How Purple Works

The 5 Contracts that make us a DAO

Purple is a DAO that was launched on October 25, 2022. It's goal is to proliferate and expand the Farcaster Protocol and Ecosystem. Compared to 2022, I'd say we've been doing a pretty good job! We were the first funding source on Farcaster for builders and have funded many of the Farcaster tools and services you use today including Ponder, GM Farcaster, Herocast, Bountycaster, Kiwi News and many more. You can join Purple by winning a token at auction.

Join 427 other Farcasters who are down with this mission.

It's been a minute since I've written about how Purple and other Nounish DAOs work. We have a lot of new members and energy in Purple who have never had the mechanics explained to them. This will likely be a series on how "Purple Works" but in this essay I'll stay focused on the mechanics and smart contracts at play. Purple uses Builder Protocol to govern as a Nounish DAO which consists of 5 smart contracts. Purple's 5 contracts are: NFT, Auction House, Governor, Treasury and Metadata. Lets go through each one.

The NFT Contract

Members join Purple by acquiring an NFT. This is the NFT contract. Purple NFTs are generative in the sense that there are 7 unique layers and dozens of options on each layer and then based on the block in which the NFT is created, it chooses a random assset at each layer. This creates so many different options that it practically guarantees each one is unique.

PSA: Its time to update our artwork. If you are interested feel free to reach out to understand more about the mechanic above. An AI collection is not going to work unless you create many layers via AI which then uses our generative contracts to construct the final token.

The Auction House Contract

A Purple token is auctioned every 24 hours. It has a reserve price of 0.05 ETH. We send 1% of our NFTs to Nouns DAO (as a tribute for creating the Governance structure) and 1% to Merkle Manufactory. All of that is changeable via a Proposal and implemented by the Auction House Contract.

The Governor Contract

The Governor controls our Governance aka the proposal system. The proposal is a markdown document with an onchain transaction attached. If the proposal is approved the transaction is executed. If not, it is not. It has a simple transaction builder for Sending ETH, Airdropping Purple tokens, Pausing the Auction, Replacing the Artwork, Releasing an ERC-721 NFT but you can use Custom Transaction to create any possible transaction. One of the most important aspects of this is Sending ETH. If you need 5 ETH for a project, you put up a proposal describing why and then adding the transaction to send 5 ETH to a project wallet. No assets can leave the Treasury without the Governor executing the transaction. Put another way, the only way ETH can be removed from our Treasury is with a vote. The Governor also controls the Veto address, the Quorum Threshold and how many tokens are required to put up a Proposal; all which is updateable via a Proposal.

The Treasury Contract

The Treasury stores all of our assets; namely ETH but it can hold any asset on Base. You can think of this as our "Wallet" but its a smart contract (so don't send non-Base assets to it). The most important characteristic is that assets can only be released from the Treasury via a vote.

The Metadata Contract

Our DAO name, a description and a website all controlled by the Metadata Contract. We are literally "Purple" onchain and have the provenance to prove we were first.

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Those are the mechanics that make up that make up Purple. We are highly decentralized. We have 427 Owners holding 610 tokens. Our auction revenue goes into a Treasury which can only be unlocked via proposals that hit Threshold (think Quorum) + 51% Yes vote. There are other nuances like our recently elected Grants Chair, Revenue Chair and Security Council. Its often more practically to move funds into a multi-sig for use (ie we have a small grants multisig so we can run multiple retroactive funding rounds without requiring a vote every time. I'll write about some of those topics in the near future.

I'll restate that the goal of Purple is to proliferate and expand the Farcaster Protocol and ecosystem. If you are down with that mission you should join us by winning a token at auction. My DMs are open if you want to talk more about it.

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