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closedEnded 2 years ago · Onchain

Double down on nounspace.wtf

By 0x06AE...95F6C5

GM

Hope you’re having the best day ever ⌐◨-◨

TL;DR

In April, Nouns voted nounspace in as 1 of 3 winners in the Nouns x Farcaster prop.house competition (prop 498 + 509), granting us 100k USDC from Nouns to build out our concept of a nounish Farcaster client over the next 3 months.
We launched nounspace v0 on July 2nd, delivering on our original proposal in full exactly 3 months after we were funded.
We’re requesting 250k USDC from Nouns to fund ongoing development, maintenance, and proliferation for a minimum of 6 months, with the target of continuing on forever via sustainable revenues.
By further investing in and developing an open source Farcaster client that’s useful to not only the Nouns community, but all communities and users, Nouns can proliferate ⌐◨-◨ across the metaverse in a fun, valuable, and scalable way while also developing the best tools for our own ecosystem’s use. We believe this is what Nouns does best, and that there is no better use of 250k USDC from the treasury than to double down on nounspace and the Nouns x Farcaster thesis.

Topic Overview 📖

Benefits to Nouns
We’re live! A. Testimonials B. How’d we do?
Bonus features: A. nOGs NFT Collection B. nounspaceTom C. $SPACE D. Onchain Summer Extravaganza
See for yourself
What’s Next?
How You Can Help
The Plan
Use of Funds
Path to Sustainability
Recap A. Featured Spaces B. nounspace interviews & articles

Benefits to Nouns

Extensible Tooling - Continued improvement and maintenance of a Nounish Farcaster client that all nounish projects and community members can use, contribute to, and even extend themselves through reusable and remixable mini apps called Fidgets
Proliferation - Beyond Nounish communities and members, a Nounish Farcaster client that all projects and users can use
100% Open Source Code - https://github.com/nounspace/
Path to Sustainability - Rather than require ongoing funding from Nouns DAO, our goal is to continue building, growing, and maintaing nounspace indefinitely, and with $22k+ in revenues, recurring revenues, and over $5M stETH staked in our Fair Launch, we’re off to a great start
Profit Potential - While we believe that the best way nounspace can support Nouns’ treasury growth and sustainability is by driving Auction sales, Nouns will also have the ability to earn $SPACE for the users and communities it refers to nounspace.

Nouns has already invested $300k in developing 3 nounish farcaster clients. While this was the right amount for developing a proof of concept, it’s clear that developing a truly competitive client requires more time & resources. If nounspace succeeds in our mission to build the best Farcaster client, the benefits to Nouns would be enormous. This is one of the few props that, if successful, has the potential to reverse the current trajectory of the auction prices and treasury value. Beyond providing nounspace with the necessary funding to continue building, the Nouns community can significantly increase the likelihood of nounspace’s success by using and supporting nounspace with our own projects and networks.

We’re live!

ICYMI, nounspace v0 opened the token gates to private alpha for nOGs holders on July 2 :rocket:

After a month and a half of testing and iterating, we’re now proud to open nounspace up to everyone. nOGs will continue receiving early and premium access to new features. Tabs are the first of these early access premium features.

Public reception to the first nounish Farcaster client has been positive and encouraging.

Check out the 1 minute launch video, and/or visit nounspace.wtf to see for yourself.

nounspace has been quite busy over the past 5 months, and while we’ve strived to condense it all into a digestible prop, we understand that not everyone has time to read it all. So, we created a 3-minute video that highlights nounspace’s entire journey so far and goes more in-depth on key concepts such as nounspace’s mission and $SPACE.

As promised in our original prop.house submission, we’ve delivered a beautiful MLP of an incredibly nounish farcaster client that everyone can use.

How did we do?

Status of features outlined in the proposal:

✅ Fidgets - open source sandboxed mini-apps that can be used as building blocks for spaces.

Ten powerful fidgets are live now, with more being added weekly, and we’re working on a full suite of developer tooling to empower anyone to build and deploy their own Fidgets for any nounspace user to use.

The Nounish Governance Fidget demonstrates how Fidgets leverage composability to enable compatible contracts or subgraphs to share the same UI/UX.

The Frame and iFrame Fidgets are particularly magical, and have already opened pandora’s box, demonstrating infinite creative possibilities within the platform.

Fidgets live now ߷

Frame
Pinned Cast
Feed (supports both Farcaster & the other app)
Create Cast
Gallery
Text
Iframe
⌐◨-◨ Governance
SnapShot
Links
Swap (also supports bridging and bridge+swap combos)

We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with Fidgets. Which Fidget(s) do you think should we build next?

✅ Spaces - customizable personal pages where users can layout fidgets and frames

✅ Homebase - a private customizable feed and dashboard

✅ Themes - change colors, fonts, drop shadows, and more (even completely freeform css)

✅ Music - use any youtube video or playlist to give each space its own theme song

✅ Tabs (just launched!) - multiply the power of Themes, Fidgets, and Music by adding additional pages to a space or homebase as tabs.

Beyond the features pledged in our original proposal, we’ve also launched initial versions of the following core features:

✅ Theme Templates - select from 10 pre-configured theme templates, complete with Fonts, Fidget Styles, and Backgrounds, and (optionally) add your own modifications.

✅ Search - search for any Farcaster user by username, FID, or verified wallet addresses.

✅ Explore - a curated selection of customized spaces across a variety of topics, with Nounish projects featured on top.

✅ Notifications - get notified for relevant Farcaster activity, such as likes, recasts, quote casts, replies, and follows.

Beyond shipping a loveable, feature-rich v0, we also launched…

nOGs NFT collection

Granting our earliest supporters access to premium features for life. (4.83+ ETH in sales so far)

Nounish community members get to mint their nOGs for free! Nouns, Public Nouns, Gnars, Yellow Collective, Purple, and VRBS.

There will only ever be 11,111, so mint yours before they run out!

nounspaceTom (aka me)

a handsome, nounish KOL with over 8k followers and growing

tomontage

/nounspace channel

A flourishing community of over 1.5k followers

channel

$SPACE

The governance and utility token for nounspace (With over 1920 stETH deposited into the fair launch currently)

Onchain Summer Extravaganza

To cap off our 3 month sprint to the proposal finish line, we hosted the Onchain Summer Extravaganza in Austin, TX where we brought together over 200 attendees (both longtime crypto lovers and curious novices) to celebrate life onchain, nounishness (or as the locals call it, weirdness), nounspaceTom, and the launch of nounspace. As a result, we were rewarded with a 2 ETH grant from the Onchain Summer Hackathon.

See for yourself!

If you haven’t had the chance to check nounspace out, please give it a try and let us know what you think!

Quickstart Guide

A 5-minute tutorial on customizing your space or homebase!

You can view our public analytics dashboard for the nounspace web app here, as well as our onchain analytics on Dune. While we felt a web-first approach made the most sense for the initial 3-mo sprint, we understand the importance of mobile support for any social app. The analytics on mobile.nounspace.com (where mobile visitors are redirected) confirm this and underscore the importance of releasing nounspace as native iOS and Android apps.

(Prior to July 2, this chart shows all traffic to nounspace.com. Beginning July 2, this chart shows visitors to mobile.nounspace.com, which is where mobile visitors are currently redirected. Note that the final data point is for an in-progress week)

What’s next?

Does the journey to build the ultimate nounish farcaster client end here?

While we’re ofc biased, we hope that this is just the beginning. We’re big believers in Nouns’ potential to be a top community in Web3, and have developed strong conviction that creating the best Farcaster client (not only for the Nouns community, but for all communities and users) is a winning strategy to secure the bag.

Over the past 5 months, our conviction in this thesis and in nounspace has only grown stronger. Emboldened by the positive reception from both nounish and non-nounish web3 communities, we feel confident that we’re on the right path with the right team in place.

We’re so excited to finally have the MLP out in the wild. We’re getting helpful feedback from organic users we’ve never met, shipping improvements weekly, and getting clarity on the most impactful features for us to prioritize going forward. We would love nothing more than to continue building and growing nounspace, and believe with support from the nouns’ community, we can do this infinitely.

How you can help

Grant us an additional 250,000 USDC to fund at least 6 months of continued accelerated development and growth.

(Also plz follow and recast me, @nounspaceTom, tell everyone you know to mint nOGs, customize their space & homebase, and participate in the $SPACE fair launch!)

You’ve seen what we can do with $100k and 3 months.

Let us show you what we can do with $250k and infinite time.

“Ok, that sounds cool, but infinity is a long time, wtf does that even mean?”

Infinite time means that our goal over the next 6 months is to achieve sustainable revenues and $SPACE tokenomics, or DAO trying. While our success ultimately depends on building a product people love, we are optimistic in our ability to create and capture significantly more value than it takes to cover our operating expenses (and encouraged by the traction thus far). We believe $250k is the minimum amount to provide the necessary time and resources for nounspace to become independent of nouns and not require additional funding to continue maintaining, developing, and growing further.

It’s also possible that even after 6 months of continued effort, we will not be successful in achieving sufficient traction or revenues. While this is not our expectation, if we find ourselves in this position in 6 months, we do not intend to request additional funding from nouns. If I or anyone from nounspace ever ask for $ in the future, please quote this! :)

The Plan

When building nounspace v0, we chose to concentrate our focus on our key differentiators - the unique features and capabilities of nounspace that set it apart from other clients. In addition to improving these core differentiators, we’ve spent the past month and a half of private alpha catching up on the core features that users of Farcaster or any social network come to expect, such as Search, Notifications, and improvements to the Feed and Casting UX. We also added some key Fidgets: Links, Swap, and SnapShot.

Over the next 6 months, we’re excited to continue building upon this solid foundation to create a one-of-a-kind social app with the potential to change nouns, and the world, forever. Here’s a high level overview of the roadmap we have planned.

Bug fixes + Polish + Improvements

First and foremost, we look forward to improving the app based on feedback from nounspace’s growing userbase and community. We’ve already received some great feedback and bug reports from community members and shipped dozens of fixes and improvements, and look forward to continuing this trend.

Native iOS and Mobile apps

We’ve already invested a lot of thought into nounspace’s mobile UX, and have clears plans to enable the full suite of nounspace functionality on mobile, including theme customization, fidget configuration, fidget usage, and core farcaster functionality in a cohesive experience that’s easy, accessible, and fun. We have the backend, mockups, and team ready to make this a reality, and are targeting the release of native iOS and Android apps in stores by October 1.

Check out these sneak peaks of nounspace mobile, which demonstrate the smooth UX & awesome power of navigating Feeds and Fidgets from the palm of your hand.

Feed/Infinite Scroll Fidget	Fidget Carousel

View Fidget	Opening Multiple Fidgets

Channels

Enable channel owners to customize the space for their channel with music, themes, fidgets, and tabs. We have some exciting ideas for how to evolve channels from here, but the first milestone is to ship the core MLP feature and bring the power of Fidgets & customization to Farcaster channels.

View spec
Direct Messages We look forward to implementing Farcaster DMs as soon as they’re supported on the protocol.
Smart URLs By enabling sharing themes, fidgets, and/or tabs via URLs, we can empower both users and their communities to quickly and easily share the magic of nounspace with one another.

Smart URLs serve multiple purposes that are core to nounspace’s strategy to provide the best platform for users and communities to both explore the online universe as well as share the look, sound, content, and functionality they wish with their audiences. Further, we can maximize the virality of this strategy by displaying results publicly and rewarding successful creators, referrers, and communities with $SPACE.

View spec
$SPACE Dashboard & Power Stake $SPACE to receive a tip allowance and boost the ranking of your casts in nounspace user’s feeds. View $SPACE metrics, content, and opportunities, and claim $SPACE rewards earned as a capital provider, user, and soon, developer.

View spec
Smart Contract Fidget Read from or write to any function on any contract. With a simple, no-code UX for creating, customizing, and sharing smart contract data and interactions via Fidgets, nounspace is not only a website builder, but a dapp builder. Not only do we need this ourselves for contract interactions related to $SPACE (ie. approving and staking stETH or $SPACE, claiming $SPACE rewards), but it’s yet another infinitely powerful Fidget that can benefit any user or project that utilizes smart contracts.

View spec or clickable prototype
Fidget SDK, smart contracts, developer experience, review process, and marketplace

Enable developers to quickly and easily build and deploy fidgets in a way that’s both flexible and secure. Because nounspace is basically composed entirely of fidgets, getting this part right is essential. We’ve drafted the architecture as well as the factory contract for deploying, using, and updating Fidgets. We did this in collaboration with Morpheus, who had already started working on a spec for “Non Fungible Agents” when we realized we had the technically-identical goal give users to access to an infinite library of flexible, permissionless, and secure third-party apps. This is a huge win-win, not only enabling interoperability between Fidgets and Agents (ability to use agents deployed in the Morpheus ecosystem alongside fidgets on nounspace), but also saving development costs for both projects and resulting in recurring revenues for Nounspace in the form of MOR emissions to code contributors. If you’re a developer excited to build fidgets, stay tuned for the Fidget SDK and join the #fidget-devs channel in our discord server in the meantime.

Testnet demo
More Nounish Fidgets

Auction fidgets, Agora/delegation fidgets, fidget where you can easily add ⌐◨-◨ to any image? Yes, yes, and 1000% yes. The Nounish Governance Fidget is live now and features 25 nounish communities (if yours is missing, make a PR or ask Tom!). Let us know which nounish fidgets you’d like to see next! If you’re a developer interested in building nounish fidgets, join our discord!
nounspace DAO

Last, but not least, nounspace DAO launches on September 12, 2024. While the team that’s developed nounspace thus far will continue developing and growing nounspace as an independent entity, the Based Space Foundation, the community of $SPACE holders will be empowerd with their own treasury, governance process, and control of the $SPACE-emissions allocation contract(s). The Based Space Foundation is using our past experience and learnings launching DAOs to equip the community with the full suite of DAO tooling necessary to discuss, propose, and execute proposals autonomously. While the Based Space Foundation is incentivized to support the community in successful coordination, the community has minimal dependencies and is empowered to carry nounspace forward in whichever direction they collectively choose, with or without the Based Space Foundation.

This synergy results in the best of both worlds: the ability to move nimbly and competitively relative to centralized organizations as well as unlock the infinite potential of an aligned, incentivized, and empowered community.

Further, it ensures that nounspace will be owned and operated by the community, which we believe is critical to our mission to create the future of social.

Use of Funds

While the requested funds will be used to cover all operating and hosting expenses, the primary expense at this stage is to pay humans to design, build, and grow the app. Specifically, the 250k USDC would enable nounspace to offer competitive full-time salaries to the existing team that’s built nounspace thus far.

Retain existing full-time team:
- nounspaceTom - CEO (Noun 1131) (I work for free)
- @hypocrisy - Engineer (Future Nouner)
- @realitycrafter - Engineer (Noun 765)
- @ryannorton - Engineer (Future Nouner)
- @skateboard - Engineer (Gnar Whale & Future Nouner)
- @willywonka.eth - Product (Noun 1016)
- @raygbiv - Intern (Future Nouner)

Funds will be held and administered in a 3/6 Safe multisig composed of team members.

Path to Sustainability

nounspace is already generating significant revenues and has additional streams going live soon.

nOG Sales (4.83 ETH in sales so far, all re-invested in development)
MOR Emissions (currently 1.5503 MOR/day, or $15.4k annualized, with more rewards pending final delivery of the Non-Fungible Agent Factory (aka fidget factory))
Tabs Sales (Users that don’t hold nOGs will get their first tab for free then can pay a low price (ie. $3/year) to host additional tabs on spaces or homebases)
Fidget Commissions
Theme Commissions
$SPACE Emissions
Additional grants for roadmap-aligned features to help offset development costs

For more info, check out our runway projections.

Recap

One of the best available opportunities for the Nouns ecosystem is to double down on the vision for a nounish farcaster client, specifically doubling down on one of the promising clients Nouns has already invested in. We’re lucky to have a world-class, aligned, and proven team led by nounspaceTom ready and eager to accept this challenge. We believe that with 250k USDC, we can not only continue developing at an accelerated pace for at least 6 months, but achieve sustainable revenues that enable us to continue maintaining and developing nounspace indefinitely.

The best part, strategically saved for last

nounspace would be nothing without you, our users and community. Check out a few of the fun, unique spaces that were customized in the first week of launch.

space-montage

Spaces featured: valesol01, lukestokes, r4topunk, abstrct, gerbz, skateboard, taliskye, 0xluo.eth, thejasper, uncrown, 183aaros.eth, loudman.eth, shapeshift, xenbh.eth, willywonka.eth, sleepypenguin.eth

P.S.

We want to give a big shoutout to the nouners that have gone above and beyond to support nounspace over the past 3 months:

latsko.eth, ccarrella, toadyhawk, bigshotklim, RobotFishGirl, nounishprof, vlad/skateboard, carlosmelgar, brennen.eth, dotnouns, Benbodhi, bob burnquist, jesse pollak, gami, yes2crypto, and many more.

Building something as ambitious as the future of social takes a village, and Nouns greatest super-power isn’t its treasury, but rather its diverse and aligned community of builders, creators, and connectors. We’re prepared to do everything we can with the resources available to build and grow nounspace to the best of our ability. Similarly, we ask that you all do everything you can to support and grow nounspace so we can maximize the ROI and wholeheartedly double down on this timely opportunity of epic proportions.

Curious to learn more? Check out some of the longer-form content we’ve produced over the past 5 months while building in public:

GM Farcaster - August 16

Onchain Outpost - July 23

Web3 on Fire - Nouns meets Farcaster w/ Willy and Jesse - July 18

ShapeShift X Space - nounspace: the future of socials - July 10 The Third Space

$SPACE - the future of social is community-owned

Onchain Summer Series: nounspace - July 2

ATX DAO Podcast: nounspace - July 2

Manifest Mondays: nounspace - July 1

Hash Rate Ep. 58: nounspace on Farcaster - June 19

Building Web3 Ep. 12: nounspace - June 16

Tacobytes #661: How to stake with nounspace - June 14