This is an idea that has been discussed in the ENERGY Telegram. Thanks to neokry, issac, dee bee, soren, derek taylor, j.valeseka and all of ENERGY for the ongoing discussion.

ENERGY is a creative grants collective. We fund creative arts and engineering projects on Zora Network. We used Nouns.build to create our collective and you can join by acquiring an NFT at auction here. If you want to support the arts and be surrounded by people who love art in the Zoraverse, you can usually pick up a token for 0.05 ETH. All of that ETH goes directly into our Treasury, which is used to support the arts through onchain Proposals. This is the nature of a DAO created with Nouns.build.

The auctions last 24 hours and if the token goes unbid, no one receives it and it is burned. ENERGY's token artworks which are generative Zorbs, by the artists 0xen, are soo beautiful. It's painful when they are burned because they belong in people's collections. ENERGY #47 was one such token.

Feeling this should be in people's collections, we have a Droposal up to make this a free mint for anyone with an Ethereum account. A Droposal is simply and NFT release that was voted on by the Collective and minted from the Treasury address which gives it the provenance of being from ENERGY. This also creates a revenue source for the Treasury using Zora Protocol Rewards. The Rewards accrue to the minter, who in this case is the Treasury. This is a win-win; the public gets to collect this Zorb for free and the ENERGY Treasury grows to fund more creative art projects. This NFT is its own unique artwork and does not come with any Governance rights to ENERGY. There is no "utility", its just a beautiful artwork to collect. If you want Governance rights, you need to join the Collective at Auction.

The Idea

What if every token was available at Auction AND released a a free collectible? Many people could collect it, without Governance Rights and increase its meme value. However, only the version acquired at Auction would come with Governance and be considered the original 1/1 token. Owning the Governance version would be even more valuable because it comes with meme value. In popular NFT parlance, the Governance version is the Mona Lisa, the free mint is a print.

This would increase revenue for the Treasury by collecting protocol rewards for each token and increase the value of the Governance token by giving it increased meme value. One can imagine serious collectors, who would collect every token. Think Nouns. Think Opepen. Think Zorbs.

This doesn't reduce the activation energy required for an organization to create momentum around the virtuous flywheel. An organization needs to make Governance valuable. In the case of DAO's build on Nouns.build this is means doing exciting things with the Treasury. Things that people want to be a part of. However, it can reduce the pressure on the auction as being, in some cases, the only revenue source for the Treasury.

This is an early idea. This isn't easily done with the current Nouns.build contracts. I'm not suggesting BuilderDAO make changes to support this. An early experiment could be done with a third party app that listens for a new auction to begin and mints it. I would love to hear what you think about this.

Links

• ENERGY

• The ENERGY Telegram

• The Droposal mentioned in this essay

• ENERGY's Free Mint for onchain Summer that received 5K mints.