Small Grants - DAO Punks

NounsDAO Small Grants
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DAOpunks

tl;dr - A generalized protocol to “Nounsify” any existing NFT collection, starting with the CryptoPunks community in the form of a Punker DAO

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Mainnet Launch: Today, Sept 26th, 2023
Website: daopunks.wtf
Twitter: @daopunks
Discord: join

Nounsifying an Existing Collection

We believe (i) the Nouns model is the most innovative and sustainable model for NFTs to date, and (ii) it should be made available to retrofit any existing collection.

Thus, we forked Nouns DAO and added 3 new features:

  1. Attribute rarity - attributes can be rendered in the daily artwork based on weighted probabilities.

  2. Duplication prevention - a registry is used to index the attributes of existing NFTs, which prevents the NSeeder.sol contract from ever creating any repeat artwork.

  3. Treasury co-ownership - two collections are permitted to co-govern the DAO treasury: the new, Nouns-based collection plus an additional, existing collection.

These three features allow any community of an existing NFT collection to “Nounsify” themselves by introducing new artwork and a continuous source of collective revenue.

Scope

  1. We’ve taken this protocol and developed it for the CryptoPunks community first:

    i. Attribute rarity - one new DAO Punk will be generated per day. The rarity of attributes will be approximately the same as CryptoPunks.
    ii. Duplication Prevention - we indexed all 10,000 CryptoPunks. No DAO Punks will ever be a duplicate of a CryptoPunk. Once a DAO Punk is minted, it is added to the index to prevent its own duplication.
    iii. Treasury co-ownership - One CryptoPunk = 1 vote. One DAO Punk = 1 vote.

  2. This protocol will be generalized in partnership with Zora and Builder DAO via Nouns Builder to create a Collections+ protocol for any existing NFT community to “Nounsify” itself.

Why start with CryptoPunks?

CryptoPunks is the largest NFT collection by market cap, but is communally, completely cash poor. CryptoPunks were released by Larva Labs on June 23rd, 2017 with a free mint price and zero trading fees. As a result, no community funds were ever accumulated, and Punk holders are unable to do any of the cool things Nouns holders get to do today.

Because CryptoPunk holders are so high profile, yet financially incapacitated, they are particularly susceptible to adopt a retrofitted, self-sustaining mechanism, like Nouns. This provides an especially high probability of success with this experiment.

If we can demonstrate a successful execution of the Nouns protocol for the CryptoPunks community, it will serve as an inspiration for all other prominent (but potentially nascent) NFT collections to Nounsify themselves, too. The success of a DAOpunks collection could easily become one of the largest proliferators of the Nouns ethos, while simultaneously catalyzing widespread NFT coordination and market sentiment for select and willing communities.

Request

  • 100 ETH transferred to seed the Nounsified DAO treasury for the CryptoPunks + DAOpunks community, collectively known as the Punkers DAO.

Reasoning

The request is effectively structured as a 100 ETH delegation to the owners of all CryptoPunks in exchange for them adopting the Nouns model and distributing funds with comparable intent (and vibes).

Similar to Zora’s proposal #167, we are requesting that NounsDAO pay it forward rather than reimburse us for:

  • approximately 50 ETH worth of development we paid out of our own pocket.
  • 12 months of time we spent independently researching, developing, and fine tuning the first Collections+ implementation.

We do not want reimbursement, we want proliferation!

Deliverables

In return for seeding 100 ETH into the Punker DAO, we will (or have already):

  • Deploy the implementation for the CryptoPunks community to mainnet
  • Open source the codebase of this first Collections+ implementation
  • Open source the research we conducted on CryptoPunks in building this project
  • Open source the research we’ve begun for other collections
  • Generalize the protocol in partnership with Zora & Builder DAO via Nouns Builder
  • Steward the Punker DAO initiatives & community

Generalizing the Protocol

“If I had to suggest only one short term focus after L2 it would be funding and generalizing the Punks+ work by @cr. Show up to the website and start a canon DAO for any existing project.”

- Jacob Horne, Founder of Zora [1] (see also)

CryptoPunks are dramatically different than other NFT collections:

  • They do not use the ERC721 standard - they use ERC20
  • They have multiple, mutually exclusive sub-classes of traits
    • Example: {hair, hat} are in the same sub-class
  • They have single-attribute (non-class based) rules of exclusion
    • Example: welding goggles are glasses that can be worn with hair but not with a hat
  • They have multiple visual implementations of the same attribute
    • Example: vr glasses have 2 different pixel patterns depending on if the punk is female or not

These unique characteristics, which are not found in other collections, required us to create a lot of custom logic. As a result, our codebase is not yet immediately generalizable.

To achieve a generalizable state, we will work in cooperation with Zora and Builder DAO to port our architecture into their Nouns Builder protocol, which is already extremely accessible and widely adopted. This port will allow any NFT community to deploy their own Nounified DAO using Zora’s intuitive, no-code tools.

Team

  • I am CBob.eth, founder of meTokens and former Hoard, Golem Foundation, and OMG Network team member. I presented the first ever talk on NFT Utility at ETHBerlin in 2018, and have since spoken at DevCon, NFT.NYC, NIFTY (first ever NFT hackathon), the ECF’s Non-Fungible Summit, and more. I acquired CryptoPunk #4330 in 2018 for 0.15 ETH ($34 at the time).

  • FR3UD is the founder of the NFT Cambridge meetup and former Risk & Data Analyst at Coinbase, Binance US, MoonPay, and Wyre. He is a day one holder of The Proof Collective pass and an active member of the Moonbirds community.

Disclaimer: this project is NOT affiliated with Yuga Labs. It has, however, received guidance from both the Yuga Labs legal team and their CryptoPunks division.

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