WTF is the NOUNS DAO?
What are Nouns and Why are They so Expensive?
Every 24 hours a noun artwork is auctioned off. This will go on forever. The first noun sold for 613.37 ETH (roughly $2 million) on August 8th.
Noun 1 sold for 613.37 Ether.
100% of noun auction proceeds are sent to Nouns DAO treasury. In less than a month the treasury has already raised 2,214 ETH (over $7 million). You can check out the details of the treasury here.
This treasury is exclusively controlled by nouns via governance.
1 Noun = 1 Vote
Buying a noun not only gives you ownership of a unique piece of artwork, but it buys you a vote in how to manage a multi-million dollar treasury. It also means if you sell your noun, you lose your vote.
What will this treasury be used for? The first proposal within the Nouns DAO Governance is to Donate 5 ETH each to 6 charaties. The proposal was successful with 7 votes ‘for’ and 0 ‘against’.
You can read about some other cool ideas that could be proposed in the future here.
Who Created This Project?
The creators of this experiment are known as the “Nounders” aka:
- @cryptoseneca
- @supergremplin
- @punk4156
- @eboyarts
- @punk4464
- solimander
- @dhof
- devcarrot
- @TimpersHD
- @lastpunk9999
Considering 100% of noun proceeds go to the DAO, Nounders have chosen to compensate themselves with every 10th noun for the first 5 years of the project. Here is Noun 0 that went to the Nounder’s multisig wallet to be vested and shared among the team.
Noun 0 was saved for the Nounders.
How is malicious conduct/proposals avoided in the early days of Nouns while supply is low? Nounders currently have a special veto right on any proposal that the team deems harmful.
This veto power will be removed when the team deems it safe to do so.
Remember, there is a new Noun auctioned off every day. Eventually there will be hundreds if not thousands of owners and voters that are a part of this DAO.
So how can you get your hands on a Noun? Unless you have a few hundred ETH laying around, you probably can’t buy one outright. But you can own a fraction of one.
Fractionalization of nouns are already taking place. A Party Bid was used to win Noun 11. Punk 4156 then airdropped NOUN11 tokens to hundreds of people on Twitter.
What does the future have in store for nouns and the treasury? It is unclear. But this project is certainly one of the most unique ways we’ve seen to bootstrap a community and governance in the crypto space.
You can find more info on the nouns project on their website.
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