Bankless - The Nounders | 4156, VapeApe, Seneca | Nouns DAO Series Ep #1

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

In this two-part Bankless Series, we're exploring the Nouns DAO. In episode one, we're chatting with The Nounders, aka the founders of the Nouns DAO. In episode two, we'll be chatting with a few Nouners, aka some Nouns DAO members. The Nouns project has taken the crypto ecosystem by storm. Hear why and how in the episode! ------ 📣 Forta | Help Make Web3 a Safer Place https://bankless.cc/Forta  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🌴 MAKER DAO | DECENTRALIZED LENDING https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE STAKING https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 6:00 Nouns DAO Origin 9:05 CryptoPunks vs. Nouns 11:55 4156's Tweet Thread 13:05 Noun Distribution Mechanism 22:20 Noun Art, Properties, & Rarity 37:00 Nouns Governance 44:25 Nounish Culture & Direction 52:00 Nouns DAO Proposals 54:50 Nouners Wednesday Episode 57:05 Closing Resources: 4156 https://twitter.com/punk4156  Vapeape https://twitter.com/punk4464  Seneca https://twitter.com/cryptoseneca  Nouns DAO https://twitter.com/nounsdao  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome Bankless Nation to this very special episode where we cover, is it going to be a two-part series? This is going to be our first ever two-part series. We were talking to the Nounters of the Nounstal. In the second episode, we will talk to the Noun-Nurtz of the Nounstow. If you haven't guessed, the Nounters are the founders of the Nounstow. So in this particular episode, we're talking to three of them. We got 4156, punk 4156, who I now think just goes by 4156, also Vape, and Seneca. So these are three Nounders of the Nouns-Sow project.

And the Nouns Out Project has taken the crypto ecosystem by storm. And as to why it's taken the crypto ecosystem by storm is an interesting question, one that we will unpack in this episode, because is Nouns an NFT project? Is Nouns a Dow? Is it a DFI app? Yes to all of these things? So we're going to explore what about the Nouns project has captured the beloved attention

of so much in the crypto space and how it's perhaps brought something new to the table as to something that can be copied and pasted and brought forward into the future as a primitive for so many different things to unpack. And so I hope you guys enjoy this podcast. We're going to talk to these three founders in just a quick sack. But before we do,

we've got to talk to our friends over at Forta. And as we all know, Defi is risky. We say this every single time on the podcast. And Forta offers real-time security and operational monitoring or whatever value that you have in the crypto world. Whether you're a defy app,

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banklist.c.com. C.c. Slater. Top protocols like Maker, Lido, compound, balancer, DYDX, all are leveraging Forda to make Web3 a better and safer space for us all. So you can check them out also at forta.org.

All right. And so as we, before we go into the show, I just want to talk a little bit more about, a moment, a little bit about the show format. So I do these show formats every now and then. We call them out of their alpha leaks

or panels and AMAs. basically if you are part of a community, part of an organization, and you think that the bull case for that org needs to be presented on bank lists, you got to let me know. And here's what you've got to do. You got to grab up to three members of your community, maybe just one, maybe just two, maybe just three. No more than three, though, who can articulate the bull case for your, for your project, for whatever you're working on. You've got to slap an agenda together and let me know. And so I know for a fact, the Rocket Pool team is doing this right now. They've You've got a thread in their Dow about their bull case or rocket pool agenda on bank list.

We've done this a few times before with the Treasure Dow community. If you've got a bull case for your project, your Dow, your community, or whatever, and you think that it needs to be told, you've got to get fined up to three people, produce an agenda together, and you send it my way, and we'll get that story told. And so today we're telling the story of the Nounters, the Nouns Dow, with the Nounters. This is, like I said, a two-part series. there is the nouners, the community members of the noun style. Then they are coming on the show on Wednesday.

This is our first ever two-part series, just because there's so much to unpack here in the nouns organization. So let's go ahead and get that started with unpacking this story of nouns from the noun-ders side of things. So we will be right back with three of the members of the noun-durs side of the noun style right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Rocket Pool is your decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your ETH in Rocket Pool and get our ETH. in return, allowing you to stake your ETH and use it in DFI at the same time.

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creating a world where digital participation and the health of our environment can live side by side. Soon, Maker will be present on all chains and layer two's, bringing the biggest and best Defi credit facility to everywhere there is defy. So follow Maker on Twitter at MakerDow and learn from the oldest and most resilient Dow in existence. introducing the nouners. In the top left corner, we have Seneca in his beautiful, cute little noun with head looks like, I don't know what his head looks like.

Seneca, what is your head? You're talking to a milk carton. Milk carton, with a milk carton head. In the top right corner, we got VapApe, which is an ape vaping. Actually, not a real noun. I just discovered this right before going live. Vape Ape, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. And then in the bottom left corner, we got 4156 with a horsey head and a lull shirt. 4156, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Like I alluded to in the intro, the Nouns project has just captured the attention,

captivated so many of us for so many different reasons. Like, is it an NFT project? Well, almost certainly, because it definitely comes with a JPEG. But it also is a little bit like a defy app in this auction that goes on every single day. But it's also like a Dow, because the NFT is also like a governing share over this org.

So we're going to unpack the full story of this, but we got to start at the beginning. Where did the idea for nouns come from? Who should tell this story? 4156, I'll throw us to you. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I mean, nouns was, I guess, to a certain extent, my brainchild. I had been, you know, I've been in the crypto space for almost a decade. But, you know, I'd been spending a lot of time in the in the Cryptopunks community.

and just generally around the NFT space and had been thinking for a while about what could Cryptopunks 2.0 look like. What were the sort of like primitives missing from that project that could make it more crypto-native could potentially kind of elevate it so that it could kind of do things beyond mostly just kind of cheerleading the price?

And so I had been chatting with some friends, been writing down different ideas about, you know, what could this look like? And then, you know, one day I just had this kind of like moment of inspiration where I decided that I was going to write everything down, tweet it out in like Twitter thread format, and just see if anyone wanted to work on it. So the white paper, if you want to call it that for nouns is the Twitter thread. You can still find it on my Twitter. I can send you the link.

And yeah, basically, you know, describes a lot of the, the properties and very high level that nouns has today. And kind of at the end it says like, you know, does anyone want to work on this with me? And of course, Fave-Vap and Seneca are two of the people that said yes. I'd actually like to explore the the crypto-punk side of things because cryptopunks have captured, there's a significant overlap between nouns and cryptopunks. And I think, you know, you already alluded to a little bit as to why. It seems to like both projects tried to capture some of this like ethos of crypto that

while we can't really articulate it, the vibe is there, right? It's just like, it's the same vibe. It's not the board apes vibe. It's a little bit more of a bottom up community-driven project. But what would you say are the weaknesses of the Cryptopunks project that led you, that motivated you to start thinking about what a Cryptopunks 2.0 could look like. Yeah, sure. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily call them weaknesses. Like the way I've always thought about it, and I've said this on other podcasts, other podcasts are that like Cryptopunks are sort of like if you want to use a filmmaking analogy, Cryptopunks are like the citizen cane of the medium, right?

Like they define the form. And so, you know, it's inevitable that when you push things to a certain extent, when you kind of define the form, there are certain things that will be missing just because, you know, by way of defining the form, you've covered, you know, 80% of the interesting ground, but maybe there's an additional 20% or more that hasn't been covered. I mean, for me, I think that the two,

the two big things were like, one, the sort of like lack of organizational structure, like lack of, I guess, Dow infrastructure is how the problem was solved. Or maybe actually three things. So the kind of the lack of organizational infrastructure such that like the punks could kind of on-chain coordinate their activities to do things together. The distribution mechanism. So like is there a way that's kind of like more fair in terms of distribution for for the kind of building of the community, right?

Can that happen over a longer period of time rather than just being a function of like, you know, who happened to be online, you know, on a Thursday in 2017 when these were all released and claimed? And then the third thing was just this idea, and I guess I was probably most vocal about this, and this was one of the major motivating factors behind nouns. The idea that, you know, that the the, the, the, the, the, the thing that the token is referencing should kind of have this symmetry with the token itself, where it is as permissionless and open as the token.

So effectively putting all of the intellectual property into the public domain and making it CC0 so that people could use it and build on top of it without worry of what might become of the IP. Certainly. And 4156 is actually the name of your punk, not your noun. And so there's still a homage paid to the cryptopunks there. That's also shared by you, VAP, VAP. Your Twitter handle is Punk 4464.

And so VAPE, I'll throw it to you. When you read 4156 tweet thread, what stuck out to you as like, ooh, neat and captured your attention? Yeah, I think there was a lot of components around drops that were happening at that time. It's kind of like the ICO era of the NFTs where there's a lot of 10K PFP drops. And 4156 really laid out, I think. a, you know, materially different and novel mechanism for both launching, distributing, and governing a set of NFTs. And so that was initially, you know, very intriguing to me.

Seneca, what about you? What about the tweet threat stuck out to you? Yeah, the one thing that really stuck out to me was the infinite aspect of it, the fact that it could go on so long as Ethereum lives on, Nouns could go on forever. And that I feel is very unique to blockchain, something that couldn't really be done before. And so that unique property of it really reeled me in and got me thinking in a million different directions. Right. And so as we've alluded to, there's a number of different things about the Nounce project

that has captured so many different people's attentions. I think the distribution mechanism is a primitive that this industry is going to be able to take forward and use. And we've already seen this being used by little nouns. And I bet you there's a number of projects that I'm not familiar with that are using this mechanism. And I'm sure there's hundreds more that have yet to be released that are thinking about using this distribution mechanism. So who wants to take, how do we define what this distribution mechanism is? Who wants to define the distribution mechanism for our audience out of you three? I mean, I can give it a try. Go for it.

You know, I mean, I think we've sort of like taken it to, taken to calling it a nounish distribution. You know, whether it's, you know, used in the context of nouns or outside of it. But, you know, this idea that of like a continuous auction, I think is powerful for a few different reasons. You know, I think one is that it's just more fundamentally fair, like we alluded to when talking about crypto punks. You know, this idea that, you know, crypto history, if you've, if you've been around for, for a while is just kind of like littered with with these these like very narrow windows of opportunity, right? Like were you, were you here when the Ethereum crowd sale happened? You know, were you here when the punk's distribution happened? You know, we can probably collectively think of like

a dozen of these examples. And so this idea that, that, you know, there could be equal opportunity for participation over this like extraordinarily long window of time. And that equal opportunity would create this kind of, you know, more credible neutrality, more fundamental fairness at the protocol layer, I think, ends up being quite important. The other thing I would say is that, you know, the, the, the, the nownish distribution mechanism, the kind of like continuous cadence ends up being important for the reason that it potentially could create, like, a perpetual source of. funding for an organization, right?

This idea that, to the extent that there is a bid for nouns forever, that the organization always has this perpetual inflation to rely on, to fund itself, to organize itself. And of course, you know, we've seen kind of in the context of like Ethereum versus Bitcoin, this idea that like inflation is necessary to keep things working, I think is this kind of important idea in crypto. And just to concretely define what this mechanism is, one noun per day is minted and sold and in perpetuity forever. And was there any supply ahead of time or anything other than this mechanism? Or did the supply of nouns literally start at one and increase serially up from there?

Yeah. So the second tweet in the original kind of like white paper thread is initial supply of zero. So there were no nouns initially. And on the first day, one noun was created. And what was the price for the first noun, if you can remember? Who set that price? How much did that go for? Here, we can pull it up.

Do you have it off the top of your head, Santa Caravabe? It goes around 600? 600. 600, Eth? Around there. Ow! What about the second noun? That was a big draw.

That we would have to look up. I've got it here. Noun 1 was 613 aith and then noun two was Here, one second, go ahead. 69.69.Eth. Of course. Of course. This is one of the things that has really captured,

captivated me is because, you know, because there's such a strong supply constraint that these prices of these NFTs, are off the charts. I mean, for a 10K PFP project that releases $10,000 all at once, they do like a mint price of, you know, 0.03 or like 0.5 if they're really expensive. But nouns are going for like the lowest nouns for a while. I saw it going at 60 and now they're going at like 100 or so.

And it's off of like, it's in such an, or with such a low supply that you like, you actually can command such a high price for these things even when it's like so early in the project, right? And I thought it's just like this model of extremely constrained NFT release is actually a fantastic pricing mechanism because it's commanding prices that all the other NFT projects would have dreamed of. Vepe, do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah, I think it's an interesting dynamic where all the demand for the project really gets funneled through this daily auction every day. And so we've seen relatively, you know, compared to other projects, relatively low secondary market movement,

it usually happens after somebody's been outbid several times on the primary auction and they kind of capitulate and then go to OpenC and we'll buy a noun there. But this has been a really interesting mechanism for driving demand directly through the primary auction. You sort of get this continuous pricing of the noun as these auctions are happening every day. I think it's acted as a funnel for a lot of the community too to come in sort of the front door, look at the primary auction and try to compete there first before they ever go to secondary to try to score it noun that way. You know, there's also, I think there's a couple of other like interesting components related to nouns as a meme, right, where it kind of like benefits from, one, this,

this idea that there's like a daily event, you know, we call it noun o'clock, this, this like daily cadence that happens every day where people want to pay attention to the project. And then, you know, the other thing that, you know, it's a bit more in the weeds, but this idea that, you know, there's not kind of like explicit trait scarcity in the nouns universe. Like all nouns are, in essence, like, equally rare. But the thing that is sort of notable in that, in that context, like the thing that that becomes rare is the timestamp, right? Like the date on which the noun was minted, you know, is it a Christmas noun? And then also the ID, you know, how long have you been around the community? How long have you been in the project? If each ID

sort of like, to an extent corresponds with, with day, the, the, the, the idea. like sort of carries this this meaning about you know time-based participation interesting interesting i mean i was shocked to hear that noun number one went for 600 plus eth but i mean if this nouns project is actually massive having noun number one is is kind of equivalent to a flex even though the noun number one is largely going to be like indistinguishable from noun number like whatever because like the properties are so random it's it's actually the number one uh place that's actually kind of the unique thing about that, isn't it? That's right. Yeah, I mean, it was seeing lower ID nouns go for a premium as well. So like a two-digit noun or a one-digit noun obviously fetched as a higher

premium than the current primary auction price. One one thing to add there with regards to the daily auction is that it served really well to prevent crazy hype cycles. So because you have the daily inflation, you tend not to see the, you know, the pump and dump mechanics that you see in a fixed supply, uh, PFP project, which is nice because it sort of infiltrates the culture as to focusing on, on other things that are not price related. Right. The emphasis on the daily auction rather than the secondary market, uh, remove some of the, uh, the bull market shenanigans that we saw with NFT projects. How much secondary market liquidity is there, though? And why would somebody go to the secondary market rather than be

patient and wait at the wait for the primary? Yeah, I think, you know, with nouns, there is a real sense of I want to find my forever noun. So given that there's only one daily auction, right? There's only one head that is being auctioned off with through the secondary. You can find the the auction that you prefer, right? The one that you actually want to hold. Okay, so is it, so I'm sure some people would love to buy their forever now and off the daily auction and be like, oh, that this daily auction is mine. But, I mean, we, you know, full disclosure, I mean, me and Ryan have been waiting for like

the bankless noun to pop up and it hasn't really have popped up yet. And so at some point in time, we're probably going to have to peruse the secondary market to find like somebody with a bankhead or something. But I'm sure many, many other people are playing games like this, I'm sure. That is true. The auction is a big party every day, as 41 kind of stated. Bidding, winning the audience that surrounds the auction every day is pretty fun. So yeah, there's a whole event around the auction end, which we call 9 o'clock.

Can we talk about some of the properties? First off, who is the artist behind all of the properties? How are they decided? How is the art decided? Let's lean into like the art and the property side of things. Just who wants to tell this side of the story? Yeah, sure. I can tell this side of the story.

Yeah, so, so, you know, like, again, shortly after this tweet thread went out, we were kind of assembling the team of 10-nounders in the Discord channel. And it was, I think it was roughly like six kind of technical. technical nounters and four, four kind of artistic nounters. So there was Gremlin, who's a, of course, a very well-known NFT artist, Eboy, who, you know, they're effectively like the godfather of pixel art, Timpers, who is also a well-known pixel artist. And then I worked on the artwork as well to an extent. So it was really like the four of us that kind of attempted to define the nounish aesthetic. And that happened like relatively quickly after we started working on the project.

And what about just the properties? Who decided on what properties? How did that happen? Yeah. I mean, so I think we knew early on that we didn't really want to emphasize kind of trait scarcity. So like really we just started drawing stuff. And I think we, one of the kind of early decisions was that it would be pixel art. And that ended up being kind of very important in terms of storing the nouns actually on chain, right?

And being able to kind of compress them such that they would fit on chain. And then, you know, we started trying to draw, you know, these characters with different kinds of heads. I believe so like I think the initial genesis was, Grimpland drew this like sort of like Duckman type character. And it had the eyes like the, you know, the very kind of contrasty, characteristic eyes that the nouns have. And I just kind of like took that image with another prototype I'd made. And I don't think it was like a moment of genius or insight or anything. It was just like goofing around. I just drew the glasses around his eyes. And, you know, just fired

it back into the Discord channel saying, oh, hey, you know, I think this looks kind of cute with your eyes and the glasses. And then we all, I think we all just very quickly agree that it would be interesting if every single one of them was wearing the glasses and the the glasses could be this kind of like iconic you know central meme of the project um and again you know it it was this I think like the creation of nouns was was this like pretty special time both in terms of the wider space but also just in terms of like aggregating 10 like really world class builders in a discord channel and and just like you know going off for for a couple months and so like almost everything we did happen very very quickly you know I think with

in about 24 hours, we had sort of defined the nounish aesthetic. And then we went on Twitter and just started asking people what sort of noun heads they'd like and then drawing the noun heads for them. That was like the initial genesis of like coming up with the different ideas for the heads. And I'm sure you guys didn't have any specific criteria as to like what kind of head you would accept as an idea and what kind of head you would deny as an idea. But like overall, like what was the vibe? Like what kind of ideas passed? Like, oh yes, we will do that as a head versus like, oh, no, that's a bad idea. Was there any sort of like social contract about this? I mean, you know, I think we did ultimately, like, filter and reject certain ideas.

Like, you know, we didn't want to have like a gun. Like, you know, there are certain properties of nounishness that, you know, it's a kind of optimism and kind of like absurdity and silliness. So I think those were our filters. You know, we ended up with about 235 heads in the collection altogether and I think we cut probably about another 50 or so. So we drew 300 heads altogether, which is, of course, that's a lot of artwork. So, so, you know, we kind of took to, like, within the Discord channel, all just kind of like listing out nouns and then the artists kind of like picking up on the ones that they thought were funny and drawing them. So, you know, it would be like a list of like igloo, ardvark hair, you know, goldfish. And then someone would go and

draw the art vark and then we'd iterate on it from there. So what are all the properties? of a noun. So you have the shirt, you have the head, you have the color of the glasses, and then the hair. What are all the properties? Yeah, sure. So there's a background, so it can be warm gray or cool gray, which I actually think is kind of to only two. Only two. Yeah. And I actually think this is like one of the kind of underappreciated traits of nouns. Because if you have like this sort of like binary trait, you can do all sorts of fun, fun things with it. Right. Like someone could create a game that's like warm gray, versus cool gray or, you know, maybe it's notable when there's like, you know, seven,

seven warm grays in a row. That's like seven heads in a row. And that's like a form of scarcity in the collection. So the background color can be warm, warm or cool gray. Um, there's a body. Um, and so, you know, the body is, is like the torso with, with the kind of characteristic one arm. Um, there's an accessory, which in most cases is, is just like an overlay on the body. And then some of the more kind of the complicated looking accessories just kind of completely over the lay of the body. There's the head, of course, which is really what we define as the noun. And then there's the glasses. So there's roughly about 20 different types of glasses. And so 4156, you have a lull on your shirt.

Seneca has pop on his shirt, their shirt. Are these the accessories or is that something else? Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's the accessory. Okay. So there's not very many parameters. There's not too many properties out there. Yeah, that's right. Components. Yeah. Components. Excuse me. Yeah. How many different shirts are there? Do you know off the top of your head? Here, hang on. It's on the answer to the WTF. And while you're thinking about that, I'll ask either Seneca or VAPE, just like, what's the, what was the, talk a little bit more about, like, the choice behind not really having rarity in the properties. Why was that important? I think you want to take as well.

Yeah, sure. I think it's important because within, you know, pre-nowns, the focus of a lot of PFP communities was always the trait rarity, right? So in effect, you'd have this hierarchy within the community. And I think one of the goals within nouns was not to emphasize any sort of hierarchy between one member or the next, but rather we're all, sort of more or less the same, right? That said, there are rarer heads just because one head can pop up, you know,

once a year and another can pop up five, seven times a year. But, you know, to your question, it's not to build a hierarchy within the community. Wait, so are those heads programmed to only show up once a year versus other heads are programmed to show up more often? Or is that just a, well? No, that was just an example of what could happen. So how quote unquote rarity is defined, although no noun is particularly rare, there can be rare nouns because randomness, right? So not too long ago, we had, I think, three voids, three void heads happen one after the next, right?

And so if you think about the amount of heads that there are, which correct me, if I'm wrong, there's 2.30 something. Yeah, 2.34. Right. it's about one a year, more or less, one and a little bit more. Right. So you'd expect that, but given randomness, you can see multiple heads happen in one year or three in a row, as we saw recently. Right, but it's never ever programmed rarity.

And I really like this concept, because if all properties are not, are the same, are treated equivalently, then you have like emergent rarity, right? And so it's more about just like the random serendipity of certain properties coming together or like you said, like the random serendipity of the days of time in a row or just like rather than like controlling for rarity and having top down rarity created by like the organizers, you have like this bottom up community decided what's rare, which I think is a little bit more true to the ethos of crypto, which is great. Totally.

It's chaotic rarity. And there's something to be said as well Since the only sort of quote unquote Rarity is time, right? If you have noun one, two, three, you can think of rarity as well as noun 69 Went for a lot higher than noun 68 or 70. You can imagine noun 420

We'll do something similar. And so, yeah, it's definitely chaotic rarity where there's no predefined rarity. It's more all nouns are. rare but then randomness will give us whatever it wants to give us yeah and then just just adding in there so since we use the you know previous block hash as our source of randomness for the the next noun that's minted really interesting game called fomo uh fomo nouns has popped up where the community actually votes on um so as blocks are ticking by after an auction is finished um

you can actually see if you were to mint in you know this particular block that's that's about to be mined next, you can actually determine what the noun is going to be. And so the community has created this voting game where they get on spaces every day and we play FOMO after the auction ends where you can actually, the community is sort of voting up and down these various potential next nouns. And if there's enough upvotes on the next noun, then a transaction is triggered. The auction settlement happens. And the next noun is voted and minting. on. And so this has created sort of a game of aesthetics for the community where there's, you know, the community really wants aesthetic nouns. Esthetic nouns will drive more demand of the primary

auction. And so the Dow started funding these FOMO games to sort of create this feedback loop of demand and aestheticism, which is sort of created this new game within the Nouns ecosystem as well. I do have FOMO nouns up on the screen right now. I know you guys can't see it, but the viewers can. That's pretty cool. But excuse me, sorry. But also, the JPEG's not necessarily the point, right? Like, I mean, it's a fun feature, but is not the centerpiece?

Is that a fair take of the nouns ecosystem? I would say it's the centerpiece. It is a centerpiece? I think that, yeah, I mean, I think you could, like, there's lots of different ways to think about nouns, but like, I think you can, in some sense, like, think of it, like, these sort of, like, concentric circles. And, and I would, I would think that in that context, you would probably put, like, the meme, the artwork, the feeling in, in the center. You know, you could maybe argue that, like, it's the treasury in the center and it's the meme surrounding the treasury. But, like, I think, like, I would personally view the treasury as, like, the means for proliferating the meme, rather than, than the meme as like the way to accrue the treasury. So I, I would probably put put like the nounish artwork and the nounish feeling in the center. In the center or at least the next closest to the treasury. I think that is a fantastic way to segue into the second part of this conversation, which is like the Tao aspect of nouns because this is also something that's very,

very unique about it. But also 4156, you kind of alluded to it is like what is the long term vision of this whole thing. Like, what is the Dow oriented for? Like, are their success metrics? So we'll talk about all these conversations and more. In the second half of the show, right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. There is a brand new staking feature in the Ledger Live app today. We all like staking the assets that were bullish on. And now you can stake seven different coins inside the Ledger Live app. Cosmos, Pocodot, Tron, Algarians, Tezos, Solana, and of course Ethereum. With Ledger Live, you can take money from your bank account, Buy your most bullish crypto asset and stake that asset to its network all inside the Ledger Live app.

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Who wants to take this part of the story? 4156, go for it. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, for context, I haven't spent much time at all in any like ERC20 DAWS. you know, it's kind of funny, like in the kind of initial specification for nouns, I just, you know, I had this idea that a DAO would be cool and kind of dashed off this idea that, you know, oh, you know, there should be a DAO attached to the NFT collection without necessarily understanding, like the gravity of what that would mean long term and, you know, like all of the kind of

complexity that goes with it. But, you know, like the high level, one noun is one vote, right? One NFT is one vote. So in essence, you can think, that, you know, when a noun is being auctioned every day, yes, like, there's, you know, there's a kind of like meme NFT being auctioned, but also there's like one vote, one membership, one voting membership in this organization that's being auctioned every day. And, you know, to the extent that, I guess, like, non-fundable governance tokens kind of produce different outcomes than fungible governance tokens, you know, these are kind of like the differences in kind of like behavior of nouns DAO voters. But you know, I would say like my my best guess is that

the effects of the votes being non-fungible are like at least at this this point in history, like sort of negligible. Like I think like a lot of the positive outcomes that we've seen on the Dow side of things like related to engagement and things like that are really like much more a function of like the nounish meme and the nounish culture. And then also like the slow cadence of like Dow membership growth rather than being specific to the idea that votes are non fungible. Hey, Babe, Senator, do you have any experiences that you want to share about nouns, governance, and how it's unique? Yeah, I think some other interesting aspects are around the Treasury, like the assets to make up the Treasury. So we, you know, our project makes ETH and ETH goes directly

in the Treasury where a lot of other DOWs have sort of minted their own token. And the bulk of their treasury is this minted ERC20 token that they've created. And they can do other things to try to convert that into ETH or stables to do various Dow operations. And I guess what's interesting about nouns is there's no native mechanism to get nouns into the treasury. So this has been a big topic of conversation of like, how do we get nouns in the treasury? Some people would prefer to be compensated in nouns for the proposals rather than ETH as well or some combination of the two. So I think that's been another interesting dynamic. dynamic. And I also think like the proposals are in some sense compared to other DAOs,

like much less risky, right? So when you're talking about a compound or another, you know, pretty heavy hitting defy protocol, every proposal is under an intense amount of scrutiny because if you set these parameters incorrectly on a money market or something like that, very bad things can happen where we can sort of throw a lot of darts, you know, against the wall here and try a lot of different experiments and sort of the impact of an individual proposal or individual initiative is probably a lot less than going and tweaking parameters down the smart contract layer for these various defy protocols. One thing I'd add there is on the conversation of NFTs versus ERC 20s, I think while

what 41 said is true, the fact that it is the fact that it is the noun. culture that allows us to do all these quote unquote fun things versus when you compare it to you know changing parameters in a in a finance protocol there's also um when you talk about the the voting token when you're when you're when you talk about that nfts it's not this faceless sort of fungible thing that you have 10,000 of but rather it's it's a noun it's a thing with eyes it's an identity almost right and you should have become that within the DAO and I think that plays a role in in in how the DAO not necessarily functions but maybe the engagement in in how people feel towards government governance and in the community as a

whole yeah go go for a 45 oh yeah I was just going to add to that you know that and that's a great point um it was just going to add to that that like if you go to nouns that WTF and kind of take a look at any specific noun you can actually see the voting record of that noun. You can see everything that it's done. So I mean, yeah, that that that's certainly true that, you know, that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the NFT sort of have a track record of participation. So you get both an identity and then, and then also this kind of, like, persistent track record of, of how that identity behaves. It's interesting to put an identity onto an NFT. And that's often, like, that's a meme in, like, the NFT space, like, like, like, you know, board apes. are an identity for many, many people.

But Board of Sopon represent, like, one membership vote in a DAO. And so, like, that is, like, the unique angle. And so I would imagine if you go to, like, the nouns governance forums, and, like, you see a proposal, and you see people commenting on that proposal, and they all have nouns as their profile picture, probably. And, like, you're looking into those nouns as you do governance stuff. So, like, that dynamic, I don't think exists anywhere else across,

across Defi, especially not with, like, ERC20 token. Like, you, when somebody proposes, something, it's like, oh, yeah, it's that one noun with like the banana head or something. They're always voting about this stuff. And that's unique. And I think probably adds a little bit more of an engaging governance experience. Is that, am I on the right track here? Yeah, for sure. I think it also, like an important thing about it is that it sort of like de-risks the enterprise, right? Like there's a sense, I mean, Babe was alluding to this with all of the, kind of like, defy projects. Like there's the sense that like all of these things that are built

on top of this very new and experimental tech stack are like so serious and so high stakes and so intense. And so like, you know, the idea that it's like a banana and a milk carton and like a horse, you know, and a cotton ball are like collectively, you know, controlling tens of millions of dollars to do governance. Like it somehow kind of makes it feel like a bit more absurd. And which is I think probably like a little bit more closely aligned with the stage of crypto history that we're in. What would you guys say is the direction of the Tao? Was the nouns Dow established with some sort of like,

here's our goal, here's what we want to do? Or has that kind of been left up to the community? Or overall, like, what would you say is like, what's progress defined by the nouns? Seneca, right, babe, you want to take this one? Either you too, Seneca, go for it. Yeah, so I think to a large degree, the sort of direction of the Tao and where the treasurer,

is allocated has been left up to the community. That said, I do think there's a culture, which is what we call a nounish culture that is very hard to define, but I think everybody more or less abides by it and and thus votes accordingly. So things that are nounish get, you know, whopping 90% votes, things that are obviously not nounish don't do as well. And so the question then is like what exactly is nounish, right? And I think that, that's the answer will be a bit different between between members and and and people within or outside the community but I definitely say it's something it's something along the lines of optimistic uh 41 mentioned absurdist definitely has that that component um trying new things right there there is that

culture that that is being defined but it's very mushy it's very meat space it's there's no sort of technical around it. But yeah, so, and then going back to your question, I think at the very beginning, our focus was optimized for getting anything out of the door, right? So fun, whatever does proliferate the meme. But I feel that as we've grown and as we continue to grow and evolve, the nounish meme, what started as maybe just the classes and an aesthetic, become something much deeper, right?

And so, for example, while initially you could fund, you know, merch with announced glasses, now you see more trying to fund more, more, how do you say it, more ambitious projects, right? Something like public infrastructure, which doesn't necessarily proliferate the glasses, per se, but it does proliferate a sense, a meaning that goes much beyond the glasses themselves. So what would like victory or success look like for a noun style? If we like fast forward five, 10, 15 years into the future,

and however you define it, the nounstow is super successful. What does that look like? How would we gauge success? I mean, I would say one of the ways I think about it, and again, this is not, you know, I think we try to avoid saying, you know, this is the direction that the Tao should go. I think like to actually have like a truly kind of permissionless Dow, permissionless pool of capital, you know, it's of course up to the Dow to determine its own direction. And, you know, as Seneca was kind of describing like that will be like a function of

certain kind of initial conditions, right, including the meme and the nounish feeling. But, you know, when I think about like, you know, what is the best possible case here, you know, what like what could this this become kind of in in the maximum i i would i would think about it as like potentially that the governance layer of the metiverse right like the the idea that maybe the first instance of nouns to the extent that you know it were correct or that we've actually like invented something substantial right the first instance of that substantial thing and again to the extent that that that thing is kind of like auctioning daily NFTs. Like the first instance of that substantial thing would have the kind of greatest claim on

sort of like provenance, right? And that would make its NFTs the most valuable. And that would mean that, you know, it would kind of accumulate the most capital and it would have the most capital to kind of like distribute, you know, whatever that capital might be used for if it's, if it's public goods funding or we're kind of like funding Ethereum infrastructure, et cetera. And, and, you know, I think the feedback loop in the long run would be that, you know, the, the, the kind of larger the pool of capital becomes and kind of like the more influential the organization becomes the more kind of valuable or the more kind of critical it is to be a member of that organization right and so in the long run you could imagine that at scale you know ethereum has

scaled the kind of economic bandwidth of ethereum has scaled the the value of the eth and the treasury has you know increased by a couple of orders of magnitude and and you know there are lots and lots of these kind of nounish daos that kind of point back to the original as having this kind of like provenance. You know, in this scenario, nouns are very valuable and the organization is very large. And in this context, I think you would probably expect that most individual nouns would not be owned by a singular person. But they would potentially be owned by communities because those communities would want to kind of share the cost of ownership. And those communities themselves could then become organizations, you know, maybe organizations as large as nouns is today.

You could have a single noun, you know, noun 386 or 387 or whatever, has a community of members and kind of engaged members, kind of on the order of magnitude of nouns today. And then nouns kind of like the, you know, the Dow, the meta organization, is sort of like, you know, the UN of all the individual nouns. and all of those kind of individual nouns have participants and delegates that choose how the individual noun votes. So, you know, I think it's certainly possible to imagine the organization kind of like scaling up to look something like this over the next few years. And I think that would probably be like the best case scenario we can imagine today for the future of the project.

I think of APA, do you want to add anything to that? Hard to follow that up. I think we talk about this stuff a lot of time. So, yeah, I think I echo a lot of the narrative there and the goal there. And, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, first is trying to reach some sort of brand ubiquity within NFT culture or the metaverse culture. That's really kind of the stage we're at now. And then I think 41-56 did a good job of laying out.

Yeah, kind of the future vision here. Yeah, likewise, I echo everything that both 41 and Babe said. the one thing I'd add is with that sort of meta org, I think the one thing, one thing I focus on a lot is is what's the, what is what is that, what do the rails on which that org runs on look like, right? And that takes a lot of innovation, a lot of building both within the governance layer, for example, on the IP layer, on the funding layer. There's a bunch of things to tackle that I think, If we are to be successful, we have to build a lot of this infrastructure for the rest of the organizations to be able to easily build on. I'm wondering of all the proposals that go through nouns, governance, how much of them, like, what proportion of them is, like, promoting the nouns brand or versus something to do with, like, the treasury?

So, for example, like, I could see nouns either, like, using something like Oble Network or just whatever, just like staking their eth, right, and like growing the treasury that way or diversifying their treasury into something else or just like, one possible future of noun style, in addition to growing the brand, it's also like growing the treasury via like on-chain investments or maybe off-chain investments. I don't really know. is there any, is there any proposals or in like something in the, in the culture of nouns to do some of just like direct treasury management and like an actual investment with the funds that the nouns have been available? Is it or is it more focus on just the brand side of things? Yeah, you can go ahead. Yeah, I see you guys like muting and unmuting each other. Yeah, sure. So I mean, you know, I think again, it is ultimately up to the doubt to decide. But I would I would say that there are some kind of incentive. to kind of like stay away from kind of complex, you know,

management of the treasury. You know, one, like the kind of like the form, the form factor of like doing that is, is challenging. You know, there's all kinds of like added like regulatory complexity and risk in doing it. And then I just think like the risk reward is probably such that there's just like a lot more leverage in kind of proliferating the brand, proliferating the meme, kind of funding, funding public goods, making people aware of nouns, then there is in trying to earn, you know, some kind of like APY on the treasury.

You know, the treasury is denominated in ETH. I think most of us who, like, deeply understand Ethereum are like extraordinarily bullish on, you know, the future of the asset. And to the extent that nouns is, you know, treasury is denominated in ETH, our card is sort of like hitch to something that has a very bright future. And really, like, you know, nouns won't necessarily succeed until, Ethereum kind of like like nouns won't succeed at the scale that we think it can until Ethereum kind of like scales its economic bandwidth by a factor of 10 to 100, which would mean a

scaling of the Treasury by a factor of 10 to 100. So in that sense, I think it's just like, you know, kind of accumulate the ETH. You know, we stake the ETH. We do some like very basic stuff. But in my view, there's just so much more upside that's possible than kind of, you know, some kind of yield on on the treasury. Well, fam, thank you so much for joining me. And I know I could keep on talking about nouns with you guys for another hour. But I have the nouners coming on the show on Wednesday. So I'm going to talk about their perspectives of nouns Dow. What should I ask them? I'd love to know what you guys think that I should ask the noun holding community about their perspective on things. You have any question or a question and suggestions for me that I should ask them? Yeah, I think there's been really interesting dialogue. around potential failure modes for nouns. And so it's something that we talk about a lot.

I think it would be interesting to get some broader perspectives on community members because we're pretty head down, head in the weeds over here. And so talking about a lot of the various failure modes that are possible. I think that's probably an interesting topic to touch on. It would be, I think it'd be very interesting to ask them like about the nounders. You know, I think, you know, we kind of look at the. community and have things that we want to work on and things that we think should be prioritized in terms of risks. It'd be interesting to know what they think we should be spending time on.

And then also just like, you know, how much involvement, how much direction do they think we should kind of continue to have in the project. You know, again, we have kind of like internal discussions and ideas about what is correct. But it would be interesting to hear the, the noun owner perspective on that topic. Can I get anything from you? Yeah, I'd ask them each specifically, what's top of mind within nouns and

more importantly, why is it that not much else? I think 41's question will be an interesting one. Thank you for helping me write my agenda for next Wednesday, so I appreciate that. Seneca, VAPA, 4156, is there anything that you guys want to say before we

sign off? The noun anniversary is on August 8th. So that will be one one year of nouns every day. So happy noun anniversary. I'm sure that noun will have a decent premium associated with it. Yeah, I'm sure it will. Awesome, guys. Well, thank you so much for joining me on this show, exploring the noun style. Again, the first ever two-part series that we've done on bank lists. So Nounters, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Cheers. Like I said, for everyone watching the stream or if you're watching the stream, the nouners will be coming on in about 48 hours. So it'll be happening on Wednesday.

If you're listening to this on the podcast, that means this Tuesday. So that I'm having the nowers on tomorrow the next day, Wednesday. Either way, I will see you there. And thank for you everyone for tuning in. Cheers.