Snapshot on Arweave: Governing the Future
Information has always been a vital organisational asset, and good governance is deeply connected to effective record management. With good records, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel (or the city bus, or vending machines) — you can rely on trusted information to inform decision making. DAOs, or decentralised autonomous organisations, are a type of non-hierarchical, collective organisation that makes decisions based on a protocol or smart contract. You can think of them as programmable organisations. As life becomes more networked, a democratic system that enables dispersed, cross-jurisdictional communities to transact with each other could be the solution for problems facing communal governance. Today, we’re delighted to announce that off-chain governance interface snapshot.page has integrated Arweave as data storage.
Recordkeeping is one of the pillars of open, democratic organisations. Destroying records is often a strategy used by governments to obfuscate their misdeeds. In the UK, early attempts to record, print, and distribute summaries of parliamentary debates resulted in jail sentences and hefty fines for those involved. Persistence paid off, and over two centuries the Hansard parliamentary transcripts, named after a printer who was sentenced to three months imprisonment, became a cornerstone of British governance.
DAOs are a revolution in governance, and Arweave is their Hansard. Snapshot.page is a DAO discussion forum that makes democratic governance easy and accessible for everyone. Run by programmable liquidity protocol Balancer, Snapshot.page provides a central location for members and stakeholders in an organisation to meet up and have a say in deciding internal policy going forward.
Snapshot is an off-chain, gasless, multi-governance client making democratic decision making easy and accessible for organisations. Messages and votes on Snapshot.page are permanently stored by mirroring from IPFS onto Arweave using the Arweave + IPFS bridge. By ‘pinning’ proposals using the IPFS to Arweave bridge, communities on Snapshot.page are able to ensure that records are kept forever. Proposals and votes are easily verifiable signed messages stored on IPFS. By integrating with Arweave, Snapshot.page is taking the necessary steps to ensure that these voting records are never lost, deleted, or swept under the rug.
How does the Arweave + IPFS bridge work? To put it simply, when a user wants to incentivise the storage of a piece of content on IPFS, there is a simple process where the data can be tagged and uploaded onto the Arweave network. Nodes that run the Arweave + IPFS extensions can add and pin that data onto their IPFS node, solving the incentivisation problem facing IPFS.
Participants in DAOs now have direct access to the records of their organisation. It’s easier to see who voted for what, and how resources were allocated. This level of transparency and openness is indicative of a new wave in the crypto space — one where fair, distributed governance is a universal constant.
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