Nounish DAO: DAO, Governance and the Diffusion of Cultural Symbols
Original source:
Original source:Web3 random door
Over the past period of time, I have been invited by various Chinese Web3 Crypto organizations and projects to share the story of NounsDAO.
NounsIt is a very special DAO. Unlike the general NFT project with a total amount of 10K, Nouns auctions one NFT every day. Since the auction began, there has been no interruption or failed auction. In the past two years, the treasury has only Over 62,000 ETH have been accumulated through auctions, how did this happen?
What's even more amazing is that Nouns has inspired many excellent builders to come here to build. Not counting other small contributions, there are more than 300 various creative proposals on the optical chain, including marketing, development, and local charity activities. How DAO organizes everyone to work in an orderly manner is a governance problem. How does Nouns handle it?
Here I write down the issues that everyone cares about in each sharing, mainly the introduction of the fact level (What). I am still jumping forward in this rabbit hole. I hope that when I share in the future, I can add some interesting things based on the current basis. details, new threads on Crypto development, and further Why and How discussions.
The story begins!
The first time I got serious about Nouns was in June 2022, when LilNouns was launched, when DAO OGsuper brotherJust a mention: Hey, I noticed a lot of my friends put on LilNouns avatar...
(LilNouns is a fork of Nouns, Lil means little, and LilNouns is small Nouns. Let me tell you a small detail that can distinguish Nouns and LilNouns by looking at the eyes alone: LilNouns has more black eyes than white eyes, and Nouns has black eyes and white eyes the same⌐◨- ◨).
first level title
What are Nouns?
We can use 3 keywords to make it clear:
Auction, NFT, DAO
Nouns auctions an NFT every day, and all the ETH from the auction will go into an open and transparent DAO treasury (treasury). Community members initiate a proposal to apply for spending treasury funds to spread the cultural symbols of Nouns glasses ⌐◨-◨. Whether the proposal can be passed It is determined by voting by NFT holders, and 1 Nouns is 1 vote.
Nouns websiteDefinition:
Nouns are an experimental attempt to improve the formation of the on-chain avatar community. Projects such as CryptoPunks try to bootstrap digital community and identity, while Nouns seek to bootstrap identity, community, governance, and a treasury that can be used by the community.
In the definition, we can see that Nouns compares itself with CryptoPunks. The creation of Nouns is based on the innovation of CryptoPunks, adding two things: governance and treasury.
image description
secondary title
auction
The NFT of Nouns is auctioned 1 per day, and the average auction price in the first half of 2023 is 20-30 ETH.
Nouns No. 1 were auctioned on August 8, 2021 for a price of 613.37 ETH.
The initial establishment of Nouns began on June 2, 2021 with one of the foundersPunk 4156 After getting a response, he and 9 other people formed a 10-person founding team and formed a discord to discuss the progress of the matter. 24 hours after starting the discord, 3 members@gremplin, @timpers, @eBoyArtsimage descriptionhttps://discord.com/invite/PaZVHc 7 phm）
nouns.centerWebsite presents a brief history of Nouns' origins
The Nouns governance section forked Compound Governance, and the auction section forked Zora (auctionhouse.sol). Interestingly, Zora 'fork' Nouns later, and made a one-click Nouns tool called Nouns Builder, which contributed to the proliferation of Nouns models, forming a virtuous circle of "fork to fork".
Regarding the auction, small details that need to be noted: in the first 5 years of the auction, 1 of every 10 Nouns (the number ends with 0) will be given to the founding team as a reward for their creation of NounsDAO. Beyond that, they do not receive a share of the funds generated by the auction.
According to Dune data, the funds spent by the treasury are now ~ 35,000 ETH, and the remaining funds are: ~ 28,000 ETH. (Specific data can be queriedDune data panel）
Funds are spent in the form of proposal applications. The main types of proposals on the chain are: community, engineering, marketing, production of physical products, art, charity, operations, Staking (putting ETH in Lido for staking), etc.
A few examples of interesting proposals:
The Budlight Budweiser team applied for 1 Nouns to make an advertising video, which was broadcast during the Super Bowl, and Nouns glasses appeared in the video;
Nouns funded the work of the tropical rainforest research team, and the team discovered a new type of glass frog named NounsDAO;
Sponsored the Dota eSports team and won the second place in the eSports competition;
Nouns develops its own AI model, and Nouns AI pod has made various explorations and attempts in AIGC drawing and GPT bot
……
For more sharing of interesting proposals, you can watchthis popular science video。
The more proposals to increase the popularity of Nouns such as the above, the more people will know about Nouns and its glasses symbols, which may bring more people who are willing to spend money to shoot Nouns NFT, and the treasury will have more funds and more More funds can fund more proposals to help spread Nouns. Nouns give everyone a feeling: it has formed a flywheel effect.
first level title
Concise Layered Governance
Every time you share, you will receive a question. Is it possible that only NFT holding Nouns can initiate a proposal and apply for funds to make contributions?
the answer is negative.
At the beginning, there was only one channel for the onchain proposal (corresponding to the rightmost red part in the figure below), and the onchain proposal was the proposal displayed on the DAO page of the Nouns website.nouns.centerAs shown, the threshold is 10 ETH), the large-scale proposal on the chain is voted by the Nouns holder to decide whether to pass, and the dynamic voting threshold will be displayed on the specific page of each proposal. The current submission threshold for such a large proposal is: need to hold 2 Nouns.
image description
Nouns Hierarchical Governance
Prop HouseIt is a community fund distribution tool created by one of the founders, Seneca, through Proposal No. 23 on the chain. Through different funding rounds, the community allocates a fixed amount of capital to the builders with the best ideas.
How does Prop House work? byNounsDAOFor example, as shown in the figure below, each box is 1 round, and there are 2 types of rounds in Nouns, one is Open Round, and the other is a round with a special theme:
Open Round is unlimited in theme, and there are 2 rounds per month on average (according to current observations, if there are any discrepancies or detailed explanations, welcome to add). Each round of Open Round will take out 2.5 ETH to solicit proposals. Specifically, 2.5 ETH rewards 1 proposal, such as the 21st and 20th rounds, or 0.5 ETH/proposal, a total of 5 proposals are rewarded, such as the 18th and 19th rounds, see the specific instructions. Anyone with an Ethereum address can submit a proposal, which will be voted by Nouns holders, and the 1st (or top 5) proposer of the final voting result will be rewarded.
image description
NounsDAO's page on Prop House
Small Grant is a retrospective reward for small completed contributions, such as writing high-quality articles promoting Nouns, and building a Dune dashboard for Nouns, which can be found on the Nouns forumdiscourseState the contribution on the website, and indicate how much retroactive reward you want to get, and there will be a special Small Grant multi-signature wallet holder to review.
Small Grant also has another cute name, NSFW, which doesn't mean "something not suitable to watch at work", but the abbreviation of Nouns Strategic Funding Works. NSFW also opened a special area on Prop House, which will be launched at the end of 2022 one roundWhat Did We MissRetrospective bounty: you made some contribution, but it was ignored, please submit it!
With the development of the community, the ways of retroactive rewards are becoming more and more abundant. In addition to the classic NSFW, a new way of playing has appeared this year:Infinite, by 3 NounerWilson, Onion, and SenecaInitiated, the fund pool is 20 ETH, and each applicant can apply for a maximum amount of 3 ETH. There are 3 judges to review, and 2 of them vote in favor, and the proposal will be passed.
I initiated a proposal in Infinite under the name of random doorNouns x Chinese Participatory Media co-creation experiment, and got passed.
So far, the 3-tier governance structure of Nouns has been introduced. Both large-scale on-chain proposals and Prop House proposals are voted by Nouns holders to decide whether to pass them, which determines whether funds can flow from the treasury to the proposer, while Small Grants are reviewed by dedicated community leaders.
first level title
Diffusion of cultural symbols
secondary title
About forks
Nouns is a project of CC0 nature, which supports secondary creation and bifurcation on the basis of it. According to the incomplete statistics on nouns.center, there are already Nouns ecological projects158 indivual.
A typical fork of these is LilNouns. Except for the difference in parameters, the rules of LilNouns are basically the same as those of Nouns. The auction period of LilNouns is 15 minutes, and the starting price is 0.15 ETH. This is implemented after the proposal is approved, and there is no limit on the starting price initially. LilNouns hopes to bring more members into the Nouns ecology by lowering the threshold for participation. If new members learn governance experience through participation in LilNouns, they can finally successfully initiate proposals to Nouns. Such new members are called graduates by LilNouns. LilNouns now has 17 votes, of which 16 Nouns were purchased with funds from the treasury, and 1 was commissioned by Noun 557 (Noun 557: Why I Delegate Nouns to the Lil Nouns Community）。
The 17 Votes in the LilNouns treasury will participate in the voting of each proposal of Nouns. For each proposal, how to cast these 17 votes is determined by the LilNouns holder voting with LilNouns NFT. In the sense that LilNouns members can practice voting and launching proposals within the community, LilNouns is like a rabbit hole in the governance world.
For more interesting ecological projects, you can refer to "Explore the Ecosystem of Nouns Derivatives"Introduction.
About Build
Nouns attract a lot of hardcore Builders. The figure below lists some DAO tools developed in the community. Many of the developers have Coinbase work backgrounds, or their projects are invested by the excellent organization Paradigm.
secondary title
Tools - Agora
Agora was originally at Prop House'sNouns Governance ClientRound (Subject: Building a Client to Improve Nouns Governance) Funded with 20 ETH with the highest number of votes, followed by an on-chain proposal154 image description
One of the answers to What's next: Uniswap Agora
Since then, the second-tier network Optimism forked the Agora client, and OP holders can perform delegate operations on this client;May 2, developed by the Agora team for UniswapUniswap Agorasecondary title
Tools - Prop House
image description
Tools - Nouns Builder
Nouns BuilderIt is a tool for "creating Nouns with one click". Friends who don’t know how to write code can use this tool to set the parameters of the auction (such as auction cycle, starting price, whether to set a veto right, whether to reserve a certain proportion of NFT for themselves, etc.) and then initiate a Nouns structure DAOs.
Currently, there are 111 (data updates can behereQuery) DAO built on top of Nouns Builder. The team behind Nouns Builder is Zora, and Zora built theBuilderDAO, and throughProposition 167Apply for 1000 ETH to enter the BuilderDAO treasury (the proposal has been passed).
BuilderDAO uses this start-up capital to incubate more creative NounishDAOs and spread the Nouns model. For the first incubation, BuilderDAO allocates 270 ETH to solicit various proposals for DAO creation on the Prop House. The funds are distributed as follows: 8 DAOs are incubated (20 ETH for each DAO, 160 ETH in total), art package (40 ETH), Website customization (50 ETH), meme promotion (10 ETH), idea collection (10 ETH). Among them, the idea of art package and website customization tools further lowers the threshold of building Nounish DAO, allowing DAO builder to only conceive ideas without distracting energy from NFT, website design and other issues.
BuilderDAO has set a demonstration role. DAOs that come out of Nouns Builder can use other Nouns tools to meet their own construction needs, such as Prop House. After the community grows larger, it may also use the delegation tool Agora. The newly added Nounish DAO enriches the usage scenarios of tools in the Nouns ecosystem, which also reflects the attributes of these tools as public goods.
Among these Nounish DAOs, the ones with deepest impressions are:
PurpleDAO：Initiated by the decentralized social protocol Farcasterpurple.construction, the purpose is to expand the influence of Farcaster ecology. The governance of PurpleDAO also adopts Prop House, which has launched4 rounds. PurpleDAO’s weekly auction revenue was once the highest in the entire ecologysecond only toNounsDAO。
HeadlineDAO：Nounish media without full-time journalists and editors. Those who are interested can read the reference: "An encrypted media without reporters and editors HeadlineDAO》、《The launch steps of HeadlineDAO can be used for reference》
Other interesting NounsihDAO, you can explore by yourself according to your interests: e-sports themeBLVKHVND, music themethe park dao, Music + visual interaction + AI theme Spores...
In addition to the attention of Builders, Nouns has also attracted the attention of many investment institutions, such as Variant, 1kx, 1confirmation, etc. In addition to purchasing Nouns, institutions sometimes also participate in Nouns’ governance voting. Through their opinions, we can also get a glimpse of the institutions’ views on Nouns, such as the very controversial 271 proposal (funding writers to write children’s novels),Variant voted againstfirst level title
Fun Chinese Nouns meme and activities
The fork and build of Nouns in the English-speaking world are very lively. How is the internationalization of Nouns in various places? Through the observation of the Prop House proposal on the chain, we can find that Nouns has held some interesting local activities in combination with local culture in Brazil, Seoul, Mexico, Japan and other places, such as the Nouns sailing event in Seoul. Sailboats with small glasses printed with Nouns form a scenic line, and local Mexicans use delicious pizza cut into pieces to form Nouns to hold a big appetite competition...
If Nouns are combined with Chinese culture, what creativity can there be? If you look carefully at our Chinese characters, you can find that Nouns glasses are hidden in the Chinese characters - words with two "mouth" characters, such asThe "device" that a gentleman does not use 。
We brought this idea to the Web3 Art Exhibition in Xi'an, and held a small co-creation event to let everyone discover more Nouns in Chinese characters:
In addition to cultural creativity, the Builder of Chinese Nouns focused on public goods, conceived and carried out a radical governance experiment Nouns Protector: carefully study Nouns' chain proposals, and participate in Nouns governance voting. Currently in the voting, only negative and abstention votes are cast, and the final voting result is determined by the quadratic voting method of Protector members. There was once such a voice in the Nouns community: Nouns is famous for wasting money. Protector believes that everyone will like and vote for excellent proposals, while proposals that waste money need to be identified and supervised.
The proposal discussion meeting is held every Tuesday night at 20:00 Beijing time. Since each proposal has a specific scene and involves the tracking of the proposer’s past proposal experience, this information is usually connected into a very interesting story, so everyone named the proposal discussion meeting For Nouns stories will be. The story will be open to the public, and interested friends are welcomeconnectparticipate. Weekly proposal briefings passTwitter threadPublished in a way, welcome to pay attention.
Even more interesting is that Nouns Protector will also combine traditional Chinese culture for research and thinking:
About meme is a topic worthy of continuous pondering. Regarding the meme of Nouns, I only know a superficial cultural symbol similar to System 1 of "Thinking Fast and Slow". Further, what kind of cultural symbol does this cultural symbol want to convey? spiritual culture? It may still be waiting for more experimental activities to inject soul and stories in the future.
Punk 4156, one of the founders of Nouns, said, "But don't ask about your future when you do good things, create positive externalities, embrace absurdity and differences, and teach others everything about Nouns and Crypto." Another community activist, Gami, the founder of the extreme sports GnarsDAO, said that "Nouns are people who find the right taste, find some new places and create something that belongs to you". These interpretations of the spirit of Nouns are pretty good, but each of us involved can have our own opinions and create our own Nouns stories.
This goes back to the question of how we think about Nouns. Members of Nouns Protector gave an interesting point of view: Nouns members are like the Medici family in the encrypted world, where thinkers, artists, and businessmen gather together to collaborate and create together.
Other points of view are: Nouns is a headless brand native to Web3, a meme machine native to Crypto, a consensus engine, a public goods funding pool...
At the same time, some Web3 players will look at Nouns from the perspective of investing in DAO, and calculate the profit expectation of NFT, the book value of each Nouns, value support, etc. Small partners who look at it from the perspective of investing in DAO usually ask questions. At present, almost the vast majority of expenditures are donations of public goods that do not ask for return. I am a little worried about the sustainability of capital flow. Apart from auctions, Nouns Are there other sources of income? There are 3 potential sources of income that have been identified so far:
ETH Staking, on-chain proposals involving staking: 18, 22, 30, 52, 217, 222, 227
investment, such asOn-Chain Proposal No. 107 NounsDAO investment in Verse
source:
source:https://nouns.wtf/
Judging from the global spread of Nouns, it can be found that Nouns organizations have spread all over the world; from the perspective of subDAO groups in the virtual world, the Nouns ecology has spawned influential sub-tribes such as LilNouns, GnarsDAO, and NounsJapan. Will Nouns take a uniquely innovative route to Network State?
The Nouns experiment has been going on for almost 2 years. From the perspective of community activity, community creative output, treasury accumulation, etc., it can be regarded as the most successful CC0 experiment. However, it also has some development concerns, such as:
The implementation of the proposal lacks supervision, such as the "soft rug" canned beans proposal that has been criticized every now and then on Twitter;
at last
at last
Despite all my worries, I don't know how long this experiment will last, but during the participation process, I fully felt the Nounsvitality. In a drama event at the beginning of the year, I met a Chinese builder who helped me. With their help and encouragement, I started to take root in the community and carried out research work with them. I mastered a lot of first-hand DAO governance information, and was sometimes amazed by the good ideas. From time to time, we can discover some special ideas under some techniques, and even bring first-hand governance experience to Chinese DAOs as a reference for improving governance rules (such as Nouns' governance dynamic threshold). Along the way, we gained the trust of the holders, who entrusted us with the Nouns and LilNouns in their hands; clocked in the DAO experience for successfully initiating proposals and getting rewards;Co-creation of ledger systemThe conception of product tools, this journey is exciting enough to have real interactions with interesting people and establish real links. As an INTP, you can feel real happiness in the process of interacting with people, really Journey is the reward!
Read reference:
An in-depth analysis of Nouns DAO governance
Anniversary丨Listen to the three founders talk about the growth story of Nouns
Nouns DAO and Governance Philosophy | Thought for Today
