In The Nouns Virtuous Cycle we talked about utilizing the Nouns DAO treasury to enhance infrastructure for building on Nouns. Since then, we’ve funded projects like 3D Nouns Generator, Nouns Party, Nouns iOS App and more. Today, I’d like to use another analogy to describe the Nouns: Nouns as crypto-powered superheroes.
In just over two months, Nouns DAO has aggregated over 10,000 ETH , and more importantly, some of the brightest minds in the cryptoverse. We can think about the Nouns individually as little superheroes with different abilities, and the Nouns DAO treasury as the glue that makes them a powerful team like The Avengers or Voltron.
If we buy into this analogy, then we’re left with the question of where to apply our superpowers. Where are large amounts of ‘no strings attached’ capital and expertise that can (usually) only be aggregated in the cryptoverse needed?
Personally, I think one answer is to use the Nouns DAO treasury to begin funding real world public goods. Like it or not, most of the world still exists outside the cryptoverse, and in case you hadn’t noticed, things aren’t going so well there.
Crypto-natives increasingly have the power and capital to have a positive impact in the real world, but to date, most of the real world ‘signals’ people have seen from us are not so compelling. Crypto-outsiders may not understand the machinations of the cryptoverse, but they do understand the real-world fallout. If crypto imparts us with capital-aggregating superpowers, and we only use these superpowers to buy Rolex watches and lavish trips to Dubai, the outside world will reject our vision of the future (and rightly so).
For the first time we can use NFTs as filtering mechanisms to simultaneously aggregate large amounts of capital, like-minded people, and positively brand the activities they carry out in the real world. This spring, the Cryptopunk community funded billboard advertisements in Miami and New York in what was one of the first attempts to create a more utopian meeting place for the cryptoverse and the real world.
The Nouns can take this one step further. We have aggregated the capital and expertise to not just market a crypto-utopian view of the world, but to begin to build it. Our superpower is a mechanism for funding and building public goods (among other things) that accrue value back to the original work of art in the form of ‘brand equity’. The status and brand power of operating a Noun can exist proportional to our ability to help make things better for everyone, and the increase in brand power will yield more ETH in the treasury for creating even more impact.
While a truly permissionless pool of capital won’t have an explicit purpose, it will be subject to a marketplace of credible ideas and fund the best ones. In addition to building infrastructure for proliferating Nouns, I think there are compelling reasons to fund real world public goods using the Nouns DAO treasury, and to teach the world about Nouns and the superpowers of the cryptoverse.
If you’d like to help make this vision a reality, you can join us in #skatepark in the Nouns DAO Discord, where we’re exploring the creation of a nouns-themed public space for underprivileged youth. You can learn more about Nouns DAO at nouns.wtf
