Preface: I’m not a Nouns DAO member, so I bring this proposal as early as possible to the community members so they can help shape this proposal.
Status: Extremely Early Draft
Author(s): @defijesus[twitter] - Nouns enthusiast since Rinkeby days, furiously bidded on noun #1 and won noun #2 as a founding sharkDAO multi signer); @0xqtpie[twitter] - shitposter, mediocre mev artist, full stack monkey
Created: 31/05/2022
Summary
Nouns Labs is a working group dedicated to ideate, implement, deploy novelty approaches to the Nouns distribution model.
Abstract
Create and fund a new “Nouns Labs” working group focused on meaningful experiments in (1) mechanism for continuous dilution of supply funding a treasury & (2) onchain art generation.
Motivation
Motivation #1:
Nouns was a “zero to one” moment in the NFT distribution model. What does the next zero to one moment look like?
Motivation #2:
Nouns are still largely inaccessible to the general population due to the high auction price. How do we onboard the next 1M members?
Motivation #3:
Decreasing the auction time to decrease price doesn’t work UX-wise with the current auction model. What mechanism parameters do we tune to enable the best UX experience for buyers?
Motivation #4:
How do nouns make sure they will keep their leadership position as innovators in the space?.
Motivation #5:
Further, bring more exciting collaborations with fellow innovators (think partyDAO)
Specification Overview
Working group creates a gnosis safe that receives 20 ETH from the Nouns DAO to fund the first 4 months of operations. The idea is to make this working group self-sustaining via the experiments before these funds run out.
Funds will be used to deliver the initial:
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grants focused on novel distributions;
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any in-house staff needed (Project Management, Researchers, Engineers, Artists, etc…);
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R&D costs (deployment, servers, tooling, etc…)
All collected ETH from the experiments will be distributed to the Nouns Lab DAO & the Nouns Lab Working Group. This split is configurable by the Nouns Lab DAO that is controlled by the Nouns Lab NFT holders.
Every 10 Nouns created from any experiment, 1 noun will be sent directly to the Nouns DAO, forever. (0, 10, 20, 30, etc…).
Creation of a Yearn-like strategist performance fee. In order to directly motivate random anons to bring their new ideas to our Lab, we should give our “strategists” 5% (this value is just an idea) of the mint revenue while their experiment is ongoing.
All experiments much be located in a single smart contract that features updeatable distribution mechanism. This helps the user find our experiments much more easily, prevents a lot of phishing opportunities, failed experiments wont be forever forgotten 20 years from now, and we keep an historical record of all experiments we ever made.
Experiment #1 will be using Continuous Gradual Dutch Auctions from Paradigm, targeting 1 Noun sale per minute at 0.002 ETH.
[mention experiment #2 will be CRISP]
[potential experiment #3: each “auction” is instead timed raffle, winner chosen by vrf, winner gets X Nouns while everyone else gets 1 Noun, everyone is still a winner but it adds an edge of excitement/participation]
Rationale
Using a continuous series of auctions to distribute the NFT collection was a remarkable step in the NFT distribution model history. By constantly creating and implementing new distribution models, this proposal sets up the Nouns DAO to maintain their leadership as distribution innovators.
Without drastically changing the auction model, trying to onboard the next 1M+ users into the DAO will be very challenging.
Without drastically reducing the auction times, the entry price will always be highly prohibitive for the foreseeable future.
If we reduce the auction time to 1 minute, assuming each 24h Noun is worth 80 ETH, we would have nouns priced at ~0.05. Unfortunately, 1 min auctions would be extremely chaotic UX wise and 0.05 ETH is still too much for the next 1M+ users to be onboarded into the Nouns ecosystem.
Our first experiment will be GDA auctions to solve that UX problem. It allows us to compress the price without sacrificing the UX. The nouns page will now feature a “Buy Now” button instead of the usual “Bid”.
Ideally, we are able to bring the best innovations that come out of this initiative back into the main Nouns distribution or any subDAOs/core groups affiliated with it(?)
Experiment #1
[TODO: list all modifications made to vanilla Nouns on experiment #1]
Technical Specification
[TODO]
[The technical specification should outline the public API of the changes proposed. That is, changes to any of the interfaces of the Nouns DAO currently exposes or the creations of new ones. ]
Test Cases
[TODO]
[Test cases for an implementation are mandatory for Proposals but can be included with the implementation. ]
TL:DR
- how much you need: 20 ETH
- what will it be used for: bootstrap a working group dedicated to inventing/implementing novel distribution mechanisms.
- what’s the project: Creation of sister nouns collection that will feature all the experiments within.
- how will it proliferate nouns: (1) maintain the Nouns DAO status at the forefront of innovation. (2) onboarding of new users into the experiments collection that we’re previously priced out.
Acknowledgements
Dave White for the help with GDA integration. cdt.eth for the help navigating the proposal lifecycle.
Copyright
Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.
Edits:
- Added TL;DR
- Described Yearn-like strategists rewards
- Added info about how these experiments are released without confusing the users or constantly leaving dead projects behind.
