Enterprise (n.)— Merriam Webster: From Old French entreprendre “to undertake”. 1. a project or undertaking. 2. a business organization; a company. 3. a systematic purposeful activity. 4. initiative; readiness to engage in daring or difficult action .

Somewhere along the way, the second eclipsed the rest. Complex coordination required corporate form, so enterprise became company.

Coordination infrastructure shapes the definition of enterprise, and the nature of organizations.

For most of human history, coordination at scale required centralization. Historically, guilds gave way to corporations not because hierarchy was ideal, but because it was the only method that worked. Before digital infrastructure, the costs of coordinating dispersed actors - communicating decisions, verifying contributions, enforcing agreements, distributing value - were prohibitive. Vertical hierarchy internalized these costs within firm boundaries, substituting trust in institutions for the impossibility of trust between strangers. Corporations became the default unit of organization because the alternative was chaos.

But like training wheels on a bicycle, these structures - vital in their time - become constraints when coordination no longer requires them. Digitalization didn't leave coordination behind, it bridged it to a new era. But Web2 was built on top of legacy systems that still require centralization for scale; Connection proliferated, so did concentration. The platforms that replaced legacy gatekeepers didn't dismantle the old logic; they inherited it, amplified by network effects. The consequences are familiar: concentration of power feeding authoritarian impulse, protectionism and deglobalization, industry gatekeeping, and siloed innovation. These aren't failures of technology. They're the predictable outcome of scaling coordination on infrastructure that was never built for it.

Web3 is introducing the missing piece: not just communication, but credible, enforceable interaction, and ownership. Where a vote once required lawyers, notaries, custodians, and months of process, it now requires a wallet and a signature. Programmable trust made it possible for dispersed actors to verify contributions, execute agreements, and distribute value without routing through legacy intermediaries.

Snapshot emerged from this shift in the DeFi Summer of 2020, as the coordination infrastructure that everyone would build their governance on. Five years later: millions of votes, 83,000 spaces (DAOs), 3.7 million unique voters. Snapshot is what a decentralized coordination platform looks like when you let the product speak for itself. The context has since evolved in two directions.

The first is the maturation of trustless systems; of blockchain as a technology, web3 as an economy, and crypto as a movement. Infrastructure once experimental now operates at scale. Gas costs have collapsed on L2s. Privacy-preserving voting is production-ready. Onchain execution is live. The boundaries of the firm are becoming porous; contributors move fluidly between projects, compensation follows contribution rather than tenure, and the definition of collectives is shifting from contractual employment to incentive alignment. Programmable trust may be the first credible redesign of institutional infrastructure since the industrial era.

The second is the AI transformation. Network effects compound as models train on models, and user-feedback loops gain scale. Value creation explodes while the number of beneficiaries narrows. Under legacy coordination systems, this trajectory compounds concentration: gatekeeping tightens, and value accrual mechanisms entrench orchestrators and incumbents. The rails that determine who builds, who benefits, and who has voice are being locked in now. Systems built on open rails - verifiable, composable, governed by participants - create the conditions for equitable human and machine coordination. The institutional substrate chosen in this moment will shape whether capability everywhere - talent and technology both - translates to opportunity everywhere.

As this context crystallizes, Snapshot's scope is broadening. What began as voting infrastructure now extends across the full coordination lifecycle, encompassing internet-native enterprise at every level and stage of its operationalization. This document returns to first principles: why we exist, what we do, and where we're going.

Nature solved this problem long ago. Beneath our feet, mycelial networks- underground fungal systems that connect plants, exchange nutrients, and store carbon- span forests like decentralized neural pathways and support 90% of terrestrial life. A single fungal network can connect hundreds of trees, routing resources where they're needed most, responding to stress signals, remembering pathways through the soil. Like water carving rivers along paths of least resistance, like neurons firing together until they wire together, like starlings forming murmurations from three simple rules, complex coordination emerges not from hierarchy but from countless local interactions following transparent logic. The same pattern repeats: simple protocols, executed trustlessly, creating emergent order from apparent chaos. Life doesn't concentrate power to coordinate at scale. Neither should we.

Coordination technology has always concentrated power as the price of scale. Guilds protected members by excluding outsiders. Corporations coordinated production by concentrating authority. Platforms connected billions by capturing the value of connection. Every leap in coordination capacity came with the same trade-off: more people coordinated, fewer people in control.

The symptoms compound. Billions contribute to organizations where they have no say, building products they don't own, generating data they can't control, creating value they can't capture.

We believe voice is a basic human right. Democracy began direct: citizens gathering to decide together. Representative democracy emerged not as an upgrade but as a compromise; the only way to coordinate at scale when communication was slow, verification impossible, and participation costly. Delegation was a technological constraint, not a design choice. Those constraints no longer hold.

Decentralized coordination infrastructure restores what was lost: the choice to participate directly or delegate as you see fit. Not forced delegation where intermediaries accumulate power in your name - but genuine optionality. Speak for yourself, or choose someone who represents you. Change that choice immediately when they don't, no waiting 4 years for a new election. The ability to participate in the organizations that affect your life shouldn't depend on geography, credentials, or proximity to power.

We exist to fight the concentration of power because everyone deserves a voice in the organizations that affect their life.

This belief is why we started. It's why we continue. It anchors us through every product decision, every strategic choice, every trade-off we face.

The gap between the world we have and the world we want isn't technology, it's infrastructure. The economy is a nexus of contracts: every exchange, every agreement, every relationship between parties encoded in terms and enforced by institutions. Smart contracts offer the same potential; any engagement whose terms can be expressed in code can be executed without intermediaries. This is what trustless means: not that trust disappears, but that it shifts from people and institutions to transparent, verifiable logic. You don't need to trust a counterparty to honour an agreement or an intermediary to enforce it, the code executes exactly as written, visible to all.

Coordination infrastructure is the layer that makes this operational across the full decision lifecycle: how proposals surface, how discussion happens, how voices are weighted, how consensus forms, how outcomes become binding action. Today, most organisations handle these stages through disconnected tools and manual processes- a proposal in one system, a vote in another, implementation dependent on someone following through. Trustless execution closes that gap; when a decision passes, the outcome can trigger automatically- treasury disbursements, contractual engagements, payments,- executed by code, rather than intermediaries.

The primitives exist. What's been missing is the connective tissue that makes them accessible at scale, to anyone, not just those with technical resources or institutional backing. To this end:

We build radically open coordination infrastructure: trustless, modular, globally accessible. The full coordination lifecycle falls within our business scope, progressively integrated as we grow.

Modularity isn't just a technical choice, it's a philosophical one. We don't prescribe how communities should make decisions; we give them building blocks and let them compose their own logic.

Consider the simplest question in collective decision-making: who gets a voice, and how much weight does it carry? Some communities want one-person-one-vote. Others weight by stake, by reputation, by contribution history, or by formulas designed to prevent large holders from dominating. Snapshot supports over 500 different approaches because the right answer depends on what you're deciding and who you are.

The same flexibility applies to how decisions get informed. Traditional delegation means picking representatives and trusting them to decide well on your behalf. We've built an alternative: mechanisms where communities can tap into collective forecasts about which options are likely to succeed, empowering all audiences with the choice of direct- rather than representative - participation in the democracies governing the enterprises they participate in.

The platform doesn't dictate, it enables. Governance becomes a design parameter, not an external constraint. This mission defines the day-to-day operations that the realization of our our vision necessitates.

Snapshot becomes the institutional foundation of internet-native enterprise- across all it’s definitions- projects & undertakings, business organizations, systematic purposeful activities, and initative itself -where voice is direct, rails are open, and participation requires no permission.

The operating system of internet-native enterprise - in whatever form you choose.

This means completing the full stack end-to-end: from the first conversation about what to build, through capital formation and contributor alignment, delegation and decision-making, to execution that doesn't depend on trusted intermediaries. Each function modular. Each function interoperable with the ecosystem of infrastructure that organizations already use. Snapshot acts as a public good.

This enables organizational forms that couldn't exist before. Some ventures use corporations, employment contracts, and jurisdictions alongside Snapshot. Some will continue using only legacy structures. Others operate entirely on decentralized rails. Defined by what you do, not where you're hired. Fluid participation rather than fixed roles. From DAOs to network states to forms we can't yet name.

Success means three things held together:

1. Ethos preserved: decentralized, non-extractive, no gate-keeping; the principles that shape Snapshot remain intact as it becomes critical infrastructure.

2. Full stack integrated: ideation through execution operationalized, creating, and distributing value democratically. RWAs bridging decentralized coordination to real-world impact.

3. Self-sustaining: Snapshot funds itself and grows as a consequence of adoption, not a goal that compromises principles.

Those criteria met, the destination comes into view: Enterprise restored to its full breadth and governed democratically.

Our purpose, mission, and vision form a coherent chain. Each layer more specific than the one above. Any initiative that can't trace through all three is disconnected from what we're building. This coherence anchors us while we navigate the complexities that come with integrating the full coordination stack end-to-end.

This marks the beginning of a new chapter. Snapshot has always built in the open; the commitments outlined here aren't aspirational, they're the foundation for what's next.

In the coming weeks, we'll share how we intend to live this: the initiatives, the structures, and the mechanisms that make our vision operational.

The operating system for internet-native enterprise is being built. Stay tuned for updates.

Enterprise (n.)— Merriam Webster: From Old French entreprendre “to undertake”. 1. a project or undertaking. 2. a business organization; a company. 3. a systematic purposeful activity. 4. initiative; readiness to engage in daring or difficult action .

Somewhere along the way, the second eclipsed the rest. Complex coordination required corporate form, so enterprise became company.

Coordination infrastructure shapes the definition of enterprise, and the nature of organizations.

For most of human history, coordination at scale required centralization. Historically, guilds gave way to corporations not because hierarchy was ideal, but because it was the only method that worked. Before digital infrastructure, the costs of coordinating dispersed actors - communicating decisions, verifying contributions, enforcing agreements, distributing value - were prohibitive. Vertical hierarchy internalized these costs within firm boundaries, substituting trust in institutions for the impossibility of trust between strangers. Corporations became the default unit of organization because the alternative was chaos.

But like training wheels on a bicycle, these structures - vital in their time - become constraints when coordination no longer requires them. Digitalization didn't leave coordination behind, it bridged it to a new era. But Web2 was built on top of legacy systems that still require centralization for scale; Connection proliferated, so did concentration. The platforms that replaced legacy gatekeepers didn't dismantle the old logic; they inherited it, amplified by network effects. The consequences are familiar: concentration of power feeding authoritarian impulse, protectionism and deglobalization, industry gatekeeping, and siloed innovation. These aren't failures of technology. They're the predictable outcome of scaling coordination on infrastructure that was never built for it.

Web3 is introducing the missing piece: not just communication, but credible, enforceable interaction, and ownership. Where a vote once required lawyers, notaries, custodians, and months of process, it now requires a wallet and a signature. Programmable trust made it possible for dispersed actors to verify contributions, execute agreements, and distribute value without routing through legacy intermediaries.

Snapshot emerged from this shift in the DeFi Summer of 2020, as the coordination infrastructure that everyone would build their governance on. Five years later: millions of votes, 83,000 spaces (DAOs), 3.7 million unique voters. Snapshot is what a decentralized coordination platform looks like when you let the product speak for itself. The context has since evolved in two directions.

The first is the maturation of trustless systems; of blockchain as a technology, web3 as an economy, and crypto as a movement. Infrastructure once experimental now operates at scale. Gas costs have collapsed on L2s. Privacy-preserving voting is production-ready. Onchain execution is live. The boundaries of the firm are becoming porous; contributors move fluidly between projects, compensation follows contribution rather than tenure, and the definition of collectives is shifting from contractual employment to incentive alignment. Programmable trust may be the first credible redesign of institutional infrastructure since the industrial era.

The second is the AI transformation. Network effects compound as models train on models, and user-feedback loops gain scale. Value creation explodes while the number of beneficiaries narrows. Under legacy coordination systems, this trajectory compounds concentration: gatekeeping tightens, and value accrual mechanisms entrench orchestrators and incumbents. The rails that determine who builds, who benefits, and who has voice are being locked in now. Systems built on open rails - verifiable, composable, governed by participants - create the conditions for equitable human and machine coordination. The institutional substrate chosen in this moment will shape whether capability everywhere - talent and technology both - translates to opportunity everywhere.

As this context crystallizes, Snapshot's scope is broadening. What began as voting infrastructure now extends across the full coordination lifecycle, encompassing internet-native enterprise at every level and stage of its operationalization. This document returns to first principles: why we exist, what we do, and where we're going.

Nature solved this problem long ago. Beneath our feet, mycelial networks- underground fungal systems that connect plants, exchange nutrients, and store carbon- span forests like decentralized neural pathways and support 90% of terrestrial life. A single fungal network can connect hundreds of trees, routing resources where they're needed most, responding to stress signals, remembering pathways through the soil. Like water carving rivers along paths of least resistance, like neurons firing together until they wire together, like starlings forming murmurations from three simple rules, complex coordination emerges not from hierarchy but from countless local interactions following transparent logic. The same pattern repeats: simple protocols, executed trustlessly, creating emergent order from apparent chaos. Life doesn't concentrate power to coordinate at scale. Neither should we.

Coordination technology has always concentrated power as the price of scale. Guilds protected members by excluding outsiders. Corporations coordinated production by concentrating authority. Platforms connected billions by capturing the value of connection. Every leap in coordination capacity came with the same trade-off: more people coordinated, fewer people in control.

The symptoms compound. Billions contribute to organizations where they have no say, building products they don't own, generating data they can't control, creating value they can't capture.

We believe voice is a basic human right. Democracy began direct: citizens gathering to decide together. Representative democracy emerged not as an upgrade but as a compromise; the only way to coordinate at scale when communication was slow, verification impossible, and participation costly. Delegation was a technological constraint, not a design choice. Those constraints no longer hold.

Decentralized coordination infrastructure restores what was lost: the choice to participate directly or delegate as you see fit. Not forced delegation where intermediaries accumulate power in your name - but genuine optionality. Speak for yourself, or choose someone who represents you. Change that choice immediately when they don't, no waiting 4 years for a new election. The ability to participate in the organizations that affect your life shouldn't depend on geography, credentials, or proximity to power.

We exist to fight the concentration of power because everyone deserves a voice in the organizations that affect their life.

This belief is why we started. It's why we continue. It anchors us through every product decision, every strategic choice, every trade-off we face.

The gap between the world we have and the world we want isn't technology, it's infrastructure. The economy is a nexus of contracts: every exchange, every agreement, every relationship between parties encoded in terms and enforced by institutions. Smart contracts offer the same potential; any engagement whose terms can be expressed in code can be executed without intermediaries. This is what trustless means: not that trust disappears, but that it shifts from people and institutions to transparent, verifiable logic. You don't need to trust a counterparty to honour an agreement or an intermediary to enforce it, the code executes exactly as written, visible to all.

Coordination infrastructure is the layer that makes this operational across the full decision lifecycle: how proposals surface, how discussion happens, how voices are weighted, how consensus forms, how outcomes become binding action. Today, most organisations handle these stages through disconnected tools and manual processes- a proposal in one system, a vote in another, implementation dependent on someone following through. Trustless execution closes that gap; when a decision passes, the outcome can trigger automatically- treasury disbursements, contractual engagements, payments,- executed by code, rather than intermediaries.

The primitives exist. What's been missing is the connective tissue that makes them accessible at scale, to anyone, not just those with technical resources or institutional backing. To this end:

We build radically open coordination infrastructure: trustless, modular, globally accessible. The full coordination lifecycle falls within our business scope, progressively integrated as we grow.

Modularity isn't just a technical choice, it's a philosophical one. We don't prescribe how communities should make decisions; we give them building blocks and let them compose their own logic.

Consider the simplest question in collective decision-making: who gets a voice, and how much weight does it carry? Some communities want one-person-one-vote. Others weight by stake, by reputation, by contribution history, or by formulas designed to prevent large holders from dominating. Snapshot supports over 500 different approaches because the right answer depends on what you're deciding and who you are.

The same flexibility applies to how decisions get informed. Traditional delegation means picking representatives and trusting them to decide well on your behalf. We've built an alternative: mechanisms where communities can tap into collective forecasts about which options are likely to succeed, empowering all audiences with the choice of direct- rather than representative - participation in the democracies governing the enterprises they participate in.

The platform doesn't dictate, it enables. Governance becomes a design parameter, not an external constraint. This mission defines the day-to-day operations that the realization of our our vision necessitates.

Snapshot becomes the institutional foundation of internet-native enterprise- across all it’s definitions- projects & undertakings, business organizations, systematic purposeful activities, and initative itself -where voice is direct, rails are open, and participation requires no permission.

The operating system of internet-native enterprise - in whatever form you choose.

This means completing the full stack end-to-end: from the first conversation about what to build, through capital formation and contributor alignment, delegation and decision-making, to execution that doesn't depend on trusted intermediaries. Each function modular. Each function interoperable with the ecosystem of infrastructure that organizations already use. Snapshot acts as a public good.

This enables organizational forms that couldn't exist before. Some ventures use corporations, employment contracts, and jurisdictions alongside Snapshot. Some will continue using only legacy structures. Others operate entirely on decentralized rails. Defined by what you do, not where you're hired. Fluid participation rather than fixed roles. From DAOs to network states to forms we can't yet name.

Success means three things held together:

1. Ethos preserved: decentralized, non-extractive, no gate-keeping; the principles that shape Snapshot remain intact as it becomes critical infrastructure.

2. Full stack integrated: ideation through execution operationalized, creating, and distributing value democratically. RWAs bridging decentralized coordination to real-world impact.

3. Self-sustaining: Snapshot funds itself and grows as a consequence of adoption, not a goal that compromises principles.

Those criteria met, the destination comes into view: Enterprise restored to its full breadth and governed democratically.

Our purpose, mission, and vision form a coherent chain. Each layer more specific than the one above. Any initiative that can't trace through all three is disconnected from what we're building. This coherence anchors us while we navigate the complexities that come with integrating the full coordination stack end-to-end.

This marks the beginning of a new chapter. Snapshot has always built in the open; the commitments outlined here aren't aspirational, they're the foundation for what's next.

In the coming weeks, we'll share how we intend to live this: the initiatives, the structures, and the mechanisms that make our vision operational.

The operating system for internet-native enterprise is being built. Stay tuned for updates.