Introduction

Snapshot is a decentralized voting system. It provides flexibility on how voting power is calculated for a vote. Snapshot supports various voting types to cater to the needs of organizations. Creating proposals and voting on Snapshot is user-friendly and does not cost gas as the process is performed off-chain.

In short, Snapshot is an off-chain gasless multi-governance client with easy to verify and hard to contest results.

In this dashboard, we are going to explore how spaces (organizations) are using Snapshot to start and finalize proposals (decisions) and how voters are voting on proposals to shape the organizations’ direction.

First let’s look at some high level metrics of Snapshot.

Glossary

Method

• Data is extracted from Snapshot via GraphQL API and table ethereum.core.ez_snapshot from .

• Analysis time: August 12, 2022.

• Numbers on charts can be slightly different than the exact number as they are rounded.

How many spaces are there on Snapshot?

• Currently, Snapshot has total 9,653 spaces on multiple networks.
• The network which has the most number of space is Ethereum with 6278 spaces or almost 65% in total.

How many proposals have been created?

• Currently, Snapshot has total 63,518 proposals on multiple networks.
• The network which has the most number of proposals is Ethereum with 52,186 proposals or almost 82% in total.

The first space and proposal

GraphQL query

• The first proposal is about “incentivizing BAL liquidity on Balancer” created by balancer.eth on Jul 18, 2020 on Ethereum.
• The proposal lasted 24 hours and got 97 votes.

First we will look at number of daily active spaces and created proposals to understand Snapshot usage growth overtime.

Daily active spaces and created proposals

• On Jul 18, 2020, beside the first proposal above, 2 other proposals were also created. After that, proposals were barely created until Aug 22, 2020.
• In the period from Aug 22, 2020 to Sep 12, 2020, we saw the highest snapshot usage as measured by number of average proposal per space per day. The metric mostly ranged from 2.75 to 8. The highest record was on Sep 8, 2020 at 15 proposals per space per day.
• After that, as number of active space per day increased (i.e. number of Snapshot users), number of average proposal per space per day decreases and plateaus in the range 1-2 proposals per space per day (except some outlier days when the number went up to 6).
• Since Aug 22, 2020 until Jun 22, 2021, daily created proposals ranged from 4 to 71 while daily active space ranged from 1 to 38.
• The first day number of daily created proposals surpassed 100 was on June 23, 2021. The main reason was the space levidao.eth created 63 in total 104 proposals (60.6%).
• The first day number of daily active spaces surpassed 50 was on Oct 12, 2021.
• The next milestone was on Nov 5, 2021, when number of daily created proposals surpassed 200 as 54 spaces created 242 proposals.
• After that, there were only 5 days between Nov 20, 2021 and Nov 24, 2021 when number of daily created proposals surpassed 300 and ranged from 385 to 834, and number of daily active spaces ranged from 144 to 249.
• The all time high of number of daily created proposals was on Nov 20, 2021 at 834 proposals.
• The all time high of number of daily active spaces was on Nov 21, 2021 at 249 spaces.
• Pancake was the space which created the most proposals in this period with 348 spaces or 12.4% in total.
• After Nov 24, 2021, both number of daily created proposals and number of daily active spaces dropped significantly and ranged from 39 to 274 and from 34 to 171 respectively. However, in general, the numbers are still higher than the period before Nov 2021.

Next we will explore Snapshot on Ethereum.

Snapshot on Ethereum

Next we will look at how proposals have been voted by voters to understand more about Snapshot on Ethereum.

How many voters have voted?

• 0.952M voters have voted 5.62M times on Snapshot on Ethereum.

How long does a proposal usually last?

Note: all durations not in top 10 are grouped in Other, and 0 is all durations < 1 hour.

• Top 10 vote durations account for almost 60% of total proposals.
• The most common vote duration is 72 hours with 19.5%, following by 24 hours (9.66%), 48 hours (9.58%), and 168 hours or 1 week (8.03%).

Does longer vote duration proposal have more votes and voters?

To answer this question, we will compare the average number of vote and voter per proposal of each group.

Normally, in a proposal, a voter only have one vote → number of vote and number of voter are the same.

→ And the answer is yes and no.

• Yes with vote duration <= 48 hours, in this range, the longer the vote duration, the more number of vote and voter per proposal. From the 1 hour group with 11.6 votes per proposal to the 48 hours group 215 votes per proposal.
• However when we look at the 72 hours group (the most common one), the number drops to 81.5, then increase again to the 120 hours group with 192.6 votes per proposal. From here, the longer the vote duration, the smaller the numbers.

What are the top 10 proposals by number of votes?

• An interesting point is the proposal with the most number of vote is Ratification of the ENS DAO Constitution which has 1 week of voting duration.
• The next 9 proposals in top 10 are all polls of Arbitrum Odyssey started on Apr 14, 2022 and all lasted in 48 hours.

Do spaces have preference on which day of week to start a proposal?

To answer this question, I will look at number of proposal by start day of week.

• Spaces usually start a proposal on the first 3 days of a week with Tuesday has the most number of proposal (8358), following by Wednesday (8289), and Monday (8258).
• The number then decreases toward weekends.
• Spaces prefer Sunday to Saturday to start a proposal.

How active are voters in a space?

To answer this question, I will look at distribution of % voted proposal per total proposal of a voter in a space.

Caveat: voter might not be able to vote all proposals as space set some specific threshold in voting strategy of a proposal. However, available data doesn’t support analyzing that.

• 50% of voters only vote 15% or less of total proposal started in a space.
• 75% of voters vote 50% or less of total proposal started in a space.
• Average value is higher than Median, which indicates that Snapshot voter usage is also skewed by very active voter, though it is less skew than space usage.

→ In general, Snapshot voters are quite inactive when they join a particular space.

What are the top 10 spaces by number of proposal?

Let’s have a peek into those very active spaces.

• The most active space is Pancake with 1979 proposals

• Following in no.2 and no.3 are Snapshot’s own space, and Cake.eth.

• Top 3 spaces account for 60% of total top 10’s proposals

Next we will look at some statistics about spaces and proposals on Ethereum.

How have spaces use Snapshot?

To answer this question, I will look at distribution of number of proposal per space.

TP means percentile

• 50% of spaces have created 2 proposals or less.
• 75% of spaces have created 5 proposals or less.
• Average value is even higher than TP75, which indicates that Snapshot usage is dominated by a small number of very active spaces.

What are the most common number of choices in a proposal?

• 67% of total proposals have 2 choices - the most common one.
• Following in no.2 and no.3 is 3 choices and 4 choices.
• Top 3 account for 91% of total proposals.

Is there any imbalance between option being voted in top 3 most common number of choices?

To answer this question, I will look at number of vote of each vote option group by number of choices.

• In all 3 groups of number of choices 2, 3, 4, the most voted option is option 1, which is much more than other options.
• With 2 choices, 2.67M votes are option 1, 7 times higher than option 2 with 384K votes.
• With 3 choices, 862K votes are option 1, 2.8 times higher than total votes of option 2 and option 3.
• With 4 choices, 400K votes are option 1, 1.8 times higher than the 2nd highest option.

→ voters tend to vote the first option, which might be the result of designing choices.

Conclusion

We have explored Snapshot’s growth, spaces’ usage, and voters’ usage. Below are some key highlights:

• Snapshot first usage was on Jul 18, 2020.
• Snapshot usage peaked in late Nov 2021, and the main reason is Pancake space which created a lot of proposals between Nov 20 and Nov 24.
• Snapshot usage is dominated by a small number of very active spaces.
• Only Pancake has more proposal than Snapshot in its own service.
• Spaces usually starts proposals on the first 3 days of a week (Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday).
• Proposals usually last from 1 day to 1 week. The most common vote duration is 3 days.
• It appears that the longer the vote duration of a proposal, the more votes the proposal has, as long as the vote duration <= 2 days. Above that, there is no significant benefit of extending vote duration.
• The proposal with the most number of vote is Ratification of the ENS DAO Constitution by ens.eth space.
• In general, voters are quite inactive when they join a particular space.
• 2/3 of proposals have 2 choices, 91% of proposals have 2-4 choices.
• In majority of proposals, voters tend to vote the first option.

I also created a Twitter thread about this dashboard.

Thanks for reading!