Digital asset trust bank Anchorage Digital today announced that its customers will be able to take part in decentralized voting, known as Snapshot.
Institutional investors had previously expressed interest in being able to take part in projects’ digital governance, the San Francisco-based bank said.
In the crypto world, snapshot voting is a decentralized voting system. It is used specifically in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space to help survey users and enable them to shape which way a project goes next.
The idea is to get a project’s community—often those who hold the most tokens—to have a say in decision making, with the hope of making it more decentralized. Anchorage wants to streamline this process by custodying the tokens so their owners can vote on certain changes.
“Our federally regulated governance offering allows institutions to meaningfully participate in shaping the future of specific projects—and the ecosystem more broadly,” Diogo Mónica, Anchorage Digital co-founder and president, told Decrypt in an email.
He added: “By offering voting from qualified custody at Anchorage Digital Bank, we are streamlining the governance process for leading institutions across the digital asset ecosystem.”
“This move is a major step forward in the continued march toward decentralization, allowing for greater community input in the governance process.”
Anchorage Digital is the only federally chartered digital asset bank in the States. Just in December, fund manager M31 Capital chose it to custody the $100 million Web3 Opportunity Fund.
And last month, the firm spoke to Decrypt about how institutional investors were eyeing up Ethereum, the blockchain behind the second biggest cryptocurrency, ETH, following a big upgrade.
Anchorage Digital did not tell Decrypt exactly which crypto projects clients would be able to vote on, but said it would “support future ERC-20 tokens in response to client demand.”