Snapshot will introduce "Vote Hiding" feature! Hide real-time vote count and addresses to increase proposal participation.

Although transparency has always been seen as one of the advantages of blockchain technology, excessive transparency may have an impact on the fairness and willingness to vote. To address this issue, the decentralized voting platform Snapshot is expected to launch a voting concealment feature in the near future, hiding the voting results until the voting process is completed.

Snapshot Voting Mechanism Issues

Snapshot, as one of the most commonly used governance tools in current crypto protocols, has seen thousands of DAOs using its services to vote on governance proposals, helping to make decisions on team roadmaps, fund allocation, and other issues in a decentralized manner.

In past voting processes, participants could see the addresses currently voting and the number of votes each option received.

While this process is quite transparent, according to a report by the media outlet Decrypt, the Snapshot team believes that the information of completed votes may inadvertently affect the behavior of other participants. Nathan van der Heyden, head of the Snapshot ecosystem, stated:

“Updating results after each vote could lead to voter apathy, reduced participation, and information asymmetry.”

Additionally, when potential participants see a significant issue being dominated by a whale with a large amount of tokens, they may choose not to vote.

“If you see the option you want to vote for is winning by a large margin, it might not be worth your time to vote. Conversely, if it's severely lagging, why bother trying to help it?” Nathan van der Heyden said.

Snapshot Voting Shield Feature

To address the issues mentioned above, Snapshot partnered with the Layer2 project Shutter Network to introduce a voting shield feature using Threshold Cryptography technology.

Under this feature, the distribution of votes is completely hidden until the proposal voting phase is over. The voting results and addresses will only be disclosed after the final result is determined.

The voting shield feature is currently in the testing phase and is expected to be rolled out this week, allowing any DAO using Snapshot to enable this feature in their management settings.