Snapshot Labs Raises $4 Million to Shape Future of DAO Voting

By Jason Nelson

Voting is at the heart of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, allowing members to voice their opinion on matters like project funding and protocol adjustments. And Snapshot has become the go-to mechanism for tracking member views.

But with thousands of groups now using it, the platform needs more resources to scale for the future.

To that end, Snapshot Labs announced today a $4 million seed raise led by 1kx, an early-stage token fund. Other participants include Coinbase Ventures, The LAO, MetaCartel Ventures, Gnosis, StarkWare, BoostVC, Scalar Capital, Fire Eyes DAO, LongHash Ventures, and Coopérative Kleros.

Launched in August 2020 by Snapshot Labs for the Balancer community, Snapshot is a free-to-use platform that has become a popular place for over 2,000 decentralized communities to gauge member sentiment on a particular course of action.

By connecting to Ethereum wallet MetaMask, the tool verifies that users indeed hold tokens in the project and are therefore eligible to vote. But everything happens off-chain and no tokens actually get moved. Snapshot helps determine whether there is enough interest to move forward with an official referendum, in which tokens are used to cast votes.

Snapshot CEO Fabien (who requested not to share his last name) told Decrypt that the open-source tool is ready to expand. "The raise was mostly done to grow the team of contributors to build a better Snapshot," he said.

Specifically, he says users can expect significant improvements on the Snapshot voting framework. "One of the biggest improvements we will do is called 'StarkVote,'" Fabien said. "It's a solution that we are working on with StarkWare; the goal for us is to make off-chain voting as robust and secure as on-chain voting."

StarkWare is an Israeli-based company launched in 2018 to provide scalability and privacy solutions to blockchains. "Our goal is to enable inexpensive, trustless voting to be settled on-chain," said StarkWare Head of Product Avihu Levy during a presentation at DAOist Lisbon in October. "We want to remove the need for expensive on-chain checkpoints."

Snapshot labs say over 1 million votes have been cast on Snapshot to date. Earlier this month, Snapshot integrated the Colony protocol, a DAO framework to incentivize engagement and generate revenue and growth, to add DAO reputation scores to the voting platform.

"Voting is our only focus," Fabien said. "We want to make it more accessible, more secure and more scalable."

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