Authored By: Nancy
TL;DR
The objective of this proposal is to create a contribution-based loyalty system to incentivize Nouners’ proposal activity on Prop House through non-transferrable, or soulbound, badges.
The primary goal of this contribution-based loyalty system is to increase participation and engagement within the Nouns Prop House community by reducing existing barriers to entry while incentivizing users to become active Prop House members.
Description
What is Metopia?
Metopia is a Web3-native contribution-based governance and incentive loyalty platform. Let’s break down what all of that means.
Contribution-Based: A user’s contributions in a specific community is first gained through the claiming of soulbound, or non-transferrable, tokens through our soulbound token protocol. Metopia’s soulbound token protocol is at the core of our platform, with users able to vote on governance proposals and participate in raffles and/or prize pools based on the soulbound tokens they own. Users being able to vote on governance proposals with the soulbound tokens they own is what we refer to as non-financialized governance. Non-financialized governance hinges on our soulbound token protocol.
Governance: Financialized asset (fungible tokens and NFTs) voting mechanisms can be executed on Metopia’s platform, with the addition of non-financialized asset (soulbound badges) voting mechanisms able to be executed, as well.
Incentives: Users can be incentivized to participate and vote in their community’s governance proposals through random raffles and token-gated prize pools held on Metopia’s platform.
Loyalty: Through Metopia’s platform, Web3 brands can give out soulbound badges to their most supportive and devoted members as a form of on-chain recognition.
Goal
We propose that Nouns Prop House uses Metopia to issue claimable soulbound tokens (free + gas fee) to Nouners in order to track activity around Prop House proposals, thus establishing an on-chain contribution and loyalty system for Nouners in the Nouns Prop House ecosystem.
Such Prop House activity would include raising proposals, voting on proposals, and winning proposals. Both Noun owners and Noun community contributors, or non-Noun owners, would be eligible to claim soulbound tokens if they participate in one or more of these three activities.
The primary goal of this contribution and loyalty system is to increase participation and engagement within the Nouns Prop House community by reducing existing barriers to entry while incentivizing users to be active Prop House members. Our aim is to facilitate the proliferation of Nouns Prop House, and by extension, Nouns, by tracking user contributions to ultimately inspire growth through a culture of recognition and inclusion.
By accruing soulbound tokens, Nouners would be able to add a form of reputation to their digital identities that could be easily seen, tracked, and aggregated. Through their reputation, more active Nouners could gain credibility within Nouns Prop House, be seen as more trustworthy community members that actually care about Nouns, and separate themselves as Nouners that aren’t solely after monetary gain.
Please see examples of what soulbound tokens for Nouns Prop House would look like below.
Why Is This Important?
Putting Nouners’ Contributions On-Chain is beneficial for a number of reasons.
- Perhaps most the most important reason is the proliferation of the Nouns meme. There are many contributors to the Nouns community that don’t own a Noun themselves, since the price proves to be a high barrier to entry. The average price of Nouns #594 - #650 is 29.5 ETH, and the current OpenSea floor price at the time this proposal was written was 30 ETH, with only 1% listed. Point blank: it’s difficult to get a Noun (much less more than one)! So, because non-Noun owners are also eligible to receive soulbound tokens, Nouns will be proliferated by allowing a greater swath of the Nouns community to have on-chain proof that they are Nouners. The Nouns Prop House community would be broadened by the barrier of entry being lowered, therefore attracting more people to contribute to the Nouns Prop House community. We want to make “Nouners Without Nouns” a reality.
- As it stands today, there are two types of Noun owners: those who fully own their Nouns and those who “own” a fraction of a community-owned Noun, such as the 350 “owners” of Bud Light’s Noun #179. (Note: We say “owners” because though a Noun NFT might be community-owned, it still has to be held in and operated by one wallet.) Allowing for voter contributions to be created would be exceptionally helpful for community-owned Nouns, since community owners hold no proof in their wallets that they are associated with Nouns Prop House. By owning soulbound NFTs officially associated with the Nouns Prop House project, the Nouns meme would be further proliferated to more wallets without the risk of inflating the supply of the original Nouns NFTs.
-
With the claiming of soulbound tokens by Nouners comes the ability to port your Nounish reputation across all of your on-chain identities. A point to remember is that the claimable soulbound tokens wouldn’t be forever tied to the Noun itself, but rather the wallet that the Noun is held in. If, for example, a Nouner sells their Noun and then buys another Noun with the same wallet, the recorded reputation of voting on and/or raising proposals within Nouns Prop House would be reflected in that Nouner’s wallet rather than simply not recorded on the blockchain at all, since Prop House runs entirely off-chain. In other words, that Nouner’s reputation wouldn’t be “lost.” This recorded reputation of actions surrounding Prop House proposals would lend credibility and clout to that Nouner’s wallet, identifying them as an active, reliable, and perhaps even trustworthy community member. Additionally, that Nouner’s recorded reputation would further prove their crypto-nativeness. As Punk 4156 mentions in this Tweet, “As anonymity becomes more important, the value of clout-as-commodity will continue to increase…”
-
As mentioned briefly in Point #2, by soulbound token allocation, Nouners in Nouns Prop House would have an on-chain Prop House voting record rather than having none at all. Prop House runs entirely off-chain. As such, there is no public voting record for Nouns owners who vote on Prop House proposals, unlike in Nouns DAO where every Noun has a viewable voting record (See the example of Noun 22’s voting record. Scroll down to “Activity.”). Just as in Nouns DAO, reputation is extremely important in Nouns Prop House and is mentioned in the Prop House FAQ several times. Most notably under the question “What happens if I win?”, the Prop House FAQ states that, “In this new world, a good reputation is worth its weight in gold!” However, off-chain reputation, like the social reputation built across various media platforms, can be faked and edited. Risk of a project rugging after being funded would be further subdued if reputation around Nouns Prop House proposal activity, such as voter reputation, were immutably put on-chain.
-
The Nouns Prop House community would become further decentralized as a result of more contributors receiving official recognition and reputation in the form of soulbound tokens.
-
Nouns Prop House governance engagement and participation would hopefully increase as a result of offering proof-of-vote, proof-of-proposal, etc. soulbound tokens as an incentive. In other words, this incentivization of adding to a Nouner’s reputation could increase the number of Nouns that are actively participating in the governance layer of the Nouns Prop House ecosystem. An increase in participation and engagement isn’t guaranteed, but issuing claimable soulbound tokens would act as a soft incentive layer experiment for Nouns Prop House that we could use to see if incentives around proposals work.
Note: Although soulbound tokens will be issued and claimable through Metopia, soulbound tokens will be viewable in a Nouner’s wallet and can be carried with them everywhere on-chain. In other words, use of Metopia’s soulbound tokens is not limited to Metopia’s platform.
Future Implications Should Metopia Be Adopted
1 Noun 1 Vote is the easy voting method and has proven to work, though it isn’t perfect by any means. As John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to…do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard;” it’s high time to reignite the exploration into finding other voting methods for Nouns Prop House to continue the experiment of perfecting DAO governance.
Our team wants to give Nouns Prop House the opportunity to move beyond token voting as its exclusive governance mechanism. Should this proposal be passed, it would be possible to implement a hybrid version of token and contribution-based voting for Noun holders and non-Noun holders alike in the future. More of the Nouner community should be included in the Nouns voting system; all communities want to grow bigger and better, but if only Nouns holders can vote & raise proposals, how can more people “officially” join the Nouns community? Our solution of involving contributors is just a start.
For instance, different badges would have different voting weights. Raising a proposal would weigh 0.05 votes, voting on a proposal would weigh 0.01 votes, and winning a proposal would weigh 1 full vote (the same as a Noun).
Of course, contribution-based voting is a more complicated voting mechanism than 1 Noun 1 Vote, and specifics of how it would be implemented and enabled in Nouns Prop House would be the topic of a different proposal.
Team and Background
Metopia is a team of ten, with notable members including:
-
Moon, an avid Nouns DAO collector (owner of Noun #615) and founder of Metopia.xyz. Moon has been in crypto since 2017 and is focused on developing contribution-based governance and incentive solutions to create a dynamic Web3 loyalty platform.
-
Nancy, a former New York University economics student that is focused on soulbound protocols and Web3 credentials. Nancy is a core member of multiple Web3 communities, and has written amazing research articles regarding DAO governance and its challenges.
-
Stephen, a New Zealand born, former trad-fi analyst that has experience in both the Web2 and Web3 industries. Having studied at China’s top institution, Peking University, he has a vast array of knowledge in research and economics and is currently the host of the Web3 Futurists Podcast, which aims to solve and discuss the challenges around DAO governance.
Additional Links
Metopia’s Website:
Metopia’s Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Metopia_xyz
“Soulbound” by Vitalik Buterin:
Thank you for reading and considering this proposal! Feedback, thoughts, and/or questions are very welcome.