> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://element-2.gitbook.io/element-developer-docs/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://element-2.gitbook.io/element-developer-docs/element-council-protocol/guide-creating-a-voting-vault.md).

# Guide: Creating a Voting Vault

Council's modularity allows developers to easily create new voting vaults for new Council deployments, add them to existing deployments through governance.Let's go over how to create your own [Voting Vault](/element-developer-docs/element-council-protocol/council-protocol-smart-contracts/voting-vaults.md) to extend Council's capabilities to fit your DAO's needs.

#### Requirements

This guide uses Solidity to write a Voting Vault smart contract. You'll need:

* Some experience with Solidity
* Council contracts

1. **Clone the repository**

Get started by cloning or forking the open source Council Kit GitHub repository:

{% embed url="<https://github.com/delvtech/council>" %}

2. The Voting Vault Interface

Voting vaults must retrieve a user's voting power and a specified timestamp (vote creation), and return it to CoreVoting when requested. It can also parse extra data for custom instructions:

![](https://i.imgur.com/KR0J7Ru.png)

For example, let's consider a vault that allows anyone who calls it to have any number of votes per request. In this case, the extraData parameter can be used to set the voting power

![](https://i.imgur.com/RqRFMkE.png)

The previous example does not seem very useful for governance, so let's consider a vault that gives voting power to holders of an NFT. You'll need a few more things

3. Voting Vault functions

You'll have to implement the following, at minimum:

* a function to track and update voting power (see [History.sol](https://github.com/delvtech/council/blob/main/contracts/libraries/History.sol) included in the repo)
* a deposit function
* queryVotePower function as required by the interface

![](https://i.imgur.com/THUkhoy.png)

4. Customize

You can tweak this contract by e.g. adding functions to withdraw or delegate, changing the votes given per NFT to a different number, making a function that considers rarity, or any other functionality you can think of.

5. &#x20;Add to your Council deployment

You can add the vault to your new Council deployment by simply adding the address in the included deployment script. Existing deployments would require a governance proposal.

![](https://i.imgur.com/7uk59S9.png)