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

Transcript

welcome bank this nation to this very special episode where we cover is it gonna be a two-part series this is gonna be our first ever two-part series we were talking to the nounders of the noun style in the second episode we will talk to the now nurse of the noun style if you haven't guessed the nounders are the founders of the noun style so in this particular episode we're talking to three of them uh we got four one five six punk four one five six who i now think just goes by four one five six also vape ape and seneca so these are three nounders uh of the announced out projects and the noun zap project has taken the crypto ecosystem by storm and as to why it's taken the crypto ecosystem by storm it's an interesting question one that we will unpack in this

episode because is nouns an nft project is nouns a dow is it a defy app yes to all of these things so we're going to explore what about the nouns project has captured just the love 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 uh and so i hope you guys enjoy this podcast we're gonna talk to these three founders in just a quick sec but before we do we're gonna talk to our friends over at forta and as we all know defy is risky we say this every single time on the podcast and forza offers real-time security and operational monitoring or whatever value

that you have in the crypto world whether you're a defy app you're an nft project or you've got governance contracts or you're a bridge florida is a real-time monitoring network and so uh you know those little like those games uh there's an asteroid game back in the 80s or 90s and you'd have to shoot down the asteroids before they hit the earth that's like forta and your incoming malicious transactions trying to rob you or your d5 projects of their treasury it'll monitor some shady shenanigans going along in the mempool and it will destroy those incoming transactions to the best of its ability before those transactions come and mess up your day and so you can check this out there's a link in the show notes bankless dot cc slash florida top protocols like maker lido compound balancer dydx all are leveraging ford 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 uh one moment a little bit about the show format so i do these show formats every now and then we call them are there alpha leaks or panels and amas basically if you are part of a community part of an organization and you think that the bold case for that org needs to be presented on bank lists you got to let me know and here's what you 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 uh who can articulate the bull case for your for your project for your

whatever you're working on you gotta slap an agenda together and let me know uh and so i know for a fact that the rocket pool team has do is doing this right now they've got a thread in their dow about their their bowl 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 bowl case for your project your dow your community or whatever and you think that it needs to be told you gotta get fined up to three people produce an agenda together you send it my way and we'll get that story told uh and so today we're telling the story of the nounders uh the nouns dao with the nounders uh this is like i said a two-part series uh there is the now nerds the community members of the noun style then they are

coming on the show on wednesday uh 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 durs side of things so we will be right back with three of the members of the nounders side of the noun style right after we get through 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 eath and use it in defy at the same time you can get four percent on your eth by staking it with rocket pool but you can get even more by running a node rocket pool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to

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layer twos bringing the biggest and best d5 credit facility to everywhere there is defy so follow maker on twitter at maker dow and learn from the oldest and most resilient dow in existence ladies and gentlemen introducing the nounders in the top left corner we have seneca and his uh 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 vape ape which is an ape vaping actually not a real noun i just discovered this uh right before right before going live vape april 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 like i alluded to in the intro uh the nouns project has just captured the attention captivated so many of us for so many different reasons like uh is it an nft project well almost certainly because it definitely comes with a jpeg um but it also is a little bit like a defy app in this like auction that goes on every single day but it's also like a dow because the nft is also like a governing chair over this org we're gonna unpack like the full story of this but we gotta start at the beginning where did the idea for nouns come from like who who should tell this story four one five six i'll throw this to you yeah sure so um yeah i mean now this was i guess to a certain extent

my my brainchild um i had been uh you know i've been in the crypto space for for almost a decade but um you know i've been been spending a lot of time in the in the crypto punx community um and and you know just generally around the nft space uh and had been thinking for a while about you know what what could crypto punk's 2.0 look like um you know what what what were the sort of like primitives missing from from that project that that could make it you know more crypto native um could could uh potentially kind of elevate it so that so that it could kind of do things beyond mostly just kind of cheerleading the price um and so i you know i had been chatting with some friends been writing down different ideas about you know what what what could this look like

um and then you know one one day i just had this kind of like moment of inspiration where i decided that i was going to write everything down um tweet it out in in like twitter thread format and just see if anyone wanted to work on it um so the the white paper if you want to call it that for four nouns is the twitter thread you can still find it on my twitter i can i can send you the link um and um yeah it basically you know describes a lot of the the properties and very high level that nouns has today um and um kind of at the end it says like you know does anyone want to work on this with me um and of course and seneca are two of the people that said yes i'd actually like to explore the the

crypto punk side of things because crypto punks have captured there's a significant overlap between nouns and crypto punks and i think you know you already alluded to a little bit as to why it seems like both projects tried to capture some of this like ethos of crypto that well we can't really articulate it the vibe is there right it's just like it's the same vibe it's not 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 the weaknesses of the crypto punks project that led you that motivated you to start thinking about what a crypto punks 2.0 could look like yeah sure i mean i i wouldn't necessarily call them weaknesses like the way i've always thought about it and i've said this on other other podcasts are that like crypto punks are sort of

like if you want to use a filmmaking analogy crypto punks are like the citizen kane of the medium right like they they define the form um and so it you know it it's inevitable that that like when you push things to it to a certain extent when you kind of define the form there are certain things that will be missing just because you know by by way of defining the form you you've covered you know 80 percent of the interesting ground but but maybe there's an additional 20 percent or or more that that hasn't been covered um i mean for for me i think that the two the two big things were like one that the sort of like lack of of organizational structure like lack of i guess dow infrastructure is how how the problem was solved um or maybe actually three things the the

the 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 um the distribution mechanism so like is is there a way that's that's kind of like more fair in terms of distribution um uh for for the kind of building of the community right can 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 in 2017 when these were all released and claimed um and then the third thing was just this idea and i i guess i was probably most vocal about this and and this was one of the major motivating factors behind nouns the the idea that um you know that the the the jpeg you know the the the thing

that the token is referencing um should kind of have this symmetry with the token itself where it is as as permissionless and open as the token so um effectively putting all of the intellectual property into the public domain and and making it cc0 so that people could use it and build on top of it without worry of of what what might become of the ip certainly and uh four one five six is actually the name of your punk not your noun uh and so there's still still a homage paid to the crypto punks there and that's also shared by you uh vape vape uh your your twitter handle is punk four four six four and uh so vapa i'll throw it to you when you read four one five six tweet thread what stuck out to

you as like ooh neat and and uh captured your attention yeah i think there's 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 uh you know materially different and novel mechanism uh 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 but what about the uh the tweet thread stuck out to you yeah the the one thing that 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 um nouns could go on forever and that that i feel is very unique to to blockchain something that couldn't really be done before and so that that unique property of it really reeled me in and got me thinking in a million different directions all right and so as we've alluded to there's a number of different things about the announced 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 i can give it a try um you know i mean i think we've sort of like taken it to take into calling it uh nounish distribution 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 is powerful for a few different reasons you know one i think one is is um that it it's just more fun fundamentally fair like we alluded to when when talking

about crypto punks you know this idea that you know crypto history if you've been around 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 crowdsale happened you know were you here when uh the punk's distribution happened you know we can probably collectively think of like a dozen of these examples um and and so this idea that that you know there could be equal opportunity for participation over this like extraordinarily long window of time and and that equal opportunity would would create this kind of um you know more more credible neutrality more more fundamental fairness at the protocol layer i think and ends up being quite

important um the the other thing i would say is is um that that you know the the nounish distribution mechanism the the kind of like um continuous cadence um it ends up um being important um for for the reason that it it potentially could create like a perpetual source of funding for an organization right um this idea that um to the extent that that there is a bid for for nouns forever that that the organization always has this this uh perpetual inflation to rely on to fund itself to organize itself and of course you know we've seen kind of uh in in the context of like ethereum versus bitcoin this

idea that like inflation is necessary to keep things working um i think is is this 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 it did the supply of nouns literally start at one and increase serially up from there yeah so the the the second tweet in in the original kind of like white paper thread um is initial supply of zero so there were no nouns initially um and and on the first day one one noun was created

and what was what was the price for the first noun if you can remember like who set that price how much did that go for um here we can we can pull it up you guys do you have it off the top of your head so i care of you i think it was around 600 600 around there wow what about the second there that was a big drop that we would have to look up so yeah i've got it here noun 1 was 6 613 eth and then noun 2 was uh here one second go ahead 69.69 of course this is one of the things that has

really captured uh captivated me is because you know because there's such a strong supply constraint that it these prices of these nfts are off the charts uh 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 a hundred or so and it's off of like it's in such an er with a 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 just like this this model of extremely constrained uh nft release is actually a fantastic pricing mechanism uh because it's commanding prices that all the other nft projects would have dreamed of uh vape if 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 usually happens after somebody's been outbid several times on the primary auction and they kind of capitulate and then go to opencm we'll buy it by a noun there but this has been a really interesting mechanism for driving demand directly through the the primary auction you sort

of get this continuous you know pricing of the noun as these auctions are happening every day um i think it's acted as a funnel for a lot of the the community too to come in sort of the front door look at the primary auction um and try to compete there first before they ever go to secondary to try to score it down that way you know the there's also i 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 nine 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 that um 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 um 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 how long have you been around the community how long have you been in the project if each idea sort of like to an extent corresponds with with day um the the the id like sort of carries this this meaning about about you know time-based participation interesting interesting i mean if we 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 now number one is is kind of equivalent to a flex even though the noun number one is largely going to be like indistinguishable from now 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 we've seen lower id nouns go for a premium as well so like a two-digit noun or a one-digit noun obviously fetches a higher premium than the current primary auction price one one thing to add there with regards to the daily auction is that it's served really well to prevent crazy hype uh cycles

so because you have the daily uh inflation you tend not to see the you know the pump and dump mechanics that you see in a fixed supply 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 removes some of the uh the bull market shenanigans that we saw with nft projects how much secondary market liquidity is there though uh and why would somebody go to the secondary market rather than be patient and wait at the uh wait for the primary yeah i think um

you know with nouns there is a 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 auction that that you prefer right the one that you actually want to hold okay so so is it so i'm sure some people would love to buy their forever noun off the daily auction and be like oh that this daily auction's mine but uh i mean we well 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 far gonna have to peruse the secondary market to find like somebody with a bank head or something uh and but uh i'm sure many many other people are playing games like this i'm sure that is true the the the auction is a big uh a big party every day as uh 41 kind of stated um bidding winning the audience that surrounds the auction every day is pretty fun um so yeah there there's a whole event around the the auction end which which we call nine o'clock can we talk about some of the uh the properties uh first off who is 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 i just who

wants to who wants to tell this side of the story yeah sure i can i can tell this side of the story um yeah so so you know like again shortly after this tweet thread went out we we were kind of assembling the team of ten nounders um in in the discord channel um and it was a i think it was roughly like six kind of technical nounders and and four um four kind of our artistic nouns so there was uh gramplin who's a of course a very well known nft artist uh eboy who um you know they're effectively like the the godfather of the pixel art uh timpers uh who who is uh also a well-known pixel artist um and then i i worked on on the artwork artwork as well

uh to an extent so it was really like the the four of us that that um kind of attempted to define the the nounish uh aesthetic um and and that happened like relatively quickly um after we started working on the project um and uh what about uh just the properties who decided on what properties how did that happen um yeah i mean so so i think we knew early on um that we didn't really want to emphasize kind of trait scarcity so so like really we just started drawing stuff um and and um i think we one of the 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 on chain right and being able to kind of compress them such that they would fit on chain um and then you know we we started trying to draw you know these characters with different kinds of heads um i believe so like i i think the the initial genesis was um uh gramplin drew this this like sort of like duckman type character uh and and it had the eyes like the you know the very kind of contrasty characteristic eyes that the nouns have and i i just kind of like took that image with another prototype i'd made and i i don't think it was like a a moment of genius or insight or anything it was

just like goofing around i just drew the glasses around his 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 um and then we all i think we all just very quickly agreed that 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 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 just like you know going off for for a couple months and so like almost

everything we did happened very very quickly you know i think within about 24 hours we had sort of defined the nounish aesthetic and then we went on twitter and just started like asking people what what sort of noun heads they'd like and and then drawing the noun heads for them that was like the initial genesis of of like coming up with the different ideas for the heads and well 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 past 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 um i mean you know we i think we we did

ultimately like filter and reject cert certain ideas like you know we didn't want to have like a gun like you know there are certain properties of nounishness that um you know it it's a kind of optimism uh and kind of like absurdity and silliness um so i think those were our filters um you know we ended up with about 235 heads in the collection altogether and i i think we cut probably about another 50 or so so we we drew 300 heads all together which is of course you know that's a lot of artwork um so so you know we kind of took to like within the 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 they thought were funny and and drawing them so you know it

would be like a list of like igloo aardvark hair you know goldfish and then someone would go and draw the aardvark and and then we 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 uh there is a background so it can be warm gray or cool gray which i actually think is kind of to only only two yeah and i i actually think this is like one of the kind of underappreciated traits of 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 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 um so so the background color is can be warm warm or cool gray um there's a body um and and so you know the 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 overlay the body um there's the head of course which is really what we define as as as the noun and then there's uh the glasses so there's about uh roughly about 20 different uh types of glasses and if for so 4156 you have lol on your

shirt seneca has pop on on his shirt their shirt uh are these the accessories or is that something else yeah that's right that's right that's the accessory okay so there's there's not very many parameters there's not too many properties out there yeah that's right components yeah components excuse me yeah uh how many different shirts are there do you know off the top of your head uh here hang on it's on now's wtf and uh while you're thinking about that i'll ask either seneca or vape vape just like what what's the uh what was the talk a little bit more about like the the choice behind not really having rarity in the properties why was that important

yeah sure um i i think it's important because within you know pre-nouns um the focus of a lot of pfp communities was always the the trait rarity right so it in in effect you'd have this hierarchy within the the community and i think one of the the goals within nouns was not to emphasize any sort of hierarchy between one member or the 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 it's not to build a hierarchy with within the community wait so are those heads programmed to only show up once a year versus other heads or are programmed to show up more often or is that just a that was just a 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 the the amount of heads that there are which correct me if i'm wrong there's 230 something

yeah it's about 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 uh you could see multiple heads happen in one year or three in a row as we saw recently right but it's not it's never ever programmed rarity and i really like this this concept because if every if all properties are not are the same or treated equivalently then you have like emergent rarity right and so it's more about just like the random uh serendipity of certain properties coming together or like you said like the random serendipity of the days of of time in a row or just like rather than like controlling for rarity

and having top-down uh rarity created by like the organizers you have like this bottom-up community decided what's rare uh which i think is a little bit more true to the ethos of crypto would you agree totally it's chaotic rarity and and there's something to be said as well by by the since the only sort of uh quote-unquote rarity is time right if you have noun one two three um you could think of rarity as well as uh noun 969 went for a lot higher than now in 68 or 70. you can imagine noun 420 we'll do something similar and so yeah it's definitely a 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 fomo announce has popped up where the community actually votes on so as blocks are ticking by after an auction's finished you can actually see if you were to mint in you know this particular block that's that's about to be uh 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 uh the community sort of you know voting up and down these various potential next nouns and if there's enough upvotes on the next noun then uh a transaction is triggered the auction settlement happens and the next noun is voted and minted on um 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 uh aesthetic nouns will drive more demand at their primary auction and so the dow started funding these fomo games um to sort of create this feedback loop of demand and aestheticism um which has

sort of created this this new game within the nouns ecosystem as well actually i do have uh 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 um but also the jpeg's not necessarily the point right like i mean it's it's a fun feature but it's not the center piece is that a fair take of the noun's ecosystem i i would say it's the centerpiece i think that yeah i mean i 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 i would i would think

that in that context you would probably put like the meme the artwork the feeling in in the center um 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 i think like i would personally view the treasury as like the means for proliferating the meme rather than the meme as like the way to accrue the treasury um so i i i would probably put put like the the the noun-ish artwork and the nounish feeling in 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 dao aspect of nouns because this is also something that's very very unique

about it um 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 dao oriented for like are there 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 to make this show possible there is a brand new staking feature in the ledger live app today we all like staking the assets that we're bullish on and now you can stake seven different coins inside the ledger live app cosmos polka dot tron algorithms 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 through a partnership with figment

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where we're going to talk about nouns governance and governance of over announced now is different than governance of you over your particular defy app or your particular dow because it's governance by nft not by erc20 and so who wants to take the difference between governing an organization by an nft versus an erc20 and why this is perhaps better question mark if you do believe it's better who wants to take this part of the story four one five six go for it yeah sure i mean i i think um you know for context i i haven't spent much time at all in in any like erc20 dows um you know it's kind of funny like in in the

kind of initial specification for nouns i just you know i had this idea that a dow would be cool and kind of dashed off this idea that you know oh there you know there should be a dow attached to the nft collection without necessarily understanding like the gravity of of what that would mean long term and you know like all all of the the kind of complexity that goes with it but you know like the the high level one noun is one vote right one 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 jpeg 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 um and you know to to the extent that um

i guess like non-fungible uh governance tokens kind of produce uh different outcomes than than fungible governance tokens you know the these are kind of like the differences um in in kind of like behavior of nouns down voters but you know i i would say i like my my best guess is that um the the effects of the votes being non-fungible are like at least at this this point in history like sort of negligible like i 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 of like now the nounish meme and the nounish culture uh and and then also like the slow cadence of of like down

membership growth rather than like being specific to the the idea that 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 that make up the treasury so we you know our project makes eth and eth goes directly in the treasury where a lot of other dowsers have sort of minted their own token and the bulk of their treasury is this minted erc20 token that they've created um and they can you know do other things to try to convert that into e they're stables to do various dow operations um 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 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 um another interesting dynamic and i also think like the proposals are in some sense compared to other dows um like much less risky right so when you're talking about a compound or another you know pretty heavy hitting d5 protocol um every proposal is under an intense amount of scrutiny because if you set these parameters incorrectly on 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 and sort of the um 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 d5 protocols yeah one one thing i i'd add there is on the conversation of of nfts versus erc20s i think while what 41 said is true the fact that it it is the nounish 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 talk about that nft it's not this faceless sort of fungible thing that you have 10 thousand of but rather it's it's a noun it's a thing with eyes it's an identity almost right and you sort of become that within the tao 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 it 405 oh yeah i was just going to add to that you know and that's a great point um i was just going to add to that that like if you go to announce that wtf and and kind of

take a look at any specific noun you can actually see the voting record of that now you can see everything that it's done so i mean yeah that that's certainly true that you know the the the non-fungible nature of of nouns governance kind of lets 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 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 you know board apes are an identity for many many people but board apes don't represent like one membership vote in a dow 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 d5 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 that's unique and i think probably adds a little bit more of an engaging governance experience that 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 vape was alluding to this with all of the kind of like d5 projects like there's the sense that like all of these things that are built on top of this like very new and experimental tech stack are like so serious and so high stakes and so intense um and 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 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 so what would you guys say is the

direction of the dao was the nouns dao 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 would what was what's progress defined by by the nouns seneca vape vape you want to take this one either youtube yeah go for it yeah so i think to a large degree the the sort of direction of the dao and where the treasury is allocated has been left up to the community that said i i do think there's a culture which is what we call nounish culture that is very hard to define but i think everybody more or less abides by it

and 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 i think that's the answer will be a bit different between between members and and and people within or outside the community but i i definitely say it's something it's something along the lines of optimistic uh 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 neat space it's there's

no sort of technical around it but um yeah so and then going back to to your question i think at the very beginning our focus was optimized for getting anything out of out the door right so fun whatever does uh proliferate the meme but i feel that as we've grown as as we continue to grow and evolve the the nounish meme what started as maybe just the classes and an aesthetic becomes some something much deeper right and so for example while initially you could fund you know merch with announced glasses now you see more um trying to find more more um how do you

say um more more ambitious uh um 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 uh the glasses themselves so what would like victory or success look like for now so if we like fast forward 5 10 15 years into the future and however you define it nouns the noun style is super successful what does that look like like how how would we gauge success i mean i would say one of the ways i think about it and again this is this is

not you know i i i think we we try to avoid saying you know that this is the direction that the the dao should go um 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 doubt to determine its own direction and you know as as uh seneca was was kind of describing like that that will be like a function of of certain kind of initial conditions right including the meme and the nounish feeling um but you know when when i think about like you know what what is the best possible case here you know what like what what could this this become kind of in in the maximum i i i would i would think about it as like potentially the the governance

layer of the metaverse right like the the idea that um maybe the first instance of nouns to to the extent that you know it we're correct or or that we've actually like invented something substantial right the first instance of that substantial thing um 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 the kind of greatest claim on on sort of like provenance right and that that would make its nfts the most valuable um and and and that would mean that you know it it would kind of accumulate the most capital and it would have the most capital to to kind of like distribute you know what whatever that capital might be used for if it's if it's public

goods funding or or kind of like funding ethereum infrastructure etc um and and you know that 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 um it is to be a member of that that organization right and and so in in the long run you could imagine that at scale you know ethereum has scaled the kind of economic bandwidth of ethereum scaled um the the the value of the eth and the treasury has has you know increased by a couple of orders of magnitude um and and you know there are lots and lots of these kind of nounish dows that kind of point back to the original as having this kind of like

provenance you know in this scenario nouns is very very value or 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 um but they would potentially be owned by communities because those communities would want to kind of share the cost of of ownership and and those communities themselves could could then um become organizations you know maybe organizations as large as as nouns is today um you you could have a single noun you know now in 386 or 387 or whatever has a community of of members and kind of engaged members kind of on the order of magnitude of

nouns today and then nouns kind of like that you know the the dow the meta organization is is sort of like you know the the un of all the individual nouns and and um all of those kind of individual nouns have have participants and delegates that choose how the individual noun votes so you know i i think it's certainly possible to imagine the organization kind of like scaling up to to to look something like this over the next few years um and and i think that that would probably be like the the best case scenario we can imagine today for for the the future of the project i think if you want to add anything to that it's hard to follow that up i think we talk about this stuff a lot

of times so so yeah the guy echo a lot of the uh the narrative there and the goal there and um yeah i mean i think you know first is trying to reach some sort of brand ubiquity within nft culture of the metaverse culture um that's really kind of the stage right now and then i think 4156 did a good job of laying out yeah kind of the future vision here yeah like likewise i i echo everything that both 41 and vape said the one thing i i'd add is with that sort of uh meta org i think the one one thing one thing i i focus on a lot is is what's the 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 uh 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 uh 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 uh either like using something like oval

network or just whatever just like staking their eath right and like growing the treasury that way or diversifying their treasury into something else or just like it one 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 is there any like 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 haven't available is it or is it more focused on just the brand side of things yeah you can go ahead and i see you guys like muting and muting each other

yeah sure so i mean um you know i think again it it is ultimately up to the doubt to decide but um i i would i would say there it there there are some kind of incentives to to kind of like stay away from kind of complex you know management of the treasury you know one like the the kind of like the the form the form factor of like doing that is is is challenging um you know there's all kinds of like added like regulatory complexity and risk in doing it and then i just think like the the risk reward um is probably such that there's just like a lot more leverage in in kind of proliferating the brand proliferating the meme kind of funding funding public goods making people aware of nouns than

there is and like trying to earn you know some kind of like apy on the treasury um you know the treasury is denominated in eth i think most of us who like deeply understand ethereum are like extraordinarily bullish um on on you know the the future of the asset and to the extent that nouns is you know treasury is denominated in eth our our card is sort of like hitch to something that has a very bright future and and really like you know nouns won't 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 eath you know we stake the eath we do some like very basic stuff but in my view there's just so much more upside that's possible then then kind of you know uh some kind of yield on on the treasury well fam thank you so much for for joining me and uh 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 noun style what should i ask them i'd love to know what you guys think that i should ask the nouns the noun holding community uh about their perspective on things you have any question or question

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 that'd be interesting to get some broader perspectives on uh community members because you know we're pretty heads and head down head in the weeds over here um and so talking about a lot of the various failure modes that are uh possible i think that's probably an interesting topic to touch on it would be uh i think it'd be very interesting to ask them like about about the nounders you know i think you know we we kind of look at the community and and have things that we want to work on and things that that we think should be

prioritized in terms of risks um it'd be interesting to know what what they think we should be spending time on um and then also just like you know how much um how much involvement how much direction do they think we we should kind of continue to have in the project you know again we have kind of like internal discussions and ideas about what what is correct but it'd be interesting to hear the the noun owner perspective um on on that topic that i got anything from you yeah i'd i'd ask them each specifically what's top of mind within nouns and and more importantly why is it is it that not much else i think 41's question will will be an interesting one

well thank you for helping me write my agenda for for next wednesday so i appreciate that seneca is there anything that you guys want to say before we sign off the uh the anniversary is uh on on august 8th um so that will be one one year of of nouns every day so happy now anniversary i'm sure that noun will have a decent premium associated with it i would i'm sure he 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 bankless nounders thank you so much for joining me thank you for having me appreciate it

for having us there's like i said for everyone watching the stream or watching or if you're watching the stream the uh now nerds 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 it's tuesday so that i'm having the niners on tomorrow the next day wednesday either way i will see you there and thank you everyone for tuning in cheers