Ethereum Wallet, Gnosis Safe Launches SafeSnap to Enhance Decentralized Governance in DeFi

In a document released on Tuesday, Gnosis, Gnosis Safe's creator, a trusted Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens custodian, announced the launch of SafeSnap, in partnership with Snapshot, a decentralized governance platform. The new feature enables the decentralized execution of crypto governance protocols by bringing off-chain votes back on-chain.

Decentralized governance protocols have taken off with the rise of the DeFi ecosystem in the past year. However, the high gas fees on Ethereum have made it expensive to vote for proposals on-chain hence the rise of off-chain voting protocols such as Snapshot. However, the use of off-chain projects comes at the expense of decentralization.

The Snapshot governance proposal voting process is conducted off-chain with the duty to execute the proposal lying solely on the goodwill of team members and multi-sig key holders. SafeSnap aims to remove this centralization by automatically executing the proposal as soon as the “off-chain voting” closes.

SafeSnap aims to offer decentralized execution of crypto governance proposals. Several top DeFi governance protocols, including Yearn finance, SushiSwap, Synthetix, and Balancer, have already announced their support for the governance protocol.

Stefan George, a Gnosis co-founder and CTO believes the new feature will allow users to reduce high gas fees witnessed on Ethereum while maintaining decentralization in the proposal's execution.

“The ability to execute DAO vote outcomes in a decentralized way, without taking the whole process on-chain and incurring the resulting gas fees, has been a difficult one to solve.”

Gnosis Safe will tally the off-chain voting from non-custodial multi-sig wallets and use Reality.eth, formerly Realitio, to broadcast the result on the main blockchain.

3/ Each proposal is a @RealityEth question asking if (1) the linked Snapshot proposal passed (2) did the proposal include the payload, and (3) does the payload do what the proposal describes.

— Stefan George 🦉 (@StefanDGeorge) March 16, 2021

Once verified on the off-chain platform and resolved on Reality.eth, the proposal will have a 24 hour cooldown period before it is broadcasted to be executable by any participant on the blockchain.

The company boasts over $19.4 billion worth of ETH and ERC-20 token value in its Gnosis Safe Multisig wallet, including Metamask and hardware wallets. According to a BEG report in January, this makes it the fourth largest ETH custodial wallet operator.