Close to a quarter of all Snapshot voters are members in more than one space. Some of them spread much farther and heavily influence the outcome of votes, wielding sufficient voting power to overturn the popular choice.

Using the dashboard linked below we’re taking a look at the most prolific addresses, a cohort dubbed the Snapshot Mafia.

☝️ The dashboard can be updated on-demand by pressing the refresh button 🔄 in the top right corner of the page.

Spaces Crossover

Close to a quarter of the addresses that have been active on Snapshot participate in more than one Space. Most of them don’t venture too far out, with an average crossover count of just under 3, but as we can see in the distribution chart below, in some cases users have become members in tens of different Spaces.

This has become more common and over time users naturally tend to join more of the evergrowing catalogue of communities hosted by the platform.

But what if there are some that not only actively participate in far more Spaces than the average user and do so with sufficient voting power to (almost) single-handedly influence the destiny of organisations?

Mafia Hubs

Some Spaces host members that cross over into so many other groups that are practically a power hub of the Snapshot ecosystem. Places like ens.eth, cake.eth (currently cakevote.eth) or theopendao.eth host members that collectively can influence up to 84% of all Snapshot communities.

The composition of these hubs varies by a lot and crossover overlap can make their reach more or less effective. In some cases, these hubs have their members thinly spread across a large number of Spaces, while in other cases membership intersects in large proportions with other groups, effectively making them satellite communities.

Making use of the following charts and tables we can uncover how these hubs relate to other Spaces.

Using the Mafia Hubs as the place of origin, we can see members destination and their top picks (alternatively can also be viewed as a members origin trace).

Infiltrated Spaces on the other hand represent the communities where Hub members make up a large proportion of the Space membership. Although having a large number of individuals does not guarantee vote superiority, it certainly provides a lot of soft power and a loud voice within the community.

Prolific Addresses

Although members overlap can ultimately be coordinated and weaponized, there are some addresses that have ruled a collection of Spaces just by themselves. We’re going to see the most prolific of these addresses below.

For an address to be considered as having sufficient influence over a Space with more than 10 members, the bar has been set at a voting power above the 75th percentile. These addresses are part of the 50 Mafia Hubs presented above and ranked by the number of Spaces they have influence over.

Having this much voting power makes their position (almost) decisive in many of the proposals put to vote in a Space. Looking at the overall positioning of these addresses shows that although in general they tend to align with the choice of the people, in around 17% of proposals they have chosen an opposing option and tried to overturn the outcome of the vote.

There does not seem to be a typical behavior shared by these addresses, with overturn vote rates as low as 4% and as high as 58%.

While their voting power can be sufficient in many cases to swing the vote, not all overturn attempts are successful. In the next section of the dashboard we can explore the success rate of our address list.

The average success rate is around 17% but we can once again see that each address has confronted unique circumstances and has been more or less successful. While some have failed in all of their attempts to take the vote away from the people, others have been successful in more than half of the time.

Conclusion

As the number of communities hosted by Snapshot grows and cross-pollination intensifies, some Spaces have become hubs of influence. With members that are part of a number of Spaces above that of the average user, they can readily “deploy” large amounts of influence over a large percentage of the Snapshot ecosystem. Successfully infiltrated communities become satellites of Mafia Hubs. The Snapshot Mafia becomes ever-present.

Further research can be made into whether the Mafia is operative and hub members coordinate in their voting to form cross-Spaces factions, but the opportunity to do so is already in place.

We have however found that in these hubs there are many addresses that do cross over into many Spaces where they hold significant voting power. When they participate in voting, they generally align with the popular choice and express their support. In around 17% of the cases however, these prolific Mafia Hub members have tried to take over and overturn the vote but had varying amounts of success.

Even by themselves, some addresses have managed to exert significant amounts of influence over a group of Spaces, potentially compromising the integrity of the voting process and breaking the confidence of members in their ability to steer Spaces according to their will.