After we asked “Should Nouns DAO Explore Escrowed Milestones?” in this topic and with the Nouns treasury declining, we are upgrading this topic to a candidate. Given your feedback, we are certain that enabling Nouns to escrow milestones will significantly improve Nouns DAO’s ability to continue to back ambitious ideas while minimising risk, when each funding decision is carrying more weight.

Nouns treasury and token sales are decreasing, but Nouns community members are committed to experimenting with new ways to achieve sustainability for the DAO. Although the creativity and determination of the community is commendable, the smaller the treasury gets the higher opportunity costs and risk associated with every proposal.

The Nouns DAO currently lacks the tools to appropriately address these risks. Both send proposals and Streams follow an optimistic approach that lacks the teeth to instill accountability in the proposers. Without escrowed milestones, the DAO is left vulnerable to rogue proposals.

Streams are great to disperse salaries and recurring service charges, but for funding proactive work they remain risky. While the DAO deliberates and coordinates whether to cancel a stream, the DAO is bleeding funds. The cancelled stream of Prop 711 and the feedback on the defeated Flows proposal are two recent examples that emphasise Nouns DAO’s need for escrowed milestones:

• Cancelling Prop 711’s Stream (https://www.nouns.camp/proposals/766)
  • bixbite.eth says: “Also, other DAOS release payments in milestones where someone reviews the progress for completion before releasing future payments, so it’s not that crazy of a concept to have a bit of oversight on things” (https://www.nouns.camp/proposals/766?tab=activity&item=0xb67ed20fdcf323ee8d24a88ddb991fbead130764d93a0600f80fbb1dfe42d431-825)
• Feedback on the candidate for the defeated Flows proposal (https://www.nouns.camp/proposals/785)
  • 0xjanedoe.eth writes: “Why not take a “smooth” approach—split the budget into milestones incrementally, and let the DAO assess results before committing more capital?” (https://www.nouns.camp/candidates/605?tab=activity&item=0xfa7702821af6ce4201e881b2da3b4cd9e7375dc9f422e5134e3332ab29339bf4-83)

After community feedback led by @0xmonografia, we are deprecating our initial candidate (https://www.nouns.camp/candidates/enabling-nouns-dao-to-escrow-milestones-7bc48221928f11184b376da7a57650768dfd3332?edit=1) in favour of upgrading this topic to a candidate.

tl;dr

This proposal introduces milestone-based escrow payments as a new proposal type for Nouns DAO’s governance and voting system, enabling pro-active fund disbursement. The integration is done by SmartInvoice.xyz, a solution incubated by RaidGuild. Instead of proposals relying on follow-up from the community, it is up to the proposer to convince the community when they’re ready for release. Any community member can raise a release (or dispute) proposal at any time.

To ensure fair dispute resolution and bespoke arbitration features, this proposal is jointly submitted with Kleros, the leading decentralised arbitration provider specialising in blockchain-based dispute resolution.

Project Overview

Nouns DAO has historically funded projects through lump-sum grants, which require high trust in proposers and caused significant losses in the past, which is already being discussed:

• Tracking Rugged Nouns Props
• Nounforce One

However, as project scopes increase, ensuring that deliverables align with funding commitments becomes more complex. With escrowed milestones:

• Proposers receive funds progressively, aligned with agreed-upon deliverables.
• Nouns DAO retains financial oversight, ensuring capital is deployed effectively.
• Disputes are handled transparently via decentralised Kleros arbitration.
• Milestone updates are handled together with fund releases through an integration with Propdates.wtf
• The Nouns community receives the option to choose between on-chain and off-chain release of milestones, using Snapshot’s oSnap module. More information on an implementation with Safe can be found here.
• For showcasing the functionality an oSnap module for Safe using Snapshot voting was already set up. It enables the Nouns community to already verify the functionality of the solution. For details on this piece of infrastructure visit https://v1.snapshot.box/#/nounsescrow.eth/about

This integration will help Nouns DAO fund larger-scale projects with greater confidence, and reduce the social cost of protecting its treasury, ensuring that funds contribute to meaningful, measurable outcomes.

Funding Request (Total: 35 ETH)

The SmartInvoice team requests 35 ETH to cover development, integration, customisation, and support.

Item	Description	ETH
Core Functionality Development	Escrow Milestones Proposal Action (10 ETH) Frontend form for milestones, recipient, controller Controller selection logic Backend encoding of SmartInvoice creation transaction Milestone Viewer on Proposal Page (5 ETH) Display milestone list and current status View-only interface Link to full invoice on https://smartinvoice.xyz app	15
oSnap Release Integration	Snapshot and Gnosis Safe milestone release mechanism with controller-aware flows	5
Testing and QA	End-to-end integration tests, edge case handling, Snapshot and controller logic QA	2
Documentation & Training	Contributor onboarding, Snapshot/oSnap guides, developer documentation, user guides	3
Maintenance & Support (2 years)	Support for milestone release, arbitration, off-chain delegation, DAO onboarding	5
Project Management & Coordination	Sprint planning and delivery tracking Weekly reviews and stakeholder syncs Coordination with nouns.camp, Snapshot, and Kleros teams	5
TOTAL		35

Success Metrics

To make this initiative successful, we will engage with key ecosystem participants, including DAO sub-groups, such as Nouncil, LilNouns, and SharkDAO to ensure they understand and adopt the milestone-based escrow system. By integrating feedback loops, offering continuous educational content, and providing hands-on support through dedicated communication channels, this will directly save Nouns money with each proposal refunded that doesn’t fully get completed.

After the integration is completed at least 10 proposals use milestone-based escrow within the first 12 months.

Community Engagement

Work together with the community to prioritise the integration in frontends, such as nouns.camp, and determine whether a standalone hosted frontend is desirable.

As part of our maintenance and support, we will engage and educate the Nouns community.

• SharkDAO, Gnars, Nouncil, and Lilnouns onboarded to use escrow proposals.
• Workshops & guides developed to introduce milestone-based funding to the ecosystem.
• Direct outreach to NounsUniversity to provide educational sessions on escrow contracts.
• Webinars & AMA sessions to address questions and improve adoption.

Successful Integration

The Smart Escrow proposal type is available through nouns.camp, or a standalone hosted frontend (up to 2 in total). Kleros is integrated through Recognition of Jurisdiction under Kleros v1, and disputes are resolved transparently within agreed timeframes on the appropriate Court and can be appealed several times up to the General Court.

Milestone release via off-chain voting is enabled through the integration of Snapshot’s oSnap module.

This allows the community to vote on milestone completions using Snapshot proposals, which – when passed – trigger Gnosis Safe transactions that release funds from the smart escrow. This provides a streamlined governance implementation and reduces proposal overhead on Ethereum mainnet while retaining DAO control.

To make this integration future-proof and enable sub-DAOs to settle small claims, SmartInvoice is finalising its feature complete integrating with Kleros on a smart contract level.

Implementation Roadmap

• Months 1-3: Smart Invoice development
  • integration with nouns.camp, and,
  • a standalone hosted frontend
• Month 3-5: Integration with Kleros
  • Arbitration through Recognition of Jurisdiction
  • Pilot integration of feature complete Kleros smart contracts
• Month 4-6: Integration of off-chain milestone release through oSnap
• Month 6: Finalising deployment, testing, and community onboarding
• Months 6-24: Refinement user training, and ecosystem education

Benefits to Nouns DAO

• Greater financial security: Funds are disbursed based on tangible progress.
• Stronger project oversight: DAOs retain financial control throughout execution.
• More attractive funding model: Proposers gain trust by aligning payments with deliverables.
• Reliable dispute resolution: SmartInvoice enforces decisions made by Kleros courts

Transparency & Accountability

• Smart Invoice is open-source and fully auditable.
• Kleros’ arbitration rulings are public and fully decentralised.
• DAO governance will remain the primary decision-making entity, ensuring Smart Invoice acts as an enabling tool rather than a decision-making mechanism.

Team

Smart Invoice Development Team

• benedictvs – Project Manager & Governance Lead
  • https://github.com/b3nedictvs
  • https://x.com/b3nedictvs
• Shawky – Full-Stack Developer
• dan13ram – Smart Contract Engineer
  • https://github.com/dan13ram
• Ian – UI/UX & DAO Frontend Developer
• scottrepreneur – Strategy & DAO Ecosystem Advisor
  • https://github.com/scottrepreneur
  • https://farcaster.xyz/scottrepreneur.eth

Conclusion

Integrating a milestone-based escrow proposal type into Nouns DAO brings financial discipline, increased accountability, and stronger dispute resolution mechanisms. This proposal represents a natural evolution of Nouns DAO’s funding model, allowing it to support more complex and ambitious initiatives with reduced financial risk. So far, SmartInvoice has secured contracts with a combined value of over $400,000 (https://dune.com/sunsakis/smart-invoice). We actively service the majority of internal and external work at RaidGuild, and recently supported Nouns.builder DAO in rolling out escrow proposals to all Nouns Builder communities on Base:

• RaidGuild using SmartInvoice at https://dm.raidguild.org/escrow/new?chainId=100

• Nouns Builder Escrows
  • https://nouns.build/dao/base/0xe8af882f2f5c79580230710ac0e2344070099432/vote/29
  • Loom

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Additional Resources

• Smart Invoice Documentation
• Kleros Arbitration Overview
• Live Smart Invoice UI
• Farcaster Notification Bot Repository

Why Now?

Enabling escrowed proposals would not replace Streams or direct sends, it would add optionality. It could help the DAO support more complex proposals with better oversight, especially in cases where:

• Deliverables are clearly defined up front
• Work is non-recurring
• Large budgets or long timelines are involved