NounsDAO investment in Verse

NounsDAO NounsDAO Proposals
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would love to hear your thoughts and discuss! Personally, I always wanted to approach this proposal via an equity partnership (as opposed to a standard grant) for a couple of reasons:

  1. I believe that more protocol-focused companies should explore funding via community-owned vehicles instead of purely through VC. It’s important that crypto-native organizations are able to have a direct influence in the development of infrastructure that has the potential to shape the space for years to come (obv this is not a guarantee of success by any means. All startups have enormous risk, and Verse is still privy to the same challenges of any early company).

  2. Specifically, I want NounsDAO to have ownership in the company & protocol because the community of holders is distinctly high-caliber in terms of domain experience, technical expertise, thoughtfulness in governance, and quality of discourse regarding innovation in the NFT space. With an equity partnership, Verse and Nouns would be aligned long-term to build a protocol that creates 0-1 innovations in NFT infrastructure just like Nouns has done thus far.

  3. In particular, I think there are a lot of similarities between Nouns and Verse (particularly Verse V2) that would make sense to approach this from a long-term partnership perspective. Both Nouns & Verse are built on the ideals of meme propagation, autonomy, and NFT programmability. Nouns employs mechanisms like the daily auction & compound-style governance to achieve these ideals. Verse (v2) is built on mechanisms like programmable supply, embedded market, and a rolling treasury to achieve these same ideals. I don’t see Nouns just as a funder, but moreso as a playground where Verse can experiment with new mechanisms bootstrapped by the Nouns brand.

  4. I noticed the discussion recently in nouner-general about how Nouns can capture sufficient upside in projects it funds without relying solely on the recipient promising to buy back Nouns in the future. I think equity ownership is a great way to diversify treasury revenue/assets and also extend the Nouns brand further across the ecosystem.

These were my thoughts in approaching this proposal from an equity partnership mindset. Lmk if you have any follow-ups, happy to discuss!

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