Lil Nouns, Gnars, Goop (and many others), are examples of projects that have acquired Nouns so that they can participate in governance.

Since there are no solutions for giving each member a voice in Nouns proposals, communities rely on delegates to cast votes on their behalf. Resulting in a community that feels less connected to Nouns, because they cannot participate directly in the governance process.

Federation closes this gap by providing a way for communities to directly vote on Nouns proposals onchain. We call this crossDAO governance.

Moving forward we are extending Federation to support all forms of governance in the ecosystem such as integrating with Prop House and Nouns Builder, while also providing opportunities for owners of Nouns to generate value from them through new experiments like vote bidding.

To do this, we are seeking 225 ETH in funding to continue the development of Federation.

Team

wiz - creator federation; Wizards DAO; delegate;

ripe - Nounish builder and delegate. Designer, and developer with over 15 years of experience creating digital products & websites and winner of multiple Nouns Prop House rounds. A few Nounish contributions include: Nouns Explore on nouns.wtf, Nounish CV (prototype), nogs.wtf, zorggles.wtf, Noggle Factory & ⌐◧-◧.app

Progress

As a winner of the Prop House mandated governance round (Aug ‘22), wiz took Federation from an idea to public infrastructure used by communities in the ecosystem. All code is open source and has been publicly available since the very first commit: federation repository.

Metrics:

• 40+ Nouns proposal votes cast through Federation contracts
• 5+ Nouns delegated to Federation contracts
• Proposal passed for Lil Nouns adoption (which holds 16 Nouns)

Communities currently on Federation:

• Gnars
• Goop Troop

Coming to Federation:

• Lil Nouns
• The Park
• Wizards DAO

Discussions are currently underway to onboard other communities in the ecosystem that have expressed interest in using Federation such as SharkDAO, Purple, and PGodjira

Future roadmap and outcomes

We believe it’s time to take Federation from a POC to a scalable protocol designed for participating in crossDAO governance and generating value from Nouns ownership.

Make crossDAO governance easy to understand, simple to do, and commonplace

• Design & build the new Federation v1 application and website
• Simplify the process of casting votes as a community
• Enable support for existing and future Nounish DAOs created via Nouns builder
• Continue onboarding Noun holding communities to Federation
• Community voting in Prop House rounds
• Optimize contracts to reduce storage costs, provide gas refunds, and execution incentives (MEV)
• Self directed contract deployment and management

AutoBidder and Ongoing experimention

We plan to continuously release experiments that add value to the Nouns ecosystem. One area we are going to explore is an auto-bidder that enables a MEV driven approach to participating in Nouns auctions for communities and individuals.

• Allows bidding on Nouns auctions automatically
• Configurable max bid amounts
• Gas refunds and execution incentives

Vote bidding

Experimentation with crossDAO governance has led to the creation of a novel vote bidding protocol aimed at giving Nouns holders the ability to monetize their governance rights. Turning the acquisition of a Noun into a revenue generating opportunity for individuals and communities alike.

In January, we ran an experiment auctioning off a SINGLE Noun vote. This led to the following metrics one week after launch:

• 2 unique bidders
• 3 votes cast
• 0.5 ETH value created

There is a lot more value that can be unlocked with vote bidding and we want to heavily invest in its future development. You can learn more and see it in action by visiting bids.federation.wtf.

Community outreach, supportive content and learning material

In addition to product development, we will focus on creating content that introduces people to the concepts and benefits of crossDAO governance and vote bidding, and tutorials that show interesting ways that these primitives can be used in the Nouns ecosystem. For example, teaching others how to use Federation with Nouns builder, PartyBid, or showing others how to stand up their own voting blocs (political parties).

Ask

225 ETH to fund the continued development of federation.wtf and its ecosystem for at least 6 months. (There are no plans to stop development after)

• Engineering and Design (175 ETH)
• OpEx including infrastructure costs, bounties, artwork, content, marketing (50 ETH)

If this proposal passes 1/2 of the funds will immediately be released to the team. The remainder will be held in a 3/5 multisig with the following signers:

• wiz
• ripe
• krel
• tmobil
• al409

Previous Funding

20 ETH awarded for winning the Prop House mandated governance round (Aug ‘22). This was followed by a 12 ETH grant from Lil Nouns.

Path to Sustainability

It is important for us to stay lean while developing Federation. To ensure this is the case, we believe pursuing funding from Nouns is the best option in the short term.

In the future, we see Federation becoming sustainable through the creation of its own Nouns Builder DAO.

Relevant Links

Federation web app: https://www.federation.wtf/ vote bidding experiment: https://bids.federation.wtf/ github: https://github.com/nounish/federation

Team wiz: https://twitter.com/0xWiz_ ripe: https://twitter.com/ripe0x

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