Glossary
Snapshot
An off-chain voting platform — gas-free, signature-based, with on-chain state snapshots — used by most DAOs for proposal signaling and many for binding votes.
Snapshot lets a DAO take a binding (or signaling) vote without paying gas. The platform reads token balances from a chosen block height (the "snapshot"), each holder signs a message indicating their choice, and results are tallied off-chain.
For non-binding signals, that is enough. For binding actions, the DAO's executor multisig (or a Snapshot integration like Safe Snap, oSnap) translates the outcome into an on-chain transaction. Most DAO governance discussion happens on Snapshot first.