Prop House Continuation
tl;dr:
Prop House has shown promise as an alternative funding mechanism for the DAO via it’s web app and ETH<>Proposal auction format. I’m requesting 214 ETH (120 funding props / 94 opex) to continue to explore the Prop House model as a way to scale capital deployment over the next 4 months.
What has happened since Prop 23:
- Built prop.house
- Funded 9 proposals for a total of 15 ETH
- Received 69 proposals over two funding rounds (third round kicked off 4/13)
- Opened dialogue with extension communities to onboard into Prop House, holding conversations with leaders and community members to understand their footing.
- Gained 1,000+ followers on the Prop House twitter account
- Expense report
Reflections:
Quality proposals
The two core hypotheses with initial testing were that 1) there would be a meaningful volume of proposals given the ETH<>Proposal auction format and 2) some subset of proposals would be high quality. With 69 proposals and a double digit % of those being highly desirable, I feel confident that we should continue to pursue scale via the prop house model.
Communities are eager to participate
With a total of 48 proposals and 520 votes casted by 77 non-nouners for Round 1, it’s clear that members of the broader community, both individually and as part of extension communities, are eager to participate. It’s behavior like this that points to how NFT communities can grow beyond their ownership-constrained communities (particularly true for Nouns).
DAO-only voting won’t scale
Given the volume of proposals received in Funding Round 1, it’s clear that a Prop House where only Nouners are voting won’t enable us to scale to 1000s of proposals. i.e. It’s irrational to expect Nouners to be reading through 50 proposals every week. If we are to hit scale, decision making needs to be gradually decentralized.
Beyond funding - a new way to interact:
Framing the ERC721 standard as the social graph, Prop House may be looked at as a “permissionless ETH power source that communities gather around” (h/t joel).
Analogous to reddit, we now have crypto-native subreddits but are missing the key ingredient that makes crypto so special - the ability to transact, transform and create value.
With this proposal, Prop House looks to do two things:
- Focus development on the Nouns Prop House as the main node in the network:
- Nail down UX
- Experiment with different funding amounts, longer and shorter rounds
- Explore the ways in which the DAO can further its reach via independent Prop Houses (e.g. prop.house/japan, /extensions, /budlight)
- Enable these communities to become self-curating Prop Houses where their members both submit and vote on their own proposals.
Team:
- seneca (all hats)
- devcarrot (backend)
- toastee (design)
- cdt (frontend)
- jckbutcher (memes)
Budget:
We are requesting working + funding capital for 4 months of operations.
- Funding props, 120 ETH:
- 80 ETH for Nouns Prop House
- 40 ETH for 1-3 Nouns extensions Prop Houses (e.g. japan, nounpunks, budlight)
- Operational, 94 ETH:
- 23.5 ETH per month:
- 10 ETH seneca
- 3.5 ETH devcarrot
- 3.5 ETH toastee
- 3.5 ETH jckbutcher
- 3 ETH for other potential misc expenses
- 23.5 ETH per month:
Considerations
- Funding schedule is meant to be flexible so that we can both experiment (diff funding amounts) and slowly ramp up (i.e. start with 1 extension prop house)
- Funding amounts and corresponding communities will be decided internally by the Prop House team. Some of the heuristics we are using to select communities:
- Enough activity to merit competition between proposals
- Willingness to onboard from leadership
- Alignment with nounish culture and proliferation
- The ideal and final version of Prop House would allow for all decisions with regards to funds leaving the DAO to be decided upon by Nouners via vote.
Multi-sig
The multisig is currently 2/3 where the signers are seneca, devcarrot and toastee. It still holds ~20 ETH from prop 23. With the passing of this proposal, we will be adding 2 more signers (cdt and jckbutcher). The addresses are as follows:
- safe: 0x5BcD6f3B0a5519D448FBDf33204091bbE097C992
- seneca: 0xfC9e8dB5E255439F430e058462360Dd52b87cB4f
- devcarrot: 0xB1C41C71d36cedEa7DdCd5f8D5c5C32BA8f3CBFc
- toastee: 0x5F99FC2d2A98e046t9689d3117e0F96bb5c640d88
- cdt: 0xD19BF5F0B785c6f1F6228C72A8A31C9f383a49c4
- jckbutcher: 0xD1295FcBAf56BF1a6DFF3e1DF7e437f987f6feCa
Closing thoughts
Prop 23 enabled the first experiment of the Prop House model. Given the results, it seems to me that the answer to “is there something here?” was a resounding yes. Moving forward, I hope to continue to build with the same framing: an exploration to see what the model can amount to.
For this next phase, there are a few key questions that I’d like to have more definitive answers to, chief among them:
- Is the volume of quality proposals meaningful?
- Will funding align extension/external communities to proliferate Nouns?
- Is the Prop House model a viable approach to pursue 100x growth?
The goal of this proposal is to answer these questions by continuing to develop the UX while taking our first steps towards independent Prop Houses.
If this second phase succceeds, I intend to eventually develop Prop House into an trustless on-chain solution. As stated in Prop 23:
Conceptually, the contracts could be the seed to a crypto native Y Combinator model. Where as before you had partners, now you have DAO members. Instead of summer and winter batches, you have weekly or monthly cadences. And instead of demographic restrictions for applicants, you have anyone with an Ethereum wallet. It might be the case that breaking thresholds in the categories mentioned above transforms the model to something completely different.
From lessons learned in the first phase, I’d reframe it by saying that utilizing only DAO members won’t scale. Instead, plugging into open and available social graphs (ERC721) is the way.
