Nouns DAO

@ZachXBT is a public good serving the crypto ecosystem through tireless research exposing countless scams. Recent events have highlighted the dire need and importance of such work. This prop proposes to fund 100 ETH to their donation address: zachxbt.eth (address can be verified from their twitter profile).

Donations have always been somewhat controversial within Nouns governance. Prop 21 donating 169 ETH to Gitcoin grants was one of the most contentious votes in our early history. Prop 108 donating 500 ETH to Ethereum protocol development (via the Protocol Guild) was much more unanimous but still there was discomfort and discourse around whether the DAO was becoming “a tax inefficient way for DAO members to make donations.”

I agree that we shouldn’t resort to becoming a complacent vehicle of passive philanthropy. We should instead aim to actively contribute and be a net producer of public goods ourselves such that our meme (brand) can fully capture the provenance value (claim on originality of) the public work and thus leverage the virtuous cycle to do more than what capital alone could have done. However, there should be exceptions to this rule if there is an urgent and common public cause that warrants highlighting. I would like to suggest that this is such a case. Crypto needs more validators like ZachXBT.

With donations we need to be extra wary of conflicts of interest or self-dealing. Unfortunately there is no way to prove this cryptographically, but I attest that I have no prior (or planned future) relationship with ZachXBT and that today was the first time I contacted them (via twitter) to ask for their permission to make this proposal.