Dear Bankless Nation,
Nouns DAO now has nearly 22,000 ETH in its treasury, and the NFT collective is actively looking for interesting efforts to fund.
Toward this end, cue in Prop House.
Invented by the Nounder seneca, Prop House was unveiled this week and allows anyone to submit proposals to Nouns DAO as metaphorical bids on ETH.
Fellow Nounder 4156 hailed the creation as “new and important” and said “in the long run it will transcend Nouns.” There are really interesting possibilities in play, so let’s catch up on the basics and big ideas of this invention for today’s Metaversal.
-WMP
Have an idea? Get funded by Prop House
📝 First, a refresh on key Noun terms:
🧙 Nounders — one of the 10 original builders of Nouns; the “3.4156 artists” (4156, Gremplin, Timpers, and Kai of eBoy) and the developers (seneca, dom, vapeape.eth, devcarrot, 9999, and Solimander).
Art by Messhup via lostnouns.wtf 🏗️ Nouns protocol — the open-source smart contracts responsible for creating and auctioning one Noun a day; it’s a brand protocol, if you will.
👾 Nouns — the NFT avatars generated by the Nouns protocol; the art of these are in the public domain.
Noun 251 via nouns.wtf 🏟️ Nouns DAO — the collective of Nouns NFT holders, with each Noun offering 1 vote in the DAO. This group governs the community treasury, which is filled from the proceeds of daily Noun auctions.
🤝 Nouncil — a group comprised of “Nouncillors,” i.e. the leaders of Noun derivatives projects, that coordinates with Nouns DAO.
What happened
Yesterday, seneca announced that Prop House, which has been under construction since late last year, will start its first funding round next week on Tuesday, March 29th.
When the weeklong round begins, an Ethereum address and a proposal is all you’ll need to enter. Nouns DAO isn’t looking for any particular type of efforts to back, as “anyone is free to propose anything.” The three most compelling proposals will win 3 ETH each, and then a new round will begin.
As such, now Nouns DAO is poised to have a steady stream of community proposals to vet. Many of the ones that will pass will serve to explicitly propagate the Nouns brand, on and on and on.
A way to grow the Nouns community
Major demand for Nouns has made the early Noun NFT auctions prohibitively expensive for most folks.
This dynamic has led to a boom of Noun-themed derivative NFT projects, which is readily encouraged by the Noun community’s CC0 stance. It’s also led to a lot of interesting discussions in the community about how to grow the Nouns project without drastically affecting issuance, i.e. the release of one Noun a day.
Notably, then, Prop House points new ways forward here. That’s because for the first Prop House round Nouns DAO has greenlit holders of NounPunks, a Nouns derivative project, to join Nouns DAO voters in choosing the round’s winning proposals.
In other words, Nouns DAO is testing out something of a quasi-membership expansion concept, through which the Nouns community can grow by more closely integrating Nouns derivatives projects into its operations.
This move is really interesting as it marks a sort of evolution in the CC0 NFT scene. Previously, CC0 projects happily nodded from afar at the efforts of their derivatives projects, as the mere act of spinning off was seen as beneficial enough by the progenitors. In Prop House comes something more though, as Nouns DAO and NounPunks are now directly working together through it, and both projects will seemingly be better for it going forward.
Nouns DAO is leaning on the Nouncillors and beginning to call in its kin, as it were, so look for more Noun-themed projects to be brought into the fold. In doing so, the collective seems likely to elevate some derivatives into “nounish states” over time.
The big ideas
- Nouns DAO has a massive ETH treasury. Now via Prop House it has a new funding pipeline that can actualize a steady and indefinite flow of compelling, productive projects. Expect new rivers of “nounish” culture to start flowing accordingly, which will lead to many second- and third-order effects.
- Prop House is also serving as an early model for how CC0 NFT projects can go about morphing a derivative into an “extension,” i.e. something more closely related.
- The Nouns community has recently shown interest in engaging with or partnering with the CrypToadz community in some form or fashion. Will the ‘Toadz become a Nouns DAO extension? Only time will tell, though the vibes are aligned and Prop House is already giving us a taste of possible futures. Wider alliances may be coming accordingly.
- If Nouns DAO comes to increasingly lean on extensions, the group may increasingly be seen as a “punkish” CC0 counterweight to Bored Ape Yacht Club creators Yuga Labs, which now has massive venture backing and recently acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. This will be a thread to watch in the years ahead.
Action steps
- 🕶️ Read my Nouns 101 guide to learn more about Nouns DAO
- 💻 Check out my previous write-up Hacker group stalks NFTs if you missed it