Snapshot proposal for Compound DAO RFP
We are excited to propose the integration of Compound Governor into the Snapshot interface. This will deliver a streamlined, end‑to‑end governance experience, encompassing proposal creation, voting and execution. Additionally, we will develop an organizational view to consolidate proposals from multiple protocols, including Snapshot offchain,Compound Governor and Discourse discussions.
General Overview
Company/Protocol Name and Brief Background:
Snapshot Labs, based in Switzerland, was established in 2020. We built and maintain Snapshot, the leading governance protocol, widely adopted by thousands of DAOs globally, including Compound DAO. Our entire stack is fully open source under the MIT license.
Snapshot uses gasless offchain voting, providing the lowest-friction experience with the highest customization and flexibility. Continuous feedback from leading communities lets us iterate fast and today, Snapshot drives governance processes for most DAOs (96%) and sees over 50k monthly active voters.
Our current roadmap is centered around unifying every governance vertical within Snapshot. We’re building a governance experience where community ideation, discussion, delegation, both offchain and onchain voting, and execution come together.
Existing History with Compound Protocol/DAO:
Compound DAO has utilized Snapshot’s voting protocol for approximately four years, generating roughly 2,600 votes over 13 proposals. Its Snapshot space currently counts 7,300 followers. The ongoing VSP selection will likewise begin its process on Snapshot. Throughout this time, we’ve been supporting Compound DAO on Snapshot at no cost.
Section 1: Platform Functionality
1a) Platform Overview and Feature Set
Snapshot proposes to integrate the Compound Governor protocol into our existing platform. Below is a detailed breakdown of current features and proposed enhancements:
Full Integration of Compound Governor Protocol 
[scope for new work]
- Complete lifecycle support for proposals including creation, voting, and execution
- Timelock integration with the ability to veto an execution directly within the interface
Proposal Creation and Management
- A robust draft system, allowing managing multiple drafts
- Full markdown support with image upload from the interface directly
- Visual editor, to create structured proposal without having to write markdown, author can choose between visual editor and markdown editor [scope for new work]
Execution
- Easily insert ERC-20 or NFT transfer(s) into a proposal
- Add custom transactions with ABI auto-detection using Etherscan API
- Visibility of transaction calldata within the interface
- Transaction simulation via Tenderly
- WalletConnect integration lets proposal author connect to dapps to populate transactions within a proposal.
- No‑code helper for up to 2 common onchain execution actions [scope for new work]
Treasury Management
- Track multiple treasuries, Timelock, Safe, on multiple chains, showing tokens and NFTs balances
- Wallet-like experience to send NFTs or ERC-20s from the treasury page and insert those transactions into a proposal
Voting Experience
- Gasless voting through Mana, our open-source meta-transaction relayer. We can also support OpenZeppelin relayers if required.
- Users can vote directly from the feed of proposals
- The proposals page displays status: active, succeeded/rejected or executed
- Proposal creators can link to a Discourse discussion, which will be shown within the proposal page on a dedicated tab
- Users can supply a reason with their vote
- A dedicated votes page offers sorting by time, choice, and voting power, and includes vote reasons
- AI summary of proposal
Delegate Dashboards and Delegation Tools
- Intuitive delegate dashboard, ranking COMP token delegates by voting power
- Personalized delegate profiles with DAO-specific statements
- Clear visibility of current delegate assignments
- Easily delegate or undelegate directly from the interface
- Leaderboard page ranking all voters by activity
Notifications and Alerts
- Snapshot will integrate with Zapier, enabling automated triggers for events such as proposal creation, start, end, or new votes. This will unlock integrations with over 8,000 apps, including Discord, Slack, Telegram, X (Twitter), Email, and Discourse [scope for new work]
- Ability for users to subscribe to email notifications for new proposals directly within the interface [scope for new work]
- Admin or malicious actions can trigger security-alert emails warning users of potential governance attack [scope for new work]
- Integrated with Domino and Push services for custom notifications
On-chain/Off-chain Interoperability
- Snapshot will develop an organizational entity feature to manage multiple voting spaces using different governance protocols, including Snapshot offchain and Compound Governor. This will offer a unified view of all proposals, streamlining governance workflows and reducing participation friction [scope for new work]
- From a proposal’s page, users will be able to see links to the whole governance flow, including discussion, offchain and/or onchain proposal and execution [scope for new work]
- Discourse discussions are integrated with a read‑only view directly in the interface
Custom Domain
- We support custom domains with custom logos and colors, e.g. https://signal.aave.com. Hundreds of DAOs already use this in Snapshot.
1b) Service Tiers and Customization Levels
As part of this proposal, Compound DAO will receive:
- Development of every new feature listed above
- Ongoing support for Snapshot’s offchain protocol
- SLA: 99.99% uptime.
- Dedicated users and admin support, including:
- 24/7 basic support access with a response time average of 4mn,
- dev-level technical support within 3 hours
Snapshot Labs also offers a service arm for custom developments, which can:
- Collaborate with a top-tier design agency to develop a custom frontend for Compound governance that aligns with Compound’s aesthetic. A dedicated quote for this effort can be provided upon request.
- Provide custom feature development not included in this proposal upon request.
1c) Existing Partnerships
Snapshot stands as the most adopted and recognized leader in governance solutions, serving thousands of DAOs and estimated by Messari and DeepDAO to cover 96% of the market.
Note that while many Snapshot proposals are non-executable, the platform already offers robust execution capabilities through integrations with UMA (oSnap) and Reality (SafeSnap). These integrations have facilitated 729 executable proposals, securing over $628 million in Total Value, demonstrating their relevance for use cases comparable to Compound.
Section 2: Technical Integration and Security Assessment
2a) Audit History and Security Reviews
There are no new contracts to audit as we will integrate existing Compound contracts already audited.
2b) Integration Requirements and Implementation Timeline
Smart Contract Compatibility
The proposed integration is fully compatible with the current Compound Governor contract
On-chain Proposal Requirements
Using the integration won’t require any onchain proposal, it will work seamlessly
Design Assumptions and Limitations
We will integrate fully with Compound Governor, there will be no limitations and the entire flow will be supported
Governor Compatibility and Upgrade Constraints
The integration will be fully compatible with Compound Governor, and it will support updates of the Governor settings via a proposal
Timeline:
- Integration of Compound Governor (4 weeks)
- Support unified organization view (6 weeks)
- Support for 2 custom execution UI helpers (2 weeks)
- Support for Zapier and email notification for users in our interface (1 week)
- Support for a visual editor (1 week)
We estimate the full integration will take approximately 3 months from DAO approval to launch, with some features developed in parallel. However, the service will be usable after the first month, offering complete Compound Governor support and Zapier integration for the governance flow. The organization view and remaining features will be implemented at a later stage.
Dependencies and Risk Management
Our integration relies on three core, open-source infrastructure components (MIT license), all of which can be run independently: an indexer, the interface, and a meta-transaction relayer. For redundancy, we operate multiple indexers. These services are bundled in a single, easy-to-run monorepo: https://github.com/snapshot-labs/sx-monorepo.
2c) On-chain/Off-chain Data Alignment and Proposal Verification
Our service ensures accurate data alignment and proposal verification through several key features:
- Transaction call data is fully visible within our interface.
- We utilize Tenderly for transaction simulation, allowing for a clear understanding of potential outcomes.
- Calldata is decoded using ABI information retrieved from the Etherscan API for readability.
- Should an execution be undecodable, our interface will display a warning. We also provide Zapier notification support for such scenarios.
- Our indexer can be run by external parties, enabling independent verification of execution authenticity.
2d) Developer Support
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Our documentation is available at https://docs.snapshot.box, and users can find support at our help center: https://help.snapshot.box.
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Support Availability and Tier-based Access:
- Basic support 24/7 with a response time average of 4mn
- Advanced technical support from our developers with a response time under 3h
- Monthly calls to provide grant updates and gather feedback/feature requests.
- A dedicated manager will be assigned to this project.
-
Contact person is Guillem from Snapshot, available on Telegram @macondoDev or email guillem@snapshot.org
2e) Threat Modeling
We take security seriously and have identified these key attack vectors:
- DDoS attack - Mitigated through CloudFlare protection and multiple server instances
- Calldata spoofing - Prevented by transaction simulation via Tenderly, ABI verification and email notifications
- DNS hijacking - Protected through DNSSEC and ENS integration
- API abuse - Controlled through rate limiting
We maintain continuous monitoring with automated alerts.
Section 3: Commercial Terms & Commitment
3a) Budget Request
Proposed 12-month budget
We are requesting $80,000 for the comprehensive integration and implementation of the features described above, which will be made available to Compound DAO.
Long-term Financial Considerations
Maintenance, upgrades and support for the Governor integration will require a $6,000 annual subscription fee from the 2nd year onwards.
3b) Milestone-Based Payment Structure
We are requesting an initial payment of half of the total requested grant amount ($40,000) at the commencement of the project. The outstanding balance of $40,000 will be due upon the successful completion and delivery of the integration. We can accept payment in either stablecoin or COMP.
Platform Maintenance, Reliability, and Uptime KPIs:
- Maintain 99.99% frontend and API uptime on a monthly basis
- Respond to technical support requests within 3 hours
- Notify the DAO at least 7 days in advance of any platform upgrades affecting governance UI
3c) Offboarding, Data Portability, and Sunset Plans
- Should the DAO choose to discontinue its collaboration with Snapshot or cease the annual $6,000 fee, we commit to a 2-month grace period. During this time, we will provide support to any successor team to ensure a seamless transition.
- All data is accessible via our API, which anyone can operate.
- Snapshot is fully open source under the MIT license. Our core infrastructure, consisting of a static site, an indexer, and a meta transaction relayer, can be openly and independently run.
- The static site is pinned on IPFS and accessible at snapshot.eth.limo, and can also be downloaded for local operation.
- There are no vendor lock-in constraints, ensuring a smooth transition to new providers.
Final Considerations
Our goal is to enhance the governance experience by providing a unified interface that integrates Discourse discussions, offchain voting, onchain voting, and execution. This streamlined approach minimizes friction and promotes increased participation throughout the entire process.
Snapshot’s integration offers a smoother path with minimal migration effort and low security risk.. Being fully open-source under the MIT license, Snapshot promotes transparency and eliminates vendor lock-in for the DAO.
Our pricing model is designed for long-term collaboration, costing half of existing solutions in the first year and a significantly reduced fee thereafter. We firmly believe this proposal presents a practical and cost-efficient method for strengthening Compound DAO’s governance.