Metopia NFT Membership Report — Communitized Genesis, Governance, & Growth

Introduction

It goes without saying that NounsDAO has stood out in the sea of NFTs both as a PFP and an NFT community. While many NFTs have lost more than 50% of their ETH value since the market downturn in early June, the performance of the price of Nouns has been on par with blue-chip NFTs such as BAYC and Moonbirds.

In this report, we dive deep into the unique features of Nouns DAO and explore the thesis of “communitizing NFT” and how we believe the community aspect has been the secret sauce for Nouns in sustaining its value and community participation during market downturn.

Sales & DAO Stats

As of writing this report, there are 346 Nouns NFTs in supply. Conducted witha continuous genesis event that auctions off one NFT a day to the highest community bidder, NounsDAO has conducted 346 auctions to 205 unique bidders, with around 10 unique bidders participating in each auction.

With a current sales price of 88 ETH, NounsDAO has raised around over 30,000 ETH for its community treasury as all the sales proceeds go to the community treasury.

So far, the Nouns DAO treasury holds a balance of 26,032 ETH. 8,802 ETH has been spent through past DAO proposals. There have been 97 proposals past, 77 executed, and 19 rejected.

According to Deepdao.io, NounsDAO ranks the 6th in terms of treasury size. This means that while other NFT-based DAOs boast an active membership 30 to 50 times larger in size compared to Nouns, NounsDAO has maintained a treasury-to-membership ratio of 83,838 compared to 2,444 of Aavegotchi and 31,147 of Merit Circle, making it one of the most efficient NFT DAOs in terms of capital generation.

Treasury & DAO Governance

As stated above, NounsDAO has been able to accrue a significant amount of capital (relatively) from its community members. Based on this treasury, Nouns holders have actively participated in governance decisions around fund use from the treasury.

The benefit of having community-governed treasury is visible in the membership participation rate in NounsDAO governance proposals. As the funds in the reasury all come from the sales that Nouns owners paid, they are incentivized to propose growth proposals in the DAO to increase the value of the collection.

Some of the proposals relating to community growth include:

• Collaboration with artists to produce 200+ real-life artworks across NYC during NFT NYC;
• Sales of Nouns to its derivative collection Lil Nouns;
• Nouns-branded apparels, etc.

Across these proposals, NounsDAO has been able to consistently activated about 1/3 of its members to participate in voting.

More on Communitized Growth

Communitized growth has been a core feature of how Nouns conducts its minting, governance, and development roadmaps. All key areas of its ecosystem involve community participation and it begins with a community-owned treasury.

Unlike many NFT projects which centralize decision making and rely on the community’s trust on the projects to deliver, NounsDAO uses community resources to incentivize programs that grow the NFT. This does away with FUD and risks of rug pulls as the development of the NFT lies almost totally in the hands of the community. And it also makes sure that there is no sudden change in the direction of project development that deviates from the community culture.

The opposite example is Goblintown, a NFT collection with a highly centralized development plan despite its strong community culture. During the same market downturn, while Nouns suffered a 30% in value loss, Goblintown suffered a >50% value loss.

In short, the success of Nouns has much to do with its community culture as well as the community structure that allows it to grow as a DAO — genesis, DAO, and treasury. We believe that as the bear market sets in, more NFT communities will have to transition into a more community-centric structure to prevent FUD and to allow community creativity to play to go through a downed market.