The no-Gas voting of the governance aggregation platform Snapshot solves the biggest pain point of the operation and governance of decentralized autonomous organizations, and may lead to a new experiment with a hierarchical governance structure.
Written by: Pan Zhixiong, Research Director of Chain News, thanks blockpunk for learning the principles of Snapshot, and provided some materials and opinions for this article
After a large number of decentralized finance (DeFi) agreements issued ” governance tokens “, it has triggered renewed attention to the issue of blockchain governance . How to choose tools for effective agreement governance has become a major issue.
Good news : Years of infrastructure construction have made Ethereum no shortage of protocols, platforms, and tools that specifically focus on various governance services. But the bad news is: in the Ethernet network tumbled Square DeFi transaction, the other low economic driving force of chain transactions forced out, especially for small-scale users of funds, unable to move, which seriously affected the user participation Interest and action in governance on the chain .
It can be said at this stage the contradictions, Square Ethernet network is the user’s growing active participation restrictions caused by the contradiction between high cost with decentralized network throughput. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) has always been an important application scenario of the blockchain network, and therefore it has been greatly affected. If a DAO organization unable to collect the most extensive user’s point of view, but only whale participation in governance, it defeats the purpose of the establishment of DAO.
Fortunately, the decentralized transaction protocol Balancer has launched a fully open source off-chain governance voting platform Snapshot , trying to solve the problem of gas cost on the Ethereum chain. After Snapshot went online, it quickly gained the support of more than 10 public chain networks and more than 200 projects, but whether this will bring centralization risks is worth continuing attention.
Although Snapshot currently looks like a control aggregator, but after a combination of Aragon tool that may be able to evolve into a complete management solution that provides cost-effective and secure toolset for project management needs.
In the process of achieving the ambitious goal of perfect Ethereum on-chain governance, Snapshot provides a constructive middle way.
What problems did on-chain governance encounter?
Block chain as a completely open network that can be used to build a wide variety of general-type applications, but the most common decentralized financial (DeFi), decentralized self-government organizations (DAO) is also an important scene one.
DAO is an organizational form of projects and participants. Some industry projects have begun to explore projects in the form of DAO, rather than traditional companies or investment funds. For example, many DeFi projects ending in DAO are exploring this new Concept: PieDAO , KeeperDAO , and even MakerDAO .
PieDAO, a project to promote index funds in the form of DAO
As DAO participants, in addition to forming a community of interests, discussions or activities organized by tokens, in fact, the most important recommendations, proposals for change of the project, and then vote execution. Ethernet Square as a generic open platform, can be implemented as a place to vote.
But this year, with the DeFi blowout applications, more and more transactions are guided by speculative arbitrage opportunities or potential, resulting in low economic driving force on the chain of transactions being squeezed. This also means that frequent voting without direct economic benefits will miss more ordinary users, because most people will not spend dozens of dollars in on-chain transaction costs because they need to cast votes worth hundreds of dollars.
Especially on the day when Uniswap launched the governance token UNI, the gas price exceeded 500, which was several hundred times that of the beginning of the year. Even if Gas drops to around 20-30 now, an ordinary voting-type on-chain transaction will cost at least a few dollars.
Snapshot will never issue coins
In order to promote active management of the project, allowing users to express their views more widely, to the center of trade agreements Balancer team has developed a platform called Snapshot, trying by this chain Free Gas Treatment aggregator solve the above problems.
Snapshot can be regarded as a community-driven platform, and developers considering the platform Snapshot attribute, it uses a very open MIT open source license agreement, and will not insist on the introduction of tokens, will not consider the business model, all the money comes from Community donation . This development team is very individual, saying that it will not use the funding in marketing activities and will disclose the details of all funding transfers.
Because of this, many DeFi projects directly adopt Snapshot’s complete solution, or as a supplement to on-chain governance. With the help of the ” wheels ” that others have built, such logic is very common in the open source world.
As the project party, you only need to submit some basic information about the project, and it may take as long as 5 minutes to build a governance space on the Snapshot platform without paying any additional costs.
As a user, you only need to use wallets such as MetaMask to access the governance space of the project party, and you can initiate proposals or vote on proposals without paying for on-chain transactions.
Snapshot and there is no limit on the project and the block chain network, so far has supported 13 public chain network (including test network) and more than 200 projects, it is rapidly growing.
Source: snapshot.page
How to achieve gas-free governance?
Snapshot program using the signature mechanism and distributed storage network layer protocol IPFS (not Filecoin) implementation, use of the second floor was a bit like expansion.
For accounts Square Ethernet network, the message itself is the signature feature of the support, in other words, for the Ethernet address Square account, they are available through the private key signature to ensure that a message is issued by an address. The signed message can be on the chain or not on the chain, and there are also ways to verify the authenticity of the message under the chain.
After the improvements introduced in the proposed EIP-712 Ethernet Square, the original signature of the hexadecimal news was structured, the user can read the signature of the purse is what news, so it reduces the risk of the user “blind sign” of .
When you vote, the front end of the purse (such as MetaMask) allow users to sign an action for casting a vote for a proposal, message content includes: for a “proposal” a “project” to support a “choice.”
When the user confirms, this has been signed message will be uploaded to a specific address by IPFS Snapshot. In the above process, there is no need to touch the Ethereum mainnet, so there is no need to pay Gas fees.
When governance is through Snapshot, the process of initiating a proposal is similar. Sponsors need to submit the voting start and end time, as well as a snapshot (Snapshot) during which a block of votes height as the reference. After that, the message is signed and uploaded to IPFS.
Anyone can see everyone’s voting status on the governance proposal page at any time during or after the voting is over.
Aragon opens up chain execution for Snapshot
Snapshot is a pure broken down chain management platform, but through cooperation with Aragon, you can extend the treatment to the chain.
As the most comprehensive early DAO management platform, Aragon in September announced a cooperation project associated with Snapshot, plans to bring the ability to perform Snapshot of the chain. At present, the cooperation has been launched on the testnet.
Aragon believes that voting in the chain is the safest and most decentralized way, if you can combine their respective strengths in the chain and down chain, it can control the process at a lower cost to achieve safer and decentralized. The cooperation between Snapshot and Aragon is quite imaginative.
Aragon combined the two features of Aragon Court (court) and Aragon Agent (agent) for Snapshot to achieve the effect of voting results on the chain.
Aragon Court was launched by the Aragon-based chain block chain network on the court, in order to provide arbitration dispute solution, users can apply for the mortgage token jury to resolve the dispute and get the reward.
Aragon Agent by Aragon in the organization have a “agent” (Agent) role, based on multi-signature account, we can help organizations with other Ethernet protocols Square account or interact with other transactions such as DeFi project.
When Snapshot combination of Aragon, previous processes have not changed, the user or the use of non-voting Gas and stores the result in IPFS, but after the polls, the results of any vote can be submitted as a package to the chain – of course, This step requires paying some Gas fees.
In order to ensure that the vote is submitted completely accurate, there is a time lock system (timelock). If only someone maliciously uploaded to their advantage results, within a certain time, everyone can issued a challenge to the results, and submit evidence to the Aragon Court.
In fact, this is proposed before the vote Aragon optimistic (optimistic voting) concept, similar to the second floor Optimistic Rollup expansion program, the first “optimistic” to believe that people submit the results are submitted complete and correct data, but if someone malicious attacks , Anyone can challenge and submit evidence.
What new problems will Snapshot bring?
In terms of the voting process, Snapshot is cryptographically guaranteed, and the message signature mechanism ensures that the voting results can be verified, and the voting process is also tamper-proof. But Aragon believes that “the entire voting process Snapshot program is very centralized, token holders can be released from their voting preferences, although this is just a signal.”
In addition, based on management’s Snapshot and some have the ability to build their own project management of the chain, the presence of two independent governance system, which did not get through two systems, users may be more doubt should go or should go to the project website Snapshot party official website Participate in project governance. If it can be opened up, it may be a complete governance solution.
For example, MakerDAO ‘s governance space can be found on Snapshot, but there is no effective proposal. MakerDAO must use its own pure-chain governance platform. There are many projects on Snapshot that have governance space but are not actually put into use.
But it might promote a tiered governance structure experiments using Snapshot for more extensive comments received, make recommendations and to allow more people to vote, so lower costs. After the re-use project on its own chain management platform for a final vote, to ensure the safety process.
What else is there?
DAO may sooner or later become the basis of components based block chain collaboration platform, so the direction Snapshot exploration is necessary, from the effects of the specific implementation, it is also far more than expected.
But in addition, there are more expansion program worth DAO try and integrated platform, such as side chain (xDai) or other Layer 2 solutions.
Circles UBI project to establish a localized or community-based economy through the concept of basic income
Recently, xDai has become popular because of the Circles UBI project. As a side chain of Ethereum , there is little difference except for the consensus mechanism, and it also uses stablecoins as the fee billing method of the blockchain network, which is more suitable for ordinary people. Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup are the most promising Layer 2 expansion solutions that will be launched next year and will be widely used. Many DeFi projects and wallets are already developing and testing with them.
DAO platform might also help these programs to find a balance between decentralization and costs, so that more people actually involved in the iterative project decisions. But in the short term, Snapshot will be a good choice.
