⌐◨-◨ Nouns Jokedao Grant
[this is a draft–feedback is welcome!]
Description
jokedao has built the first on-chain, bottom-up governance platform for communities to submit proposals and vote on their favorites; it enables community-set governance for user-generated roadmaps, grants, endorsements, bounties, curation, and contests.
One of the major benefits of on-chain voting is that it can allow for extensible contracts—that is, transactions that automatically execute depending on the results of a vote. For example, a community could vote on who to receive funds or what NFT to buy or even mint, and depending on the result of the vote, the transaction would be executed.
More excitingly, it also enables composable governance that could combine different transactions. For example, a community could vote on different features for an NFT, and the top three options could be combined to mint a unique image reflecting the different votes.
Extensible contracts would enable a whole new generation of projects in the Nouns ecosystem.
Some examples, please: how will this proliferate Nouns?
We imagine Nouns forks in the future won’t simply replicate Nouns but develop unique minting and auction mechanisms of their own to innovate on the Nouns playbook—not simply its art, but its model.
Here are a few examples of Nouns forks that jokedao could enable through extensible contracts:
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Create-a-Noun. Communities could submit and vote on the different properties of a Nouns that could then be automatically generated to incorporate each of the individual qualities.
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User-generated Nouns. Enable NFT-derived voting power so that communities could create interactive Nouns projects in which the holders of NFTs could collectively submit and vote on the design of each subsequent NFT.
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Nouns governance giveaways. Every 10th Noun (derivative) could be given away to a member of the community who had voted on the most winning options in the previous 9 contests, in order to incentivize voting and reward those who build social consensus with a community to vote on winning options.
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Nouns governance rewards. Rewards (NFTs, Poaps, tokens, portions of the treasury, etc.) could be given away to those who have voted consistently in Nouns proposals in order to incentivize active participation.
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On-chain Nouns Grants. jokedao could collaborate with Prop House to enable fully on-chain and open-source grants for communities to use to incentivize builders to develop their NFT universe.
Context
jokedao started as a Nouns fork through its proof-of-concept, the jokerace—a weekly contest in which the community of $JOKE holders votes on the 2nd best joke of the week, which is minted as an NFT that’s sold on a recurring basis. It is likely the first case in which an NFT collection was fully community-created. Since launching in the spring, the jokerace has regularly drawn around 100 weekly players who return each week, consistently sold NFTs, and incentivized the creation of teams that compete. In other words, as a DAO, it’s organically incentivized the creation of subDAOs without input or management from the core team.
Since then, jokedao has built a platform with scaffold eth for creating and running contests by minting voting tokens and sharing them with communities. Currently 8 EVM-compatible chains are supported so communities can deploy contests and voting tokens on Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc. We are relaunching with clean, beautiful UI in a few weeks.
Projects like MetricsDAO and Backdrop already use jokedao for contests with their community, and jokedao has soft commits from about another dozen projects in the space to use it for governance after the site relaunch—many of these are NFT projects looking to give their communities more ways to collectively create NFTs themselves. Other popular use cases include grants, giveaways, and content creators letting their communities tell them what kind of content to create.
Finally, let’s emphasize that neither bottom-up nor on-chain governance have been unlocked in NFTs or DAOs to date. Projects typically give few avenues for their communities to express their ideas or cocreate beyond approving proposals of a core team. And on-chain governance has been prohibitive due to gas fees until the past few months.
Both of these unlock exciting opportunities for DAOs and NFT projects to create far more inclusive and incentivized communities—as we’ve seen with both Nouns and the jokerace.
Why?
Nouns is unique among NFT projects for a number of reasons—but perhaps most of all that it’s the only NFT project with the means and model to incentivize builders to develop its ecosystem’s value through forks, homages, expansion packs, and next-generation projects. No other NFT project has this.
Jokedao’s thesis is that the next wave of NFTs and DAOs will be far more interactive and community-governed than this last wave—which has primarily seen centralized figures appealing to consumers to support them, rather than to actively cocreate. Nouns has shown the strongest evidence of this trend, and it seems clear that the next generation of NFT DAOs will go further in letting their communities compete, team up, and create as fun forms of gamified governance. Nouns is in the best position to support these projects within its own ecosystem to grow its value, and jokedao would love to team up to make it happen.
Deliverables
- Extensible contract module: enabling contests to automatically execute transactions depending on the result of a vote
- Creator submission control: enabling only contest creators to submit options for a community to choose from (avoiding user-generated code that may have issues)
- Composable contracts: enabling different winning votes to be combined, for example to combine different properties of a Nouns into a new NFT
Core Team
David Phelps is a 2x SaaS founder who cofounded ecodao, created a web3 angels collective (cowfund), advises TCG Crypto, is a Gitcoin Steward, and writes on web3 on his substack and twitter. He was named one of the top 20 leaders in the DAO space by Seed Club.
Sean McCaffery is a Software and Data Engineer with a background in building systems for finance and data analytics firms, is building DAOs including Juicebox and the towers three, and has been the engineer of jokedao’s entire current site. Here is their GitHub and Twitter.
Naomi Hauret has been a front-end developer for the past 6 years. She’s designed and developed Tombheadzzz, developed the UI and frontend for ftm.bet, and has designed and developed holodevdao, a derivate NFT viewer for the Dev NFTs of Developer DAO. You can see her github here.
Budget
We anticipate extensible contracts to be a 10-week project, and we pay each member $2,000 USD per week. At current prices, total projected costs run around 50 eth.
thanks so much and glad to answer any other questions people have!