Builder DAO

Submitter’s note: The Alphacaster team are not members of BuilderDAO (yet), so I am submitting their proposal on their behalf. Alphacaster is the primary way I keep up and participate in Governance across the BuilderDAO ecosystem and I’m honored to submit this prop for them.

TLDR

Alphacaster is a Farcaster-based Nounish social client. Launched in early Feb, it has supported 11 Nounish DAOs and won a Nouns Hack Week Award. It is requesting 9 ETH and a Builder token as retroactive funding. Visit Alphacaster.xyz to try it out (also available on mobile for beta testers)

Introduction

DAO is an inherently social experience. However, most Nounish DAO conversations today are still happening within walled gardens such as Twitter and Discord. We are still renting communication infra from web2 companies who would not hesitate to cut off API access and enrich their bottom line at the expense of our beloved communities.

We believe in ownership and full-stack DAO sovereignty. Now that we have Builder smart contracts to govern how we spend treasury, it’s time to take back our social layer.

This is why we are building Alphacaster, a Farcaster-based Nounish client that combines governance with web3 social.

Alphacaster

Launched on February 2, 2023, Alphacaster provides a platform for DAO members to vote, debate and socialize on top of an open social protocol (Farcaster). It is now available on Web, iOS TestFlight and Android (via APK).

Among other things, Alphacaster currently gives you

• DAO-only Farcaster social feeds with governance & auction updates
• Real-time push notification for governance & auctions
• Native display of vote reasons with links to voters’ Farcaster profiles
• Decentralized Proposal Comments that aggregate discussions on Farcaster

In additional, using Farcaster enables DAO members to post from any client and still have the entire global state accessible to every developer. No one can turn off the “API”.

We currently support 11 Nounish DAOs (e.g. Nouns, Builder DAO, Purple, the park) and are constantly adding new ones. Alphacaster has also become the default way to share Nounish proposals on Farcaster.

We have received some Nounish Twitter mentions (including a retweet from @nounsdao) and recently won Nouns Hack Week (finished #4 in the Developer track for our work on the mobile app)

Team

There are two people behind Alphacaster. Both are developers.

• billzh.eth (i.e. myself, @billzh on Farcaster)
• andand.eth (@16 on Farcaster)

Future plan

While this proposal focuses our work in the past, we do have exciting plans for the future. For example:

• Expand integration with Nounish DAOs (and others, such as FWB or Forefront, when timing is right)
• Develop curated DAO feed, commentable vote reasons & a seamless governance experience for multi-DAO participants
• Better integration with Farcaster, including a Farcaster profile displaying DAO badges & participation history

Our ask

Our team is entirely bootstrapped and have received no outside funding other than 3 ETH reward from Nouns Hack Week.

We are requesting a retroactive grant of the following

• 7 ETH as retroactive funding for the engineering work in the past 3 months
• 2 ETH as funding for ongoing maintenance of current features
• 1 Builder DAO token to billzh.eth (i.e. myself) so that I can officially become a DAO member

This adds up to 9 ETH plus a builder token, which will allow us to stay independent and continue our mission of developing a self-sovereign social layer for the Nounish community and beyond.

We look forward to your feedback and are happy to provide any additional information that may help you make a decision.

Appendix: Transaction information

Transfer 9 ETH to billzh.eth (0xD1EAeFBeFFD4106A1A166CD26a1Fe23140D6a42e)

Airdrop 1 Builder DAO token to billzh.eth (0xD1EAeFBeFFD4106A1A166CD26a1Fe23140D6a42e)