Snapshot Voting
Off-chain, gasless governance voting that records token holdings at a set block — the DAO governance workhorse.
Snapshot is a widely-used off-chain voting tool (and the general technique it popularized) for DAO governance. It records each address’s token balance at a specific past block (the “snapshot”) and lets holders vote by signing messages — with no on-chain transaction and therefore no gas cost.
Its appeal is practical: on-chain voting is expensive and clunky, so gasless snapshot voting dramatically lowers the friction to participate, and taking the balance snapshot before the vote is announced prevents people from buying votes reactively. The trade-off is that snapshot votes are typically signals rather than self-executing — a multisig or team still enacts the result, introducing a trust step between the vote and its execution. It’s the pragmatic backbone of most DAO governance today, imperfections included.