Snapshot VS Realms
Introduction
According to Snapshot documentation, Snapshot is an off-chain gasless multi-governance client with easy-to-verify and hard-to-contest results. On Snapshot, Votes are signed messages easily verifiable online, and users can deploy flexible voting strategies to calculate voting results like voting with ERC20s, NFTs, other contracts, and more.
Realms provides a platform for builders on Solana to create a DAO, manage their members, vote on proposals, and allocate their treasury.
> decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a community with a shared bank account. Members of the DAO make decisions in a transparent and decentralized fashion, with smart contracts executing these decisions. > > source
In this dashboard we will shows how Realms and Snapshot are growing and used in comparison to one another.



- These stats show that Snapshot platform is much bigger than Realms in terms of total users, DAOs, Proposals and votes.
- Snapshot is active for about 26 months while Realms is active for about 9 months.
- Snapshot is active on multiple blockchains (EVM blockchains) while Realms is only active on Solana blockchain.
- The number of Proposals per DAOs in Realms is higher than Snapshot.
- The average number of votes per voter is almost the same. meaning that each voter on each platform casts 5.3 votes on average.
- The average votes per DAO and proposals show that on average, votes per DAO and proposals are more than 20 times higher than votes per DAO and proposals on Realms.
- In the first 38 days, The growth of votes number and new voters on realms was more than snapshot.
- So far, The growth of new proposals and new DAOs on realms was more than snapshot in the same period since the platforms started.


So far, the active users of ETH chain on snapshot are about 18X more than active users of Solana on Realms.
- This shows that the distribution of vote numbers by each voter is almost same for both snapshot and realms.
- If we consider top ETH or SOL holders as Whales, we can say that we can see some activity of SOL whales on realms. but this approach can mislead us. we know that users can vote based on tokens or NFTs they have. so the more token they have, the more power they have to vote. So, in my opinion, we should consider those users with large amount of governance tokens as whales.

- For example, the following image shows top voters for a proposal on realms. we can see that the first top voter had 3.7% of all votes power, while the threshold was 2%. In my opinion, whale’s definition is different for each DAO/Proposal. and should be calculated to see distribution of voters to see what percent of them are whales.
- Unfortunately, this kind of data is not available for Realms in the database. we have only voting power which shows how much percent a user has used of their overall power to vote which is either 100% or 0%.
Let’s see voting power distribution by percentage of total power and quorum on snapshot:
we can see that 1.95% of voters, had more than 10% of voting power in snapshot proposals. and about 15% of voters had more than 50% of the quorum (for those proposals that quorum was specified)
Summary and Conclusion
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As of today, Snapshot has been active for 774 days while Realms has been active for 273 days.
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The growth aspects of platforms like voters, proposals, DAOs are still ascending.
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average voters per proposal on Snapshot is 111 while for Realms is 5. this shows that more voters are participating in proposals on Snapshot.
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In the first 38 days, The growth of votes number and new voters on realms was more than snapshot.
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So far, The growth of new proposals and new DAOs on realms was more than snapshot in the same period since the platforms started.
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So far, we can say that Realms is successful in attracting the DAOs and DAOs are active on realms. but the number of users that DAOs attract in Realms is much lower than Snapshot.
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About 50% of voters have voted only once (Both platforms)
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1.95% of voters, had more than 10% of voting power in snapshot proposals. and about 15% of voters had more than 50% of the quorum (for those proposals that quorum was specified)
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I reviewed some proposals on realms. I can say that whales are powerful in most proposals and this may reduce the motivation of other users to participate.
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To be more decentralized, a normalization factor can be applied to voting powers. this factor could depend on the number of participants, meaning that when participants are growing, voting powers redistribute based on initial voting power but cause the higher amount of power to decrease.
Methodology
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Metrics of Snapshot platform were extracted from
ethereum.core.ez_snapshot
table. -
Metrics of Realms platform were extracted from
solana.core.fact_proposal_votes
table. -
ethereum.core.dim_dates
used as Dim Date and daily metrics of both platforms from day 1 of each platform calculated by that table. -
All Solana users were extracted from
solana.core.fact_transactions
table. -
All Ethereum users were extracted from
ethereum.core.fact_transactions
table. -
Top SOL holders were calculated from
solana.core.fact_transfers
table by tracking all SOL transfers. -
Top ETH holders were extracted from
flipside_prod_db.ethereum.erc20_balances
table for the current day. -
Total Voting power and Quorum were extracted from
ethereum.core.ez_snapshot
table.