Episode 37: Nathan VDH | Snapshot - Digital Governance
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Timestamps:
00:00 - 00:44 - Introduction to Crypto Sapiens
00:45 - 01:47 - Guest Introduction
01:48 - 12:31 – Nathan’s exposure to web3 & his contribution as a writer
12:32 - 14:10 – Different thoughts & feedback about crypto
14:11 – 19:27 – The infrastructure of blockchain
19:28 - 23:16 – What is snapshot, why was it founded and what are the use cases
23:17 - 25:27 – How do you vote on Snapshot
25:28 - 33:14 – Why Balancer or other DAOs need people to vote on snapshot
33:15 – 41:35 – How snapshot has adopted to the emergent change in web3
41:36 – 46:15 – Future interaction with communities and snapshot
46:16 – 47:15 – Conclusion
Humpty: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative web3 builders to help you learn about decentralized money systems including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Defi the podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only and it is not financial advice. Crypto Sapiens is presented in partnership with BanklessDAO a movement for pioneer seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system. BanklessDAO will help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly On-Ramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Hello everyone and welcome back to Crypto Sapiens. Today we are talking with Nathan, ecosystem lead at snapshot to discuss digital governance and the role that snapshot the decentralized voting system plays in it. We kick off the conversation with an introduction to Nathan and unpack his interest in political philosophy from a young age. He recounts his desire to learn more about the subject eventually leading him to study political philosophy in college. He shares his initial exposure to web3 and contributions to it as a writer, eventually leading him to learn about snapshot, write a deep dive about it and meet its founder, Fabian with whom he hit it off immediately. We explore the snapshot platform, its humble beginnings, and the role it now plays in the governance of protocols and communities touching on some of the unique attributes that make it an invaluable tool in the web3 ecosystem. As Nathan says, snapshot exists to help humans participate in communities they are part of. there's lots to unpack in this episode, so without further ado well let's get started.
Nathan: I think it's in many ways, maybe an inspiring story for a non-devs year, because crypto is about so much more than development. However, drops in crypto are very often development roles because we're still in the building stage.
So, let's start at the beginning, I'm Nathan I'm from Brussels. If you hadn't noticed by now French is my main language and basically from a very young age, I started becoming super interested in political philosophy and this was always kind of from the standpoint of, I don't understand how the world works and in general it feels like what I'm learning about and reading about, about democracy, about, you know, how humans should be key in decision making in societies but actually I don't see it in the real world I don't see it and this translated into me going into university and studying a lot of political philosophy and political philosophy sounds slightly boring It's actually cool, it's like all the cool stuff about politics without the politicians. So, you are learning about ideas that have decided how we organize societies for millennials, and very often these ideas are quite cyclical and there's no really an evolution of political philosophy in the same way that there's an evolution of technology. You know, something very deterministic open to the right, you know it's a very complex topic and I decided that my main area that I wanted to focus on and research more was big tech. So big tech has such an important role into our lives. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, the key to how do we live our lives, The key to how we even enjoy our free time and I thought that was maybe too much actually, maybe they had too much power you know concerning what we do and what we decide and maybe actually human agency, you know the reason why we make decisions independently was actually threatened by what is called today's surveillance capitalism. So the idea that these companies are looking at you, they're learning from your behavior and they're getting better and better at predicting your future actions. And if you want the last stage of predicting your future actions is pushing you in a certain direction and if you think about it, that's the end of free will you know, this is very dramatic, but this is kind of where we were going it's hard to say. So I studied this for a long time and I just kinda get frustrated because there was no real answer from, there's not that much as a single human you can do it's not like politics where you can go on the street you know, protest for better laws or protest for different government, here you can't protest to get for a different Google you can try, but it's a private company. So I thought like, what are our options to rebel against this to find another way? And this is around the time I discovered Ethereum. So like many people I heard about bitcoin, I thought it was a cool idea, but not that really relevant to my life or my ideals, but Ethereum, it's something completely different. It's like this platform which is completely independent completely neutral, permissionless anyone can access it and, you know, that's in a way it's extremely dangerous, but in another more important way, it's extremely liberating. And you know I thought let's try it, let's get into crypto a little bit, Let's dip my tools in the water and so I started writing, I started writing articles about crypto, articles about what I understood of crypto and how you know, Ethereum and blockchains, in general, could change the way that the world functions and could challenge the hegemony of big tech and I continued writing and then this news publication kind of came to me and said you know, "Oh, I can stem" I can't remember exactly it was a long time ago I think I'm talking here like January 2020 I came to this publication called crypto briefing and their research arm called symmetry and basically I started writing deep dives into protocols that I found interesting. So I would write you know, 2000, 3000 words article to about like protocols I liked, met the team, chatted with them, what were the ideals? Where did they see their protocol going? All of that kinda stuff and I found that fascinating, you know, these were fascinating meetings because it takes a lot to be a founder in crypto. It takes, you know a very strong mental and especially you know back in 2020 now maybe everyone is laughing about like how much VC money there is but Early 2020 yeah It just wasn't the case. Actually now I'm thinking about it, Yeah I might be confused on my dates, but whatever and the idea is I stayed here and I learned tons about crypto, I was paid to do it, and I remember my supervisor at the time my editor in chief he told me the best asset to hold in the bear market is a good job and I still say that sentence lately at least two, three times a day to people come and talk to me, you know, a little bit scared about an impending bear market and basically from there while doing one of these deep dives, I did a deep dive on snapshots and, you know I was thinking about it I thought the project was awesome and then I met Fabian, the founder of snapshot and you know, we hit it off super well at the time it was still it was just him and two part-time developer but it was mostly him like holding the house together and the beginning of snapshot, it's extremely humble you know, it's surviving off of grants from balancer, curve, Gitcoin, you know, snapshot has never made a sense in its life so it was very humble beginnings and I love the project because to me if you make the voting systems independent and uncontestable these opens the door to so much, there's so many countries in the world that where the population would kill for free and open elections and this is what was building where, you know, we are using blockchains to favor kinds of you know blockchain voting, I think is an incredible use case of blockchain so, you know I didn't think too much about it and I just jumped in that was back in August 2021. And yeah, since then I haven't looked back, it’s been an amazing ride at snapshot then I'm still just as in love with the mission as I used to be.
Humpty: Wow, that's an amazing story. And again, this is one of the reasons why at crypto sapiens we do podcasts different I think, we do believe that there is value in the journey of individuals that are coming in from, you know, maybe more traditional backgrounds learn about web3, crypto, whatever you want to call it make a transition into this space, find really kind of the clear differentiators and start building in that space that they're very passionate about. And I think your story, it just kind of emphasizes that so thank you so much for sharing that.
Nathan: You're welcome, I now realize it was a very long story. I'm sorry to listeners to that.
Humpty: No, not at all. And I mean I think that you know it could be longer. This is really your platform, right? So, anything that you wish to share, anything that you think is important to helping our community understand, you know, what it means to be someone who is crypto-curious, right? Like they maybe have friends who have shared with them, you know their own story of, you know cryptocurrencies in terms of like maybe they bought into Bitcoin or Ethereum and that's where they're currently at or maybe their friends are maybe a little deeper down the rabbit hole and they are contributing to DAOs and they're just scratching their heads and going I like what you're talking about, but I still don't get a sense of like how I could fit into this world. You know, I think your story like many of the others that have come, you know, onto this platform is important for people to really get a good grasp and into the diversity of ideas and backgrounds that make up this space and really why this space is so rich and important in my opinion is because of the different backgrounds that make this space up.
Nathan: Yeah, absolutely. I, always think about like, how come every time I go to a big convention or a big crypto event I end up, you know getting along super well with the people and obviously we have a major shared interest, but also, I think like crypto has such a polarizing reputation sometimes that very often the first thing you hear about crypto is negative. If you are outside of crypto very often you're gonna hear like a crazy story about someone who ran away with millions and if you stop there then your opinion forever is crypto is kind of this scammy thing I don't really know what it's about and it takes curious people to kinda dig in a little bit more to think, all right, I've heard this, but what is this crypto thing about anyway? What are the ethos? What is the reason why people like it so much? And I think these curious people they're always super interesting to talk to and that's kinda how, you know, people in crypto end up getting along quite well I think,
Humpty: yeah you know, it's interesting you say that because I think we all have friends who haven't fallen into the crypto rabbit hole, They might have heard of it probably from us but they themselves have made a decision to not get more involved but the stories they hear certainly some of the stories that they've shared with me tend to revolve around some of the negative feedback to your point earlier that maybe is the breaking news that traditional media seeks to kind of hang onto kind of speak to this space and I think sadly I think that there's an opportunity there for traditional media to kind of explore this space and really be you know, influential and important to helping facilitate a lot of these emergent qualities of coordination of human relationships of technological development and so on but you know, it's probably not what gets clicks, right?
Nathan: No, it's absolutely not. I worked in journalism a little bit and I can tell you like the bad stories get so many more views than the good ones, It's absolutely nuts.
Humpty: Yeah. And you know, so it, some of these friends though, they, some of my friends actually may have already bought into, you know, some assets that they did their own research and they think is valuable to them and, you know just kind of aligns to maybe their own investment thesis or whatever, but when I see them, they don't talk about that sometimes they'll be like, oh, you know, so what I'm hearing is that, you know, this is really bad for the environment or whatever the current narrative is to kind of shift the kind of some of the positive stories that are happening in the space of web3 to some of the more negative ideas that may not necessarily be justified, right? I'm not saying that they're untrue, but maybe not justified. And you know it is just really interesting and so in our own very small way we hope that we are making a difference and certainly I've turned a lot of my friends onto this podcast and many other ones that I think are doing incredible work in the space of web 3 they come back to me, it's like, oh, I heard the story of this one person that you had or of this other podcast that they had and I'm like, oh yeah, tell me about that and they're really interested in that idea that this can be more than just like financial and I think that may be a good segue to talk about like snapshot, right? Because snapshot is looking at this beyond just like the financial element of crypto and web3 and it's looking at like the human coordination in governance level, and I think really ties in nicely to your story of studying political philosophy.
Nathan: Yeah, absolutely. I think the idea really is blockchains first blockchains are infrastructure, I don't think blockchains are inherently good or bad this, you know, an axe can be extremely good if you're cutting wood and extremely bad if you're cutting heads, you know, so tools, in general aren't inherently good or bad. So a blockchain, what does it do? A blockchain is just trust. Basically it builds a platform that is solid enough for you to build something on top of it, without having to fear that it's gonna get hacked or that it's gonna get exploited and the way it does this is not through seven different passwords, but simply by releasing the information publicly to everyone, but putting it in the hands of as many people as possible so that it becomes extremely complex to change the mind of 51% of the validators or the miners, or you know, whoever is responsible for the consensus on the blockchain so that is extremely a very interesting use case for money because if what concerns my money is this, you know bank account, how you know trustworthy is that bank account people are gonna be able to exploit it. Is the bank gonna go under? Is the bank gonna lie about my what I've got or is the bank gonna exploit my data? All of these are kind of valid questions you can ask and on a blockchain it's much easier to answer. Well, you know, nobody's gonna be able to exploit it if the blockchain is robust enough at the moment, I don't think it's even like realistic. If you had a hundred billion dollars to attack Bitcoin, it would take like so much mining hardware, you know you would need have the super, the superconductors, you know, there’s the computer chips in the world, it would be extremely hard and so money is a good use case, cryptocurrencies here we go. But for me, an even more interesting use case is voting it's data in general. There's loads of data that you'd wanna have on a blockchain and voting is a very good one because how do you prove that votes were in tempered with, how do you prove that nobody during, you know the moment you put your vote in the black box and the moment the votes appear on TV for your entire country, who knows what could have happened and what's really interesting is with a blockchain, you can kind of remove the trust element that is necessary for you to say, okay I trust that my vote was well counted during these elections and every time actually there's a recount in the US or something like the amount of vote change and that's absolutely crazy because it means that there's definitely some amount of error, some margin of error between the very first vote recorded and, you know and the moment where it’s shown on TV. So I think blockchain voting is a very, very idea and it's a very good thing to put in place. Now, the problem is blockchains you are paying for the space that you are using on a blockchain, and this can very quickly become a lot of money right now voting on Ethereum, It's probably gonna set you back between 10 and $20 maybe with the price of Eth going down a little bit, maybe it's a tad lower than that but it's still, you know, nobody wants to vote, Maybe for federal elections, you'd be happy to vote with $6 or $7 that's probably what it costs in the real world anyway but for smaller things, there's no way you're paying that for your, It's just too much. So snapshot was born out of the necessity for much more flexible, but also much cheaper voting, but still cryptographically secured. So what you're gonna do is you'll sign a message with your wallet, and then we are gonna look at the blockchain and see how many tokens you've got and then calculate the results based on that instead of having to do a costly transactional on blockchain. So that's kind of like the origin of snapshot.
Humpty: Yeah, So maybe briefly, and I know you kind of alluded to some of this already in terms of the way that snapshot works, but just give us a high-level overview like, what is snapshot? Why did Fabian found this project and you know, maybe talk about maybe some of the current use cases in terms of maybe DAO governance and why even governance is necessary in DAOs.
Nathan: Snapshot came to be in August 2020 when balancer, a decentralized exchange decided that they needed a solution for people who had taken in liquidity pools to still be able to participate in governance. And that was quite key, to be honest because if you're gonna do decentralized governance as a project, as a defi project, you also want your users to be able to use a project and vote. So the fact that it wasn't composable was very problematic. You had to choose between using your tokens and voting with your tokens, which is, goes against the ideal of decentralized governance, so they ask Fabian like try to build something, do your best, you know the kind of thing where you just send a web engineer on a very complicated task in, you know, gata blanche, as we say in French, Do you however you want, like just make it work and magically in my view, it's quite magical because it's a very complicated system and magically he managed to make it work. And so all of a sudden balancer was able to have this new governance system that you know, was completely capable of voting with two liquidity pool and voting with, you know, loads of different things we'll get back on that later and they said alright this is your company, this is your intellectual property go on, do your thing, develop this because it has a lot of potential and very quickly more and more DAOs you and finance yam for those that remember yam all of these DAOs and all of these Defi projects started using snapshot and it only grew and grew for the first year of its existence, It grew quite quickly especially since Fabian and you know, a little bit after two other developers were the only ones working on it and maintaining it, but it quickly became like a key piece of governance for most projects today, I really don't say this to brag or something but it's much easier to say projects that don't use snapshot than projects that do use snapshot. And so snapshot is Canada's hybrid blockchain governance, but also relies on off-chain elements. But these off-chain elements are also decentralized because we're using something called IPFs which is a decentralized storage system which you know puts your data in many different servers across the world to make sure that it's always accessible and it's always protected and basically these votes that kinda stored as on IPFS and we have let's say a hub that relays all those votes into the results that you see on the snapshot UI. And so snapshot is I think one of the only blockchain projects that has this kind of on chain off chain architecture, I know that discord.xyz is working on something similar for reputation and that sort of stuff but yeah we're quite happy with it. It's a good system and it managed to reduce fees massively in terms of governance. And so I think second point of your question was, how do you vote on snapshot? And so basically the idea is well, you can vote with tokens, that's the most simple, but in general, I think there's about 200 different strategies and strategies are what we call the different things that we can look at to induce voting power and these different things they could be an NFT, they could be an ERC 1155 they could be a staked token, they could be you know an amount of actions you've done on a blockchain they could be the number of days that you've held a certain token. All of these are possible to look at on Snapchat and this would never be possible in basic on chain governance, because basic on chain governance looks at a certain block and says, well at this block person X add 12 tokens so 12 votes, and on snapshot you can change that massively because you can take into account pretty much anything if we can verify it and if we can have a trusted source from which to read a certain information, this can count as voting power and what I'm saying, super flexible I mean kind of any JavaScript file would be sufficient to derive voting power. You could have like a white list of addresses that have one vote. There's a strategy called ticket and ticket is basically any address on Ethereum has one vote and all of these strategies you can kinda mix and match them on Snapchat, you can have up to eight strategies in your space and I like the example of decentraland, decentraland you vote with your token, you vote with your estate size, you vote with your NFTs on decentraland you vote with the amount of different you know, estates, you know, locations, land that you've got all in all they've got like six or seven strategies that give a certain amount of voting power to each of their user and all of this they can do for free. Like snapshot is a hundred percent free. No ads, no data harvesting, no detail, obviously. No nothing, no fees and yeah. So we're quite happy to be able to provide that service to all of this is very exciting and very creative DAOs and Defi project.
Humpty: Yeah, that's amazing and thank you again for the wonderful breakdown in terms of, you know, what is snapshot and kind of some of the different ways that people can use them. We're talking about voting you know as a superpower here for some of these projects and you brought up balancer and how they were you know, kind of they set out this I guess challenge to Fabian to create a product that allows for voting for their DAO.Can you maybe walk us through, you know, at a very high level why balancer or any DAO for that matter needs people to vote and then maybe connect that to the kind of that world that snapshot opens up and facilitates to both the projects like the protocols or DAOs and to the community to interact in that way.
Nathan: I think there's two explanations for two different kinds of DAOs, I think let's go for that first because I think it's the easiest and it's the most straightforward you've got kind of community based DAOs let's call them social DAOs and these DAOs they're all about community, they might be centered around the NFT profile picture project, they might be around something like proof of humanity, you know they might just represent a group of people that wanna buy a football club together. It all of these DAOs need to make decisions based on whatever goals they set themselves. But that's not the only reason why they vote I think they also vote because voting gives a great sense of a partners like all of a sudden you are actually part of the community you're voting you're deciding you are not like a visitor you're an actor of this community, and I think this is a very important part of why people vote that we sometimes forget even if our vote isn't that impactful, I think it's extremely important that our voice is heard and the mission you know, if we had to have like one very abstract high level mission for Snapchat is just making sure that humans participate more and have a stronger voice in the community that they're a part of because we think that's, it's kinda key to the human experience really, you want to be an actor in your own life and in the community that you love. So that's for social DAOs they have to make decisions, It gives a strong sense of community. Now for more you know, maybe let's say financial DAOs, more serious DAOs that could be investment DAOs, it could be Defi projects, while voting is quite often built into the system. For example, if you are looking at something like curve, people vote with the CRV tokens to decide which CRV pools get as much, you know rewards for a certain period. I think it's two weeks so built into the system that, you know, makes curve works which I think is like the biggest defi project in terms of total value locked. Voting is key to the functioning, to the very core of the project. But for other projects, let's say balancer for example, voting is gonna be the way that certain key decisions that have to be made by the team are made and so let's take an example if you are on balancer and you want a certain amount of rewards for different pools well the team could choose the team could say well it's gonna be simply we're gonna give more to people we like, and less to people we don't like, maybe we're gonna sway, you know, balancer in a certain direction and instead they're saying no, we're gonna let the community decide because this protocol is neutral, the protocol that we are building we are to balance the team I think it's called balancer labs we're to balancer the team, we're gonna build a protocol but then afterwards that protocol is controlled by the users, not by us directly. And this is the, in my view the key innovation of defi the key innovation is saying this is not gonna be something that's you know just wept to under a new code, not like we're just changing the we're just gonna changing who's in charge but this time it's us so it's the same product in the end. It's we are gonna build something and we're gonna give away the keys to the community and the community is gonna decide what goes on, who's accepted, who's in who's out. And I think that's, that's super important. That's, that's key to the long-term health of a protocol and that's how we make sure that we're not on the road to become a new big tech but with different people at the top this time. I really like to bring up this kind of comparison where, you know Google's motto is don't be evil, I think web3's motto is can't be evil. It's not about not being able to do bad things, Sorry. It's about not being able to do bad things, not doing bad things because we are good people. The idea is to kind of remove a central point of failure from the equation and make sure that forever the people who participate and who use a product are its owners and if you start thinking about what this means for you know some of the key systems that you use your entire life, it's amazing when I think about like public transport or when I think about like my favorite video game or my favorite Defi project, obviously I want a stronger voice in how it's run. And I think that's where governance is key and often governance get sometimes a bad reps, people say governance is slow, it takes more time I just wish the team would get on and do their thing but I think the reason why it takes more time is that we're building on stronger foundations and that's good, that's long term excellent for this space.
Humpty: Yeah, that's really great. You know that just to me, just brings so much to mind in terms of, you know the space and I guess some of the challenges that governance has enabled or excuse me some of the challenges that have existed that web3 has been able to solve, you know through some of its composable layer, the permissionless, the decentralization, you know and I guess for me one thing that I would like to emphasize because I think that this is crucial to understand is that ability for a community to make decisions that align with their own values right? And I think that that is huge in the space of web3 because that is what we're facilitating, right? Is we are developing these platforms and protocols where if there the many don't align with the few they can vote out those few to then go on and kind of govern that the way that they would prefer to, or the other is just simply forking that and creating something and then the majority comes to you and then the valley goes to that new community right?
Nathan: Yeah, absolutely. I think you're touching on something really important which is not only do you have governance, but you could be scared of stuff like tyranny of the majority, but it's crypto it's open source you can redo your own thing. The ethos of this space is incredible and I find that amazing that still today most of these protocols I can think of only a few counter examples are still building open source. This would've been unheard of 15 years ago, unheard of.
Humpty: Yeah. So, you know, I guess one other thing to kind of point out here too, is the space of web3 is constantly evolving, I mean even the language, right? The words we use today, like web3 I know when I first came in, we weren't talking about web3 we were talking about blockchain, we were talking about crypto, certainly we were talking about decentralization, but like the language changes but I think part of that is because the technology changes, the use cases change, right? Like DAOs being a novel and emergent property of web3, I think these are really wonderful examples of why adaptability is key right? In this space. And so I'm curious to hear like some of, some of how snapshot has adapted, you know to the emergent changes of web3 and maybe talk to some of the ways that you are building out snapshot into the future to maybe be more aligned to the way that the community is demanding the platform to change.
Nathan: yeah, so truly based on two things, I think the community wants completely neutral snapshot and this is why I think a lot of people it's funny because at the same time I feel like Snapchat is quite famous and at the same time, it's extremely non-famous at all. Loads of people have used Snapchat and I've never realized it. I'm often surprised when I meet people that are deep into this space and when I explain what Snapchat is, they're like, oh yeah, of course, I've used it. I've used it through this UI or that UI. There's so many projects that have integrated, you know, decentraland for example, you're gonna be voting on Snapchat but you're gonna be voting on decentraland's website and that's the same for balancer, that's the same for you know, Commonwealth in all of these snapshot is kind of the back end and I think we're quite happy with that role because we know that we are handling extremely sensitive data. Voting is extremely important data and our role has to be infrastructure only. So while I'm a relatively loud voice, I quite enjoy snapshot, not having a loud voice in terms of, you know what goes on in what happens in the web3 space, because we're here to facilitate that discussion, we're not here to you know be extremely vocal about what we need to do ourselves, you can't be both you can't be part of this, you can try to be slightly part of the discussion and that's why we put so many tools at the disposal of the communities, but we never tell them you have to use it for example, we've introduced quadratic voting because quadratic voting is extremely cool. It's this idea that your voting power is gonna progress on a logarithmic curve instead of a linear one. So instead of having, if you have a hundred tokens instead of having a hundred voting power you're gonna have 10, you know, square root of a hundred and if you have full tokens, instead of having four voting power, you're gonna have two. So all of a sudden you have five times less voting power than the other guy instead of 25 times less voting power than the other guy so we love that we think that's amazing, that's a great start of a solution to the plutocracy that that is sometimes rampant in crypto, but we've never forced it upon anyone, it's an option you can choose, but you don't have to choose it. You can choose to do whatever you want and I think this is actually quite central to the success of snapshot is that it doesn't push an agenda, it doesn't push a structure on DAOs. It recognizes that there's so many smarter people than us in this industry building so many smart things that if we try to be thought leaders at the same time that we're trying to build this infrastructure we're not gonna be good enough on both so we just choose one which is building the infrastructure to get back on your point, in many cases what we are building right now is things that make us more neutral and that could be I think the flagship of that and we were alluding to it at the beginning of the conversation is our partnership with starkware because on starknet the layer to ZK rollups we're gonna build snapshot X and snapshot X is gonna be governance contract. And once these contracts are deployed and once they're sufficiently fleshed out we are sure that everything works well. These will be completely independent, no one including us will have any control over the Snapshot X contracts and that means that you could build a new UI, a new front end in front of this Snapshot X contract, just like we could and anyone will be able to use Snapshot X however they want. You know the back end of protocol is gonna be completely free of any human interaction that could change the way things function. And so once you've got a tool like that, that's extremely powerful because in the same way that you could build a front end, You know, I don't know maybe Belgium could build a front end to snapshot X and then use it for its own national election after it's been battle-tested enough and there's been million votes of Indians of votes on it, maybe this is something that makes sense for Belgium, maybe it makes more sense for developing countries, for example, but I don't know, maybe Belgium would surprise me. So this is kind of key to like our future direction, it's making snapshot something completely independent from even our infringements upon its you know, upon its own smart contract and functioning. And apart from that, the other kind of two key directions that we're going into is facilitating participation.
So facilitating participation is just about making sure that as many people as possible votes, we want to make sure that people can quickly scan through a proposal, understand its content, and vote quickly. And part of that is gonna be a mobile app because you know, people have a lot of time to kill on their phone sometimes, you know you're waiting for your boss or something and you know you're gonna be able to have this quick notification look into what the DAO needs you for and quickly vote yes or no, or on that certain proposal, and we think that this is super important to get people that are even, you know small fishes in the notion of big whales to still participate because yeah if you lower the barrier of entry as much as possible, then you're really allowing people to participate as much as possible and that's really key to our design philosophy of Snapchat.
Humpty: Well, I really like that last point you're making there in terms of you know, developing something that is maybe more accessible, I think in terms of like mobile friendly apps I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think around the world it's more likely that someone will have a mobile device than they will have a desktop computer. So yeah, so I think there's something to be said about creating an application that allows for anyone, regardless of what part of the world they live in, has access to governance and has then a voice in that community. To influence the decisions that are made to really build something that aligns with the many and not the few and so I think that that's really wonderful. I think one of the things that for me, as I certainly see as a challenge is accessibility in governance and this definitely would be one good example of how inaccessible governance can be, you know not just in terms of the technology that you need to have to be able to participate in governance, but also the ability to recognize when there are governance decisions that need to be made in a community. I think in DAOs it's easy to get people excited about, you know getting involved but it's very difficult to getting them to act on that. And I think part of that is a challenge in attention a challenge and incentives, right? So there needs to be more alignment you know in both of these areas and certainly I think that snapshot is having something that can allow more people to participate more easily, he said our phones are probably with us more than anything else and in some parts of the world, that's the only thing we do have so Bravo on that, that's really exciting I can't wait to hear some of those updates as they happen. As we are coming towards the top of the hour here, I'm curious if you could, you know, tell us like what are some of the things that you see into the future based on like your interactions with the community and the work that you do at snapshot that you're very excited about?
Nathan: You know, in general, what gets me the most excited these days in crypto is when people use crypto and don't realize it. it's when crypto is simply a better solution. And this makes me think of like early, early internet days where people were using the internet because they were really enthusiastic about it, but not because it was actually better than going to the store and buying the newspaper and in a way this is, this moment is happening more and more with crypto where people are exchanging money on blockchains not because it's cool, but because it's better and use cases like these they're I think there's more and more of them. You know one of the things that makes life blood boil is hearing that Western union is gonna take a 20% cut on money that you know people in the US are gonna send back to their families outside of the US that I can't believe that in the 21st century this is again practice that still exists and honestly is even sometimes celebrated amongst the wealthiest bankers. So this is where crypto has to come in and change things. Everywhere that there's inefficiencies in systems, there's middlemen getting their pockets full of money on the basis of the work of other people. This is where crypto has to simplify things, I think two days ago I found this really cool music NFT made by headless scales and basically, I thought it was really cool in general I loved the music I thought it was excellent, music is pretty much my biggest interest outside of crypto. So I really wanted to buy things and then I realized oh my God, 0.2 ETH that's still a lot of money for, you know I'm a Viner collector so I'm not completely estranged to buying a lot of expensive music stuff but then I realized this is 80 artists that collaborated and of you know I think it represented maybe $360 that means I'm directly donating $4 per artist and a contract that was splitting that money is something called zero X splits, which is a contract that immediately disperses that money without any intermediaries and without fees and this is incredible, the problem of royalties in music is so complex and now on a blockchain, we kind have it completely transparent, completely programmed by a small contract. And my money goes directly to the artist when I'm paying a concert ticket, 40 euros, how much of that actually goes to the artist, when I'm listening to a song on Spotify, how much of that actually goes to the artist and this you can find in so many industries, it's not even the music industry, it's the financial industry and sadly I think in many countries still today, you are voting and who knows where your vote goes. What I'm hoping we can do here is change things, simplify things, and bring this interesting technology, this to as many people as possible because it's an empowering technology, it's a technology of human empowerment and I think if we manage to keep that idea in mind, and if we build something that's really solid and we don't get, you know, it's very easy sometimes to get distracted by greed, by the crazy amounts of money, sometimes that are flowing in crypto to lose sight of the main goal and the main goal is making humans more, you know powerful in their environment, making like a fairer, you know playing field for us all to play on. And all of these applications that are building something that is kinda changing the ways human interact with each other in better, what I'm so bullish on that and I'm truly hoping that snapshot will one, you know, will reach that status and, and will change the lives of many people, I'm extremely hopeful that this will happen. And I think it's not the only one there's so much good stuff building in crypto and obviously like we touched on it at the beginning of the conversation we hear about the scams a lot more than we hear about the good stuff but the good stuff is awesome, I think if you spend enough time in crypto, you start recognizing that good stuff almost intuitively and that's just amazing so yeah I'm looking forward to many, many more years in crypto at this point.
Humpty: And that's a wrap. I truly enjoyed my chat with Nathan and I hope you did too. If you'd like to connect with Nathan, you can find him on Twitter at Nathanvdhox and to learn more about snapshot, follow them on Twitter at snapshotlabs or go to their website, snapshot.org.
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