Snapshot

A snapshot is a record of wallet balances or activity taken at a specific block or date, which a project uses to decide who qualifies for an airdrop and how much each wallet receives. Arbitrum took its ARB snapshot at block 58642080 on Arbitrum One, 6 February 2023, and awarded at most one point per qualifying action performed before that date. Uniswap's UNI snapshot ended on 1 September 2020 at 12:00 am UTC, and 1,000 UNI went to every address that had redeemed SOCKS tokens for physical socks or held at least one SOCKS token at the snapshot date.

Activity after a snapshot does not count toward that distribution, and a holding rule like Uniswap's looks only at what a wallet held on the day, which is why snapshot dates matter when reading eligibility rules. The word has a second meaning: Snapshot is also the name of a governance voting tool, and quest platforms such as Galxe offer tasks for people who have voted on Snapshot proposals. More in airdrop eligibility.