Hey folks, I’ve written about UMA’s oSnap before— a must-have to prevent voter fraud and conflicts in on-chain markets. If you haven’t heard of UMA or oSnap before, I highly recommend you read my deep-dive about what UMA’s optimistic oracle is and how it works.

With all of oSnap’s benefits, it comes to no surprise that its Total Value Secured has grown to almost $100 million this past month, with a great deal of more interest and bullish sentiment for integrating oSnap in order to help ensure proper validation of data in relation to smart contracts and DAO voting structures. Each time oSnap gets integrated, protocols have an added layer of security $UMA stakers earn rewards by resolving successful disputes, or in other words, stakers are incentivized by majority to resolve any issues if there is a malicious or erroneous statement found in any data that it’s reviewing.

Here are the top 5 reasons why oSnap is essential and why I suspect that oSnap’s Total Value Secured (TVS) should easily break $100 million by the end of 2023. First the no-brainer…

1. Enhanced Security

In a field that’s rife with exploits, one of the major pain points is with malicious voting. oSnap integrates security within the voting process where $UMA stakers manually review each proposal, catching errors where simple automation cannot. See how a successful voting measure was described on vote #78 for Across Protocol V2:

Currently being able to earn up to 25% APR, UMA voters are rewarded when they vote correctly to make successful disputes, and to resolve issues if there are malicious statement(s) found in the data that’s reviewed.

2. Gasless Voting = Increased Voter turnout

During the last few years we saw average gas prices increase dramatically, at the peak bull market reaching almost 0.2 $ETH (more than $300 dollars in today’s prices) — a significant deterrent for people voting on proposals especially if they had low voting power.

oSnap provides a gasless solution which can not only gives more incentive for people to vote, but to significantly increase voter turnout, thus providing more integrity with each vote. Conversely if oSnap doesn’t get implemented, I would imagine a significant downturn in voter turnout when gas prices get untenable for the non-whales out there.

3. Decentralized Governance + Decentralized Execution

Apart of from increased security, with its integration with Snapshot Labs, a DAO can vote off-chain and then see the results executed on-chain with full transparency. For instance on Layer2Dao, any token holder can submit a proposal, and then assuming the proposal is passed, the vote is executed automatically through their treasury held on their Safe wallet.

Essentially the DAO can initiate and attach transaction data to any proposal, and then once reviewed via oSnap, it is executed automatically on-chain, without the need of any centralized entity or multi-sig.

4. Simplicity in a minute, not minutes

In full transparency, I’m not a dev nor do I play on one TV, but one of oSnap’s creators, John Shutt, demonstrates how oSnap can be integrated for a protocol in literally 1 minute (OK, so it’s actually 1 minute and 10 seconds so don’t sue me):

Of course this assumes that you have an existing Snapshot Space and Safe wallet setup and no multisig (because coordinating signers obviously can take some time), but I think you get my point…it’s easy. But please, this isn’t a Rubik's cube competition, so if you’re implementing oSnap I recommend using one of John’s other tutorials instead.

5. oSnap is Now Live on Arbitrum

Need another reason to be bullish? If you’ve haven’t been following Arbitrum news over the last month, last month one of the largest layer-2’s concluded voting on 95 different Short Term Incentive Proposals (STIPs) awarding 40 million worth of $ARB to 29 of them. With the injection of new liquidity and protocols working hard to make efficient use of them, oSnap is now more crucial than ever to enhance its security.

Currently Arbitrum has more than 900 different protocols with their own Snapshot space, so I imagine that once some of these DAOs realize the oSnap’s benefits and how easy it is to implement, record amounts in TVS will be broken in no time.

Conclusion

oSnap seem like a no brainer for every protocol with a voting structure out there, and so it comes to no surprise that there’s several protocols (Angle.money, ApeCoin, and 1inch to name a few) out there that have been discussing its implementation.

I know that governance generally isn’t the most exciting topic to talk about, but if you’re concerned about enhancing security in your own DAO, I'd highly recommend joining UMA’s discord and simply start asking questions, because not only do they love talking about governance, but in the wild west of crypto, we need any security we can get.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. If you want to get access to all my draft links or get an idea about what’s next on my docket before I publish, find me on Friend.tech, where I share all that information in my chatroom. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!

Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!