Proposal: Nouns Non-Transferables Factory ⌐◨-◨

[waterdrops]

Special thanks to @wag, @oni, @noun22, @TheOracle and @seneca for encouragement and early feedback.

One interesting trend in recent discourse discussions has been the growth of interest in non-owner participation strategies and in the idea of improving the rate of nounlet onboarding. The PropHouse is worthy of mentioning here, being one of the most promising and exciting projects in the current space of DAO governance.

Other ideas, such as Noun’s Center “Idea Garden” and “noun scholarships” have also been discussed. There seem to be many more similar approaches that have yet to be heard. They all lean toward a common goal: bringing forth the creativity that boils up within the community.

The following project aims to to enhance the chance of succes of these initiatives.

Introduction

The Nounish Factory is a smart-contract that enables trustless creation of non-transferable assets directly by NounsDAO.

The assets can be purely honorary or provide certain rights to their owners.
Though non-transferable, they can be displayed in third party asset explorers.

Github repo:GitHub - curelycue/Nouns-Non-Transferables-Factory
Mock-up contract live on Rinkeby: 0x6dcd872065aF9e410DBf14e479D7d130Ba41E6A2

Project Details

An example of how a function call that creates non-transferables looks like:
createAsset("Star of Service", "STAR")

This function triggers deployment of a “Star of Service” contract.

In the example above the DAO created a contract representing a nontransferable named Star of Service. It can only be minted by a noun owner and is assigned to an address of his choosing using:
gift(NounId, Receiver)

• will mint a “STAR” to the Receiver address.
• only works one time per nounId.

Applications

1. can be used to issue honorary assets to nouns or nounlets
2. can be used to issue tickets or other “participatory tokens” in the context of contests
3. still to be discovered…

More on non-transferable tokens: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/1238

Team: anoun, watedrops.

Project Deliverables

• Factory Contract - the contract the DAO will interact with - used to deploy non-transferable asset contracts.
• Non-transferable Implementation Contract - the template contract - used to mint and distribute non-transferables.

Project funding

I am requesting a grant through Small Grants Fund to fund further research on this subject.

Project Ethos

Our end goal is to make the process seamless, allowing the DAO to drop different kinds of non-transferable tokens automatically whenever a consensus to do so is reached.

We’ll open-source and document everything we build.

Excited to hear your thoughts and I’m happy to answer any questions.

[r3ptar]

I think this is a great idea. I see how excited people get to earn roles in discord, I can only imagine how excited community members would be to earn badges from the nouns commemorating their contributions to expanding the ethos.

[waterdrops]

(post deleted by author)

[waterdrops]

Much appreciated! Thank you for your input @r3ptar !
We’d like to hear what kinds of on-chain badges do you feel would be really cool to have.
We’re still exploring use-cases for the factory contract. Your discord roles analogy is spot-on! What’s one other example you can imagine?

[solimander]

Hey @waterdrops, I like where you’re going with this!

The requirement of a successful DAO proposal as a prerequisite to each non-transferable token deployment may be a bit heavy-handed if they’re designed to act solely as honorary/participatory assets that do not unlock a large amount value on-chain.

I realize this is very much an exploration, so maybe it’s too early to tell. Excited to see where you take it!

I’m currently exploring the idea of Noun contract integrations/extensions/plugins (exact name TBD) that would allow the DAO to vote in custom contracts that extend the Nouns protocol in some way, including the reception of non-transferable tokens. Thus far, this has been focused on assets that would be held by Noun owners and have the power to augment the metadata that’s returned from the Nouns token contract for their Noun.

It may be too early to tell how much overlap exists between our ideas, but we should keep in contact and share learnings as we explore them.

Just started sculpting out the integration registry and base contracts yesterday. I’ll check back in as we both iterate over the coming weeks.

[waterdrops]

can we tag mr @wag in here?

[waterdrops]

@solimander
So the way we are thinking about this is

Noun #119,hi @Oni , proposes createAsset(“badge”)
→ usual voting takes place
---->if the vote is successful, the dao calls the factory and the Badge contract is created
------> then badge tokens can be minted - every nounId has the right to mint one badge meaning there’ll be a cap of ~200 mintable nontransferables in the badge collection.

The current implementation we have in mind for the factory contract will not require a vote for every nontransferable but rather for every collection created.

Regarding “contract extentions”, you have got to give us a bit more than that !🧙‍♂️ You’ve spilled the beans and now we gotta know more!

I see no meaningful overlap between our ideas as of now if we discount the fact that I find them both valuable and interesting.

[Oni]

yo @waterdrops! thanks for the detailed proposal. it might be good to also include a quick, non-technical summary/TLDR of the project

-How much funding are you planning to request?
-Do you have a rough timeline for the deliverables?

Badge Ideas

• Community Accomplishments (ex. artist who’s trait is selected for next nouns art update)
• Prop Builders
• Noun of the Year (as voted on by the Nouns community)
• Nouns voter threshold / participation badges (Voted on X # of Proposals, ect)

[waterdrops]

@oni thank you those are some really clean use-cases.
We are intending to use this grant as a reason for more people to get interested and involved.

More educational/promotional materials are needed!

We do need artists to help us design new nounish badges, writers, developers and other forward-thinking individuals that can help us flesh out more clearly what is it that the community wants in terms of badges.

Once we feel confident with that, we can deliver a “deployment” proposal, most likely through one of propHouse’s tiers, by the end of spring. Depending on circumstances!

[solimander]

then badge tokens can be minted - every nounId has the right to mint one badge meaning there’ll be a cap of ~200 mintable nontransferables in the badge collection.

What’s the thought behind the one mint per Noun owner? Thinking through the ideas in @Oni’s list, it feels like that restriction would greatly limit the number of use-cases.

Regarding “contract extentions”, you have got to give us a bit more than that ! You’ve spilled the beans and now we gotta know more!

More on this soon! Still very much exploratory work

[waterdrops]

What’s the thought behind the one mint per Noun owner? Thinking through the ideas in @Oni’s list, it feels like that restriction would greatly limit the number of use-cases.

This is a design choice we used for the simplicity of the presentation. The number of mints per noun owner will be specifiable at the creation of each collection.

As for minting being restricted to Noun owners. We found this to be our best chance at fair distribution of non-transferable tokens conjured by @nounsdao.

[waterdrops]

[r3ptar]

Just read the Soulbound post and it made me even more bullish on this proposal.

[waterdrops]

Donations: 0xa2f0732a65d9b475df43cb5c84b41e09c2ecef6b

[Misterplus]

Hey there @waterdrops ! This is Misterplus from twitter, I saw your message inviting me here to discuss more on this subject. What I proposed in my original blog post is a ERC721 compatible token, transferable but only between wallets controlled by the same unique individual.

However it does have one small issue, which is addressed in this twitter thread. In short, an individual can transfer the asset if they link the recipient address to their own identity. And if the sender is absolutely genuine about the transfer action, he won’t (but CAN) transfer it back. Like I said in the twitter thread, when it comes to economic values, this issue can mostly be ignored (due to economic incentives), but I’m not sure how it’ll fit into a honorary asset case. Will anyone absolutely willingly give their badge to someone else? I’m not sure.