Winter and I wrote Prop 613 over a couple of months. It amounted to a Frankenstein proposal, as we tried to pretzel what we were excited to build for NounsDAO into the Prop format.
And it's already been defeated (epicly so)! Ultimately, I think it was probably for the best. The feedback we’re seeing from folks on Nouns.camp, specifically from @Gami @LilFrog, @Krel and the Nouncil has been really helpful in scrapping and redrafting something we'd be excited to work on.
I wrote this up while the prop was being submitted, and feel like it’s still worth posting for feedback. A short explainer, followed by a pitch for a program that I think could be (incredibly) beneficial to the Nouns ecosystem to consider.
TLDR
Crypto's Wordle moment will happen in the next 18 months.
Shouldn't it happen in the Nouns ecosystem?
The State of NounsDAO
In August 2021, NounsDAO hit like a thunderclap and nerd-sniped me in the best possible way.
Nouns as a concept is simple, and yet contains multitudes in its canon and more remixes than I can count. It’s a headless brand, an unstoppable meme, a daily auction that will go forever on. It was a digital passport to a network state with a $100,000,000 treasury.
Smash-cut to 2 years later, stumbling through crypto-winter: NounsDAO governance was paralyzed due to an unhappy minority who wanted out. A fork mechanism was proposed to let those exit with their Noun’s “book value” (proportion of the treasury).
Since then, 3 forks have occurred. The treasury has dropped from ~30,000ETH to ~ 4700ETH. The daily auctions prices have plunged, but the delta between daily auctions and book value is tapping on ATH, making another fork likely.
NounsDAO in a conversation with itself: “What is NounsDAO without a treasury? Are the noggles enough?”
The Problem: Projects Have Low Variance Outcomes
In the past, NounsDAO has tended to fund scoped projects because they fit the Prop format. Sometimes they worked! Other times, they didn't! But builders are incentivized to follow the letters of the proposal, even when the market traction never materialized. Because the Project was funded, not the Team.
Props for Proposals work great for iterations on the status-quo. It's why bureaucracies, corporations, and non-profits run off them. But how often are we were surprised by a RFP? And when you were, did it even pass? The floor is high but the ceiling is low for Project-based-proposals. You know what you’re getting with Projects, and that’s why they feel safe to fund. But safe only works when you don't have a lot of ground to cover, and NounsDAO has a 4ETH gap to close.
To do that, you need to change the dynamics at play, to self-disrupt.
The Solution: Fund Builders, Not Projects
My Pitch: Nouns should innovate on Props, and fund builders to shoot the moon
IMHO, it's a pretty straight forward:
NounsDAO should be aiming for self-disruption.
This can be done by increasing the rate of experimentation.
Nouns does not have the treasury to follow a platform's spray-and-pray approach to builder incentives.
Nouns can bundle 100 ideas + 10,000 hours of practice into a single Prop by funding a Builder instead.
TLDR: Nouns should consider funding Builders instead of Projects.
It’s important to underline that it's code and specifically apps that NounsDAO wants to incentivize. Other building is important and it's good NounsDAO funds it. But app-first builders addresses a few gaps in the Nouns ecosystem while being a high-leverage play.
Why fund app-first builders?
Code is still the undefeated highest leveraged use for capital
The marginal costs of software are near 0 and, done correctly, can run forever
Funding a builder bundles up 100 high-variance ideas and let's market traction be the filter
Venture Capital already does this with Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, and it’s pretty simple reasoning: you find the people who’ve already done the thing you want to happen and you pay them to do it in-house.
Why shouldn’t Nouns have a Builders-in-Residence program with the same mission?
Our Vision - A Viral App Studio
Ultimately what we would be excited to build for NounsDAO is a viral apps studio. Imagine Noun-branded BasePaint or FriendTech or, even better, MSCHF.
This viral app studio will operate with a north star: enhance and expand the ecosystem around Nouns auctions, creating new ways for the community to engage with and derive value from each daily auction event.
We'll aim to transform each Noun auction into a narrative-driven, data-rich event that captures attention and drives engagement, without altering the core auction mechanism.
Our proposed angles of attack are essentially:
Enable anyone with enough ETH to set aggressive bids on Noun auctions, regardless of timezone.
Leverage 1-click PartyDAO integration to increase the bidder audience to the other 95% of wallets with less than 2.4 ETH (possibly leveraging work already in progress w/ RaidGuild)
Explore building lore and innovating on the bidding and competition experience for Nouns.
A Launch Pad to Somewhere...
Nouns.sh becomes a launch pad where we begin shooting for the moon. Some ideas we’re experimenting with.
Mecha pilot NFTs that level up based on auction participation, creating a meta-game around bidding.
LLM-powered 'cutscenes' that turn each auction's bidding history into a shareable, retweetable story.
A prediction market for auction outcomes that drives engagement.
Crowd-sourced wallet tagging and analytics to understand who's accumulating Nouns
OE pixel-art-parties that send mint profits to the Noun being auctioned
A snippet from our Figma idea board
These are a few of the ideas we’re exploring as apps to bolt on top of the Nouns.sh launchpad. These viral experiences won't change how auctions function, but their success will be measured by their impact on auction outcomes, otherwise, what's the point?
We'll use trailing auction price averages as our north star, ensuring our work drives tangible value back to the DAO.
Addressing Some Concerns
Outside of Prop 613, Nouns.sh and what Winter and I are doing, I think there's tremendous upside on Nouns (and other ecosystems) funding builders got 3-6 months sprints.
I'm utterly convinced that crypto's Wordle moment will happen in the next 18 months.
Wouldn't it be great if it happened in the Nouns ecosystem?
There’s reasonable concerns around blank checks to builders, all of which are (imo) pretty easily addressed with a few principles for release cadence and tech stack. The best safeguard, however, are just picking the right builders. You can find holes in any system if the stakes are low enough, but high quality, highly ethical builders with skin in the game and reputations to protect are the easiest way to guard against most of problems.
Problem 1: A blank check with no deliverables?
1-4 week (max) release cadence is reasonable for Builders in Residence. That means, at the end of a 4 month residency, they should have 4 to 12 experiments in-market.
Problem 2: Will builders maintain these experiments indefinitely?
Only if the DAO pays for it. Otherwise everything that can be onchain should be onchain, and the rest of the code should be OS so anyone can apply to run infra for the DAO.
Problem 3: How do we judge impact?
The North Star for every Builder in Residence should be driving value back to the DAO. The simplest metric that would be the hardest to game because of the cost would be trailing auction average over the previous 60-90 days. Eyeballs are only valuable if it affects the perceived value of owning a Noun, and that’s expressed through auction prices.
Conclusion
IMO, NounsDAO is at a crossroads. The impulse, what we see from most flat, non-hierarchical organizations is incrementalism, because that feels sensible. We don’t have $100MM to spend, so we should be pragmatic, shouldn’t we?
...I mean, yeah, honestly for 90% of the use cases, that is how you should run things when belts need to be tightened. But if Nouns doesn't make room for moon shots, it's current trajectory won't change. And that’s difficult to incentivize without re-thinking what Nouns is willing to fund.
I’m proposing Nouns bet on what made NounsDAO special in the first place. Bet on lightning strikes and chaos and builders with a vision.
Thanks for reading! I hope you consider this, if not for us, then others! I have a short list of devs I’d love to see go crazy in Nouns ecosystem.
If you have feedback, or ideas, or opinions on what format a Builder-Prop should take, please hmu!
Bonus reading: because I've been thinking about both tweets for weeks
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