Nouns DAO

We propose a protocol for streaming funds to Nouns builders. Nouns holders vote to set a stream of funding, and can vote again at any time to change the stream.

The problem

The experience of building in Nouns is subpar, especially for smaller projects. Large up-front effort is required to make a proposal, and consistent funding is difficult to find.

For voters, everyone has different initiatives they care most about funding, but For/Against voting requires broad consensus and high effort.

Streaming grants

An ideal mechanism for capital allocation minimizes effort required from voters and maximizes funding the best outcomes for the DAO.

The protocol we propose attempts to bring Nouns closer to this ideal experience. We’ve built an MVP with Vrbs already. Here’s how it works:

A stream of USDC flows per second to a set of high level funding pools defined by outcomes (eg: Improve Public Spaces, Help those in Need, Open Source Software, Nouns Clients etc.)

Nouns holders allocate their vote weight to outcomes they care most about. As soon as you vote, the stream is adjusted proportionally to the total token-weighted votes for it. You can reallocate your vote as your preferences change, and the streams update automatically.

Within each outcome pool, you can also decide how the stream is split. With this fractal setup, you can vote for the highest level outcomes, but don’t necessarily have to vote inside each outcome pool unless you want to.

Funding flows through different outcome pools to builders who are making impact, and everyone doesn’t have to vote on every decision. Here’s a video to explain more.

Outcome in Vrbs so far

We have an MVP contract and UI with $6k a month flowing to builders in Vrbs DAO. You can explore what’s getting funded here.

We’ve put over 30 artists on salary to create beautiful artwork, built up a social media team, and funded regens to go out and improve public spaces and clean up a national forest every day. The consistent funding, even for small amounts, goes a very long way.

The plan

We’d like to build a more thorough version of this streaming grants program for Nouns. We need to upgrade the mechanism to work at scale without trusted management, and get the contracts audited.

The biggest outstanding questions are how to approve grant applications and how to decide on the outcome pools and tree structure. Outside of that, helping grants builders highlight impact in a way that’s easily consumable for voters is a big priority. We’re working on Farcaster integrations and impact profiles to facilitate this.

Our plan is to work closely with the community on Farcaster and over Discord calls to help us decide on mechanisms that answer these questions in a way that’s resistant to capture and still maintains accessibility for the long tail of builders.

Timeline

We’ve built out a solid MVP with Vrbs, and are requesting funding for the next 4 months to build out the mechanism for Nouns. Our plan is to spend the first month working with the community to build mechanisms into testnet contracts that:

• Enable DAO members to decide top level outcome pools and tree structure without over coordination
• Allow grant applications to be withdrawn or slashed
• Grant approval process (basic TCR w/bond / existing grantee committee)
• Figure out the best way to enable voting on Base with mainnet Nouns tokens.

Generally our thinking for both outcome pool structuring and grant approvals is to utilize some combination of optimistic approval and existing grantee / voter invitations. For optimistic approval, grant applicants or Nouners wishing to add another outcome pool would post a bond along with their application that can be challenged by existing grantees or voters. We’d also potentially have existing grantees invite new members on a regular basis as funding scales. We are open to ideas to help solve these problems.

August: Ship testnet contracts and open source UI. September: Continue iterating with feedback, audit with 0x52. October: Launch on Base mainnet with USDC streaming November-December: Continue iterating and building out the program

Other details

There are some shortcuts we took with the existing contract that we will spend time fixing, including ensuring streams update down the tree when votes change at the top level.

Some other things we will research and iterate on:

• Resnapshotting vote weight without having to ask for people to re-vote
• How to best highlight impact so voters can make informed decisions

The builders

Rocketman and Wojciech. We’ve been building in and around the Nouns space for nearly 2 years. In that time, we have built an alternative protocol for launching Nounish DAOs, House of Nouns, and Vrbs DAO to name a few.

The funding request

We are requesting $17.5k USDC a month for 4 months to work on this, split between Wojciech and rocketman ($8.75k a month per person).

We are also requesting $12k to do an audit with 0x52.

Finally, we’d like to seed this grants program with $20k USDC, streamed over 2 months. (we updated this from $15k over 3 months to $20k over 2 months to accelerate learnings).

Total ask: $102k USDC.

Questions

Have any questions? Want to discuss with us? You can reach me on Warpcast here or Twitter here.