Are you building the snap on an armhf device (your Ubuntu Core device)? Even with build-on: [armhf] you still need to actually use an armhf device to do the actual building. You cannot build an armhf snap on an amd64 machine easily.
A simple way to get a correct architecture snap is to use snapcraft remote-build --build-on=armhf, which will use the launchpad build servers.
Using remote-build does mean the development loop is a bit longer, though, because you need to wait for the workers to do their thing. You also have no way of interrupting a build or inspecting a broken build environment with --debug for example.
snap install lxd
sudo lxd init # answer all questions by simply hitting enter
sudo lxc launch ubuntu:18.04 bionic # create an 18.04 container, call it bionic
sudo lxc exec bionic -- bash # enter the container and start a shell (you can leave it with ctrl-d or the "exit" command)
inside the container you can just snap install snapcraft, git clone your tree and use snapcraft with the --destructive-mode option …
but i doubt running it on something like a raspberry pi with SD card will be faster than launchpad …
this is wrong, you can not install lxd inside the classic environment, leave it to be on the normal console again … (or reboot and simply dont use the (unmaintained) classic mode)