Nouns DAO

thanks to Will Price for the delegated noun allowing us to make this proposal

tl;dr

A way for snapshotted nouners at a given proposal to pseudonymously submit messages about the proposal.

proposal

We believe that Nouns DAO is where the most interesting public DAO conversation is happening today.

Sometimes, not every opinion held is voiced though. In the past month of participating more in the DAO (noun 416), we’ve observed situations where privately held opinions don’t make it to the public discourse because they’re somewhat controversial. We believe that this is dangerous for governance. Unspoken and unresolved opinions can fester into resentment and political turmoil over time.

With this in mind, we’re building heyanoun, a way for nouners snapshotted by a proposal to comment on that proposal pseudonymously.

Nouners post a message on the heyanoun site, along with a zero-knowledge proof showing that they are in the snapshot to the relevant prop:

Messages will then be passed on to a designated channel (initially could just be the funded prop’s channel) in the nouns discord server:

All proofs will be hosted on IPFS and messages will have a link from which a user on discord can verify the proof’s veracity themselves.

We believe that this product, while simple, can surface unspoken opinions to the nouns public square and could be a huge boon to governance.

about us

Personae Labs is a new R&D lab out of 0xPARC investigating how new cryptography like ZK-SNARKs changes the way we communicate online.

Read our manifesto here or watch this recent announcement talk from one of our founders here.

We’ve built (to our knowledge) the earliest Eth-based pseudonymous social apps like https://www.heyanon.xyz/ and https://www.cabal.xyz/ and are committed to furthering the technical and product frontiers here.

Find us at

• https://twitter.com/personae_labs
• personaelabs.eth
• noun 416

compensation

We foresee this project taking ~1.5mo. of dedicated effort by a team of:

• 2 engineers
• 1 designer
• 1 PM

Components to be delivered:

1. website for submitting message + ZKPs for all proposals
2. all relevant zkp circuits
3. discord bot for posting messages
4. website for verifying proofs of messages (from bot)

Given a rate of 10 ETH/mo for each contributor, we’re requesting 60 ETH total for delivery of this first app.

future work

We hope this app is the first of many experiments around pseudonymity within Nouns DAO.

If this first iteration sees traction, we see a number of further extensions:

• extend the number of places that messages are published, i.e. to a dedicated twitter account as well as discord
• plugins/react components to integrate pseudonymous badges/proving into other governance clients (i.e. agora, discourse killer)
• additional pseudonymous nouner groups, i.e. groups based on voting history (I voted in 10 of last 15 proposals)