tldr: The Prop House team is proposing that Nouns allocates additional resources to speed up Rounds development.

Context

Our development has slowed due to resource constraints. The enormous potential seen in Rounds has prompted us to seek new engineering hires. With 1-2 immediate hires, we will accelerate the delivery of our vision. Below is an updated take how we view Rounds.

Problem: Scaling Nouns

Rounds is the result of 2.5 years of iteration on the same problem: scaling the treasury to builder pipeline. If Nouns can effectively allocate its treasury to builders and fans at scale, we would be able to grow the meme in a way that has never been done before.

• A stale treasury is ripe for capture and the equivalent to a slow death
• Thriving ecosystems require thoughtful and continuous treasury deployment
• In the meme attention game, you need a meme army

Solution: Rounds.wtf (and why it’s different)

Rounds.wtf is an engine to perpetually incentivize attention by rewarding the long tail of Nouns contributors with almost zero additional effort on behalf of Nouns voters. This is achieved by removing the need to vote, focusing only on retroactive funding and using the social feed for distribution.

For those have not been following: Rounds.wtf is an iteration of the Prop House mechanic built on Farcaster’s social graph which uses Base for its onchain distributions. Submissions are done via posting to the feed. All submissions with social signal get rewarded. At the end of the round, the entire reward pool is distributed amongst the participants. Learn more by visiting rounds.wtf.

People (and distribution) live on the social feed Users don’t have to go anywhere new to submit. Posting in a round means posting on the social feed which also means posts get immediate distribution.

Using the social graph as the voter base Years of improving voting UX led us to a key insight: no matter how simple voting is, it will always be too much. Rounds leverages the social graph to contextualize reputation and build algos to go beyond the immediate Nouns voter base.

Retro vs Future Judging a submission is easier after-the-fact than forward looking.

How Rounds.wtf can scale treasury deployment

Rounds is the first time we’ve been able to programmatically reward the long tail of Nouns contributors. With submissions in the social feed coupled with social signals via Farcaster’s open graph, we’ve been able to reduce friction to reward 10-100x more participants.

Historically, we averaged about 20-30 ETH per month through the Nouns house in prop.house (exempt outlier rounds). Currently through rounds.wtf, we’re doing roughly the same amount but with 10x more recipients. The limiting factor with other methods has always been the scarce resource that is allocator attention.

Now that rounds.wtf has made a breakthrough in scaling voter attention, we can focus our attention on driving growth in new participants which should allow us to test rounds at increased levels of funding.

Avenues to explore to drive growth

Referrals Current game theory is to not let any new player know you’re playing as having them join would mean more competition and potentially less rewards per player. Referrals would flip this dynamic on its head and have it be a positive-sum game to invite new players.

Market dynamic Increased levels of funding should drive more competition as well as bring new attention to rounds. Nothing gets people going more than seeing their colleague earn meaningfully through an internet game.

Tighter feedback loops Rounds currently function independent of each other. Chaining rounds together can help motivated players put more effort to win in order to pass onto more lucrative rounds.

Category specific channels We could explore new dedicated channels for more behaviors or topics we want to incentivize. /nouns-animators and /nouns-draws are great examples.

Farcaster growth Rounds.wtf is built on Farcaster. The network has seen 20x growth in DAU this year and we are betting that the trend will only accelerate. Any increased usage of Farcaster should directly impact the reach of rounds.

Why it makes sense for Nouns & Sustainability

• A Nouns native product that onboards people en masse to Nouns and beyonds furthers its mission of becoming a world renowned brand.
• Rounds.wtf has started charging a small fee on volume deployed (Nouns communities exempt). We expect that if we achieve our mission, this will produce meaningful revenue to put us on the path of sustainability. Our business model is sure to change over time. Our focus today is developing the product.

Where the $ will go

We’re currently a team of 3 and have runway for all of 2024. Our ask is $200K USD will enable us to:

• Hire 1 more engineer as soon as possible.
• Have the flexibility to add another engineer later this year.