A New Nounish State - For the many

[Nabs]

What we’re going to achieve:

The Nouns project is nothing short of fascinating. I love Nouns and everything that now surrounds it, from the pleasant and welcoming community to the off-chain aspirations you guys are striving towards with your proposals! However, there is one problem - I can’t actually afford to purchase a noun at the moment, and I doubt I’m the only person in this situation! So… we’re working to create a child project based on the Nouns-monorepo.

As mentioned on the discord - the aim would be to make a sub-community with a lower barrier for entry - this would be achieved with a higher rate of releases, e.g. 3 or more “NAME TO BE CONFIRMED” released each day. This should keep supply high and make prices lower than the full nouns - or at least it should encourage a lower barrier of entry (and hopefully raise interest in Nouns within the wider community too!) The community will operate fairly identically to Nouns and maybe one day the new community of “NAME “TO BE CONFIRMED” might be able to purchase a Noun or two, giving everyone a share of a vote in the Noun community. This would be achieved analogously to the Nouns proposal system.

Ultimately, we’re aiming to give those struggling to reach the financial barrier that Nouns currently present an opportunity to still become an integral part of the community.

Who we are:

Nibz

• Hi, I’m Nibz, I’m a graphic designer, I love the NFT world, and every day I’m learning something new. The community of Nouns has been very welcoming. I’ll be leading the development of this new community, I believe that with my background in web development and graphic design I should be able to help form the community and find other team members with the skills to create this project! I’m going to put most of my time into this project, and I hope you guys will support me along this journey! I’m excited for the time ahead!

Matcha:

• Hey everyone! I’ve been a dev for a couple of years now, and I’m super keen to get involved! I’ve known Nibz for a while and we work well as a team - I’m very excited by the prospect of building this up!

Artwork Preview:

The artwork, although fairly simple, will have a variety of torsos, legs, heads, shoes, and backgrounds, just as with full Nouns. These are the initial traits that we’re aiming to generate. Much like Nouns, every person will be equally rare - there will be no ‘if’ statements governing the creation trait scarcity, which makes all “NAME TO BE CONFIRMED”s equally rare. The artwork is definitely subject to change before the launch of the project and the first auctions - any ideas hit us up!

Development Roadmap:

Create Official Discourse

Create Community Socials

• Discord
• Twitter

Create Artwork Assets

Forking Nouns-monorepo

Create Playground

Create Website

Ethereum Network Backend

Fork Compound Governance

On-Chain Artwork

Proposal Development

Incorporate bidding on the website

Build the initial Community

Official launch day - nominally 15/12/21?

Project Roadmap:

Great Hall’ Automation and Creation

Party Mechanic Development

SubDAO Integration

Department Development

Nounish State Awareness Project

More to be announced

[kxtz]

I love this idea and am keen to contribute. I’ve been thinking about different permutations of Nounish state governance and ways to reduce the barrier to entry.

Some questions/ideas on implementation:

• do you plan for shorter auction windows (e.g. 1 mint every 8 hours) or greater quantity @ mint (3 mints once every 24 hours)?
• will there be a mission or sub-community objective independent of nouns? one struggle in many nouns deriv communities is the lack of direction once we acquire a noun
• will there be any reward for minters? any incentive to hold them beyond voting?
• how might you encourage a fairer voting hierarchy? you will still run into the same problem of nouns if 1 whale decides to start stacking, pricing everyone else out of the ecosystem. one idea is the 1 mint = 1 vote. additional mints / tokens do not give a stronger voice. maybe incentivize participation? like levels in discord correlates to larger voice? it’s a hard problem

dm me if you want to chat. excited to see your progress

[noun22]

I think this is a very cool project, love the art, and love the goal of using the proceeds to buy Nouns in order to be a part of the community!

However, I do want to reiterate the comments I made in this recent thread that it is not in the DAO’s interest to explicitly support “official” derivative projects as being an extension of Nouns.

I agree with you that accessibility is an issue with the price of Nouns being relatively high. In my view, the ideal solution to that for now is owning a piece of a Noun through a sub-DAO like Shark, GOOP, or what this project may eventually become. There is a very important distinction to be made about being a part of the Nouns community through owning a piece of a Noun (amazing!), vs being a separate project that the Nouns bless as an extension of the Nouns project itself (not in the DAO’s interest).

[Matcha]

Hey! Yeah good questions - we’re thinking at least 3 every 24 hours, because we don’t want the time of day to impact sale price too much - i.e. we don’t want a world where staying up until 4am means that you are given some sort of advantage. Also it’s probably generally best to give a longer rather than shorter action window so there’s enough time for potential buyers to be online.

Re the sub-community, yes, we’re keen to propagate the nounish culture, I think nabs is keen for a more artistic bent - and that’s also useful to market nouns in general, but I’m more keen on the tech side, and would ultimately be keen to make some sort of direct impact on the world in some way - generally I think though that this could be decided democratically by buyers (with the usual veto safeguards to start with), and let it evolve over time. I don’t think we’re going out with a strict initial rule like “we exist to buy property, or coffee shops”, or anything like that.

I feel like incentives to hold onto our tokens is similar to above - in that it can be community led, plus there’s the benefit of being a part of a community in general - which is hopefully especially diverse due to the lower barrier for entry. With a larger group of people participating, personally I would love to see this become a place of education. I’d love to nurture a culture where people could learn and educate our members and network within this community to find someone with the skills that they’d like - artistic, technical, or otherwise. Why is it better than a random online community? Not many things tie people together more than shared capital!

Yeah fair voting is definitely a problem - we don’t want to turn away people willing to buy up lots of tokens, because they can be really useful for their financial power, but also you’re right that we want to cap their influence. One idea I had was some sort of halfway house - perhaps we could try a logarithmic scaling - i.e. something like e.g. log base 2:

• 1 token = 1 vote
• (2+1) tokens = 2 votes
• (4+2+1) tokens = 3 votes
• (8+4+2+1) tokens = 4 votes
• etc.

Keen to hear if you have any other thoughts too, I’ll DM you tomorrow!

[Nabs]

Thanks for your kind and supportive comments and I love that you like the artwork! I understand exactly what you mean - I guess we don’t need “official support” per se from the Nouns, but it was this platform that sparked my interest initially, so I thought it only right to launch, develop and use this forum as a friendly sounding board of likeminded people. Much like an incubator!

To address the point directly though, matcha and I just had a long chat about this - whilst we think you’re right about dilution - we think it’s only true to a point - if our community balloons, Nouns will indeed have a smaller piece of the pie (of potential buyers) - but critically, the whole DAO concept will be much more widely known, so the number of potential buyers for nouns would likely be higher too - i.e. when we market ourselves, by proxy we market Nouns (the original and best®) too, so I think that there is definitely a world in which our incentives are aligned with the incentives of Nouns (especially as we’re not asking for any financial remuneration, and doubly especially if we manage to buy a noun). What do you think?

[noun22]

Thanks for taking the time to come back with feedback!

If you don’t need financial remuneration to get off the ground, I think that is all the reason to just launch the project. If you look at something like Noadz, that developer/artist permissionlessly combined Nouns and Toadz artwork and generated a ton of organic buzz using Twitter and Discord. In fact, we even rewarded their contributions after the fact from Small Grants and Retro Funding group.

I understand where you’re coming from - but you can accomplish everything you mentioned in the second paragraph without any permission or endorsement, we’d love for you to do it, and we’d likely even reward you for your efforts retroactively. But the DAO has no interest in promoting or incubating other NFT projects as a de facto explicit extension of Nouns. I love your interest in the project and I’m more than happy to give you feedback on other elements of your proposal (I think you guys should definitely incorporate the Noun glasses into your art!) but I hope you understand that it is not in our interest to dilute the brand and promote anything besides Nouns as being the authentic way to own a Noun.

[Nabs]

Hey, yeah I totally understand where you’re coming from! Thanks a lot for the comments - and I’ll look at incorporating the glasses for sure!

*Messed up deleting the post before!

[kortelin]

do you think your world building could grow to resemble something like Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult? they created some really detailed character archetypes.

[17oclock]

Hi @Nabs I just came across your post and I feel like this is exactly I was looking for. Is it still ongoing?

Thinking in nounish but not be able to afford a full noun (probably ever in lifetime) this would be the way for me to feel more embedded in this great community. Would love to get involved.

I made a post about owning a smaller wallet but trying to be involved here: How could you afford a noun? - #3 by 17oclock

[Nabs]

Hey @kortelin!

I’m a huge fan of the Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult, and yes I’d absolutely love to envision that our world-building could grow to resemble that of Forgotten Runes! For now, we’re focusing on getting the basics down, leveling up our artwork, generating all the layers, creating the website, and then growing social media, but I’d love to expand in this direction in the future!

[Nabs]

Hi @17oclock,

Firstly thanks for registering your interest and thank you for taking the time to read! Rest assured, development is still ongoing, I read your post and completely understand your concerns and I appreciate that for many, owning a fraction of a noun may never feel like being fully “part of the community” for one reason or another. We’re still working on this project and I hope to be at a point where we’re giving regular development updates soon, and to start generating a following on social media so that like-minded people can begin to get excited along with us!

[Matcha]

Hey all,

I just wanted to take a second to assure those who are interested in the project that progress is still being made, and despite being a small team I’m happy with the direction things are going! The team took a short break over the UK festive period and we’re now settling back into our working lives - I’m hopeful we can provide a well written update to you all soon, hopefully with some big news!

[17oclock]

Hi @Nabs and @Matcha,

Awesome. Thanks for the prompt update. Looking forward for the progress. I guess most of the people were or are still in the festive vacation after a long and exhausting year. Not worth to rush it.

I could offer my help as a generative designer (main tool Houdini FX) if it would bring any value at this late point.

[nounsfan]

Totally support this. Have been a lurking nouns fan since its inception and I love what they are trying to achieve - I feel this is something historic. Price barrier a key problem so this is an awesome initiative. Happy to help in whatever capacity - mainly marketing (have over a decades worth of experience in the online marketing space).

[Weme]

hi let’s join forces! please check out pixelnouns.wtf. thanks!