Snapshot launched onchain DAO voting with Snapshot X

Snapshot Labs launched Snapshot X on September 9, 2024, adding a fully onchain governance option to the interface best known for offchain DAO voting. The launch put proposal creation, vote accounting and eligible execution into modular smart contracts, while retaining Snapshot’s existing offchain system as another choice.

The change mattered because decentralized organizations had often split governance across two layers: a low-cost offchain poll to measure sentiment, followed by a separate onchain transaction or vote to carry out the result. Snapshot X was designed to compress that stack without forcing governance-token holders to move their assets away from Ethereum.

From signed messages to enforceable votes

Snapshot’s original model collected signed messages offchain. That made participation inexpensive, but the resulting vote was not automatically enforceable by a blockchain. A DAO that wanted trustless execution generally needed another mechanism, and the handoff introduced operational and governance risk.

Snapshot X moved voting-power calculation and proposal logic onchain. Snapshot’s September 9 release said the system could support different voting, validation and execution strategies, including separate execution rules for routine and emergency proposals. Official documentation describes the intended properties as auditable onchain voting power, censorship resistance and execution that can proceed after a proposal passes without a discretionary human step.

Those are protocol-design properties, not proof that every DAO configuration would be decentralized or safe. Administrators still choose strategies, thresholds and execution rules, while token concentration can remain a governance weakness even when vote counting is transparent.

Storage proofs bridge the governance gap

The Starknet implementation addressed a practical mismatch: many governance tokens were held on Ethereum, where direct voting could be costly, while computation was cheaper on a layer-2 network. Through technology supplied by Herodotus, Snapshot X used storage proofs to verify a holder’s Ethereum state for a specified block and make that voting power usable on Starknet. The holder did not need to bridge the underlying tokens.

That architecture separated proof of ownership from the place where voting computation occurred. Snapshot said on September 9 that cross-chain voting and execution were available only through the Starknet implementation. The launch also made Snapshot X available for Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon and Arbitrum, but those EVM deployments did not receive the same cross-chain feature.

Snapshot claimed Starknet voting could be 10 to 50 times cheaper than layer-1 voting, with proposal creation or settings updates up to 200 times cheaper. Those were contemporaneous company estimates, not a neutral benchmark. Actual savings would depend on Ethereum fees, Starknet fees, calldata, relayer design and the selected governance strategy.

The first public test was still ahead

On September 9, the first prominent production use was scheduled rather than completed. STRK holders were due to vote from September 10 through September 13 on a minting mechanism connected to Starknet’s planned staking system. Contemporaneous reporting said a custom Starknet Governance Hub would use Snapshot X for that vote. No outcome was knowable on September 9, so the launch record should not be read as evidence that the vote had succeeded.

Security work preceded release. Snapshot’s records linked audits of the EVM contracts by ChainSecurity and the Starknet contracts by OpenZeppelin. ChainSecurity’s assessment said reviewed issues involving access control and reentrancy had been addressed, while warning that any audit is time-limited and cannot find every vulnerability.

Snapshot X therefore represented an infrastructure milestone rather than a market event: a widely used offchain governance interface gained an onchain path with cross-chain state verification. Its significance rested on whether DAOs would adopt the new path and configure it well—questions that remained open on September 9, 2024.