Nounspace & Blankspace: A Launchpad for Community-Owned Platforms

Transcript

Opening & Intro (ETHBoulder + What is Nounspace)

What's up, Eth Boulder? How y'all doing today? I hope you're having the best day ever. I know Tom and I are. And yeah, very excited to tell you guys about nounspace and blank space. Um, normally, you know, I try to stay away from just product demos and shilling, but I promise that what I'm shilling today is open source and free. And I think it's going to be something that each of you guys, uh, a lot of you guys are going to be interested in, especially any community members or community builders. So, I'm going to talk about Nounspace, which is a platform we've been building for the nouns community for the better part of two years, and Blankspace, which is the next evolution of Nounspace and something that we just opened up alpha access to a week and a half ago. And we're going to be inviting more

NounsDAO Background & Treasury Funding Model

communities from the wait list every day. So if you guys sign up for the wait list today, we'll get you on there ASAP. All right. But before I talk about uh nonspace and blank space, I want to pay some homage to the community that inspired and funded this all. Nounst. So show of hands. Who here has heard of nouns before? Awesome. Almost everybody. Um, for those that aren't familiar, Nouns Dow started as an experiment in Dow governance in 2021. And this is Nouns. Every day, one of these adorable nouns NFTTS is conceived on chain and auctioned off to the highest bidder forever.

Um, and the proceeds from those auctions go into a treasury. And then these holders of the nouns NFTts then vote on proposals and Dow governance to allocate the treasury to awesome ideas. And to date, these auctions have generated over hund00 million in revenues for the treasury. And the community has funded over $65 million of awesome projects of all shapes and sizes. So N has funded all sorts of awesome ideas to date. Everything from schools in Uganda to discovering a new species of frog. Um to a giant float in the Rose Parade, which Stupid Buddy Studios did a whole documentary about the process. Um an esports team, tons of artwork, animations, a musical that's being made.

Examples of Funded Projects (Public Goods & Experiments)

As you can see, ideas of all shapes and sizes are encouraged to make a proposal. Obviously, some members have, you know, a desire to fund things that are going to benefit nouns and give some upside so we can keep funding ideas forever. but now has funded a lot of public goods and charitable causes as well. A couple years ago, Cynica, one of the original Nounders, made a series of proposals to fund three teams to build a Nounish Farcaster client. Over 40 different teams submitted applications, and the community voted for their favorite. And a week and a half after being inspired by this proposal to have uh to build nounspace, we had a $100,000 grant and a commitment to the community to build what we had proposed over the next three months.

Origin Story: MySpace on Farcaster Idea

A fun fact, I think it's fun at least, is that the idea for nounspace actually started as a joke. I was at a ATX DAO event talking with a fellow nouner about these proposals and um had an idea. Wait, what if we built MySpace on top of Farcaster and like me, this Ner Brennan uh was a huge fan of MySpace back in our teenage years and it's actually what got him into software development by customizing these profiles. So, he really liked the idea and encouraged us to run with it. So posted a thread on Farcaster um and the community got really excited about it which got us more excited. So um I'd been working at ShapeShift since uh they acquired my last startup Bitfrack in 2018 and I was just going part-time in my role of head

Building Nounspace & Community Support

of decentralization for the Fox Foundation. So I was thinking about what to build next and when my good friend Jesse saw this thread um he's a co-founder of ATX DAO, he reached out and said, "Dude, let's let's build this." We locked in and we started working on the proposal. And over the course of the next week, the idea evolved from like a half joke into a grand vision uh for a unique product that we were really excited about and felt needed to exist. And long story short, we built it and it's pretty freaking cool. Um we delivered everything in this original prop and much much more. And we've continued building and growing since. Y'all want to see it? Heck yeah. So actually other than this proposal which is on a platform that was sunset sadly everything I've shown you so far has

Platform Overview & Unified Community Hub

been on noun space so you've already had a taste but let's see what else this bad boy can do. So in addition to the content functionality from across the the nounverse that we showed you earlier. We also have Nouns social feeds and not only the channel on Farcaster, but also the nouns account on X and a link to the Discord and Instagram. We also have Nouns documentation and Nounspot, which is a new app built by a community member that catalogs all these IRL uh nounish places around the world. And that's just the homepage. Previously, all this content uh content functionality was scattered across different websites and it's now unified in one place. And beyond the homepage, uh, we have a fully functioning Farcaster client with the ability to cast and engage with content, including

Social Feeds, Docs & Member Directory

the growing library of many apps. We also have a directory um that lists all the different uh nouns holders with their Farcaster accounts. And we offer fully customizable profiles for each of these members. Community managers can design the default profile for each member, which can include whatever mini apps or content or functionality is relevant to that community. Um, so for nouns that could be the forecaster feed, the noun they hold, an ab button to delegate, their governance participation, but most importantly, the community member can customize their profile space further with whatever content and functionality is important to them and fully customizing the look and the sound to match their own vibes.

Uh, so here are some like sci-fi novels that I vibe coded and uh, Vibe wrote with AI and you can just read those directly on my profile, but you can put whatever is important to you. We also have custom space types and the ability to add new space types for any uniquely identifiable asset. So like any ENS name, NFT, really any smart contract. Um so we have token spaces. So space for every token on base with the charts, swaps, live chat that's token gatable, a feed of all the mentions and proposal spaces. So every proposal to nouns automatically gets a space that has the proposal, an AI summary, live chat, and the ability to vote and view the activity.

Custom Profiles & Personalization

Um, and yeah, communities that want to create their own space type can define the default design. Um, and then again, the owner, uh, the deployer of whatever that unique asset is can then customize it further. And here's what it looks like to customize. So, super simple. We basically have like a website builder on top of Farcaster. It's also MySpace inspired, so you can, you know, do custom backgrounds and music and then, um, use a growing library of not only these fidgets, which are like little things like text and video, uh, as well as all the mini apps, uh, that are, you know, new mini apps are getting launched every day in the Farcaster base ecosystem. Um, and yeah, it's open source, so you can, one of the cool things is like not only can you add new fidgets, but you can also just build on

Token Spaces & Proposal Spaces

top of it without changing the code, just by vibe coding one of these little mini apps or websites that you can just embed directly. So, that's noun space. Now, I'm going to talk about what we just launched a week and a half ago, blank space. And yeah, the fonts got lost when we transferred it over. But um the problem that we're solving with blank space is that every community needs a website. Um and right now community's content and functionality is fragmented across a ton of different websites and apps. And few communities have the ability to build a website that actually aggregates all that content and functionality um let alone a mini app. We think that going forward it's important for communities to not only have a website but a mini app that can live inside these other

Website Builder & Mini-Apps

apps whether it's Farcaster or base or other apps that add many apps in the future. And um not only is it hard to build a website but it's hard to build an actual platform even with vibe coding where your community can actually like log in and engage and and have their own profile that they can customize. So we're very excited to announce blankspace which is a new type of launchpad one for these community platforms which are essentially white labelled versions of nounspace that the communities can deploy easily and permissionlessly. Um this is the weight list that's live right now and if you guys sign up for the wait list we're actively inviting people and uh here is a sneak peek of what you'll see once you get access.

Introducing Blankspace (Next Evolution)

This is how easy it is to launch a space system. So, first uh you can configure your community's domain. And if you don't have a custom domain, we'll give you a free blank space subdomain. Then you just add your logo. Um right now I'm doing NARS fork of nouns for the skateboarding community. Uh we'll autogenerate this metad description that shows up in search results, but you can customize it. Similarly, we'll this is a mini app as well that's getting deployed. So, we autogenerate the tags, but you can customize those. Then you can just do a few branding colors. So, background color here. Here, I'm going to grab uh the logo color for the the cast button. And then for the font, we're going to choose Landrina, which is one of the nounish fonts. And then we'll make the font color white so that it looks good on the background. Then you

The Problem: Fragmented Community Tools

add a thumbnail image. And um we'll help you crop it. This is what will show up when you share a link to your platform on social media. And then this step is for pre pre-populating. So, all these things are optional, but if your community already has a website or a Farcaster channel, um you can plug these things in and then when your space gets deployed in a moment, we're going to automatically uh populate some of the different pages and stuff using this information so that your space system's useful out of the box. Um if your community already has tokens, you can connect those tokens, both ERC20s and NFTts. And one of the things we do here is not only use these tokens to token gate the AI powered functionality in the app like by customizing or generating enhancing casts. Um but also we're going

Launching a Community Space (Step-by-Step Demo)

to generate a directory of all of your members so that as soon as your space systems deployed we already have all of your members in a directory. Um so you preview your space, make sure it looks good, sign a a message which is free and your space will get deployed. It's literally that easy for your community to have a new homepage and hub. Behind the scenes right now, we're doing things like looking up all the holders of your tokens on chain and then associating that with their Farcaster account. Also grabbing other data from ENS so that we can really give them a rich profile and uh setting up the domain and literally it's live like that. And you can see out of the box um we've already got the homepage, we've got the social channels um in the directory of these members and that's one minute any community can

have that. um further um the community managers can customize this. So because I deployed this, I'm going to log in and then I'll have the ability to further customize this inside the app. And the same tools that are available for community managers to customize their space system are available to the members to customize their own profile. So uh now you can see there's a customize button in the top. You can customize these spaces and their tabs. And you can even add new spaces to the nav. So here I'm going to add a docs page. And then I'm going to um drop in a web embed fidget. And I'll drop in just the URL to NAR's documentation website.

Member Directory & Token Integration

You actually have to get the right URL which I have over here. And um yeah, something that was previously fragmented and separate and would have been difficult uh taken some coding knowledge or some time to embed on the homepage is now part of this uh community hub. And that's just an example. As you can see, really the possibilities are are endless here. You can do pretty much anything you can imagine. If you can't do it yet, then you can make a pull request to to add that. All right. So, so far just in the past week and a half of uh inviting some friendly communities, we've had some awesome space systems deployed. One that's here today is Nouns Build. They are awesome. They enable anyone to deploy a Nounish DAO in just a few minutes. They deploy all the different

Customizing Pages & Embedding External Tools

smart contracts. And um what's cool about these nouns Dow contracts is that uh it's fully on chain. So you can have um Dowo governance and a treasury and token memberships out of the box that are fully onchain and decentralized. And now with blankspace, each of these communities can have their own hub right out of the box as well. Nouns build gave them a page um but it wasn't customizable and it was part of their platform. Now communities can have their own uh fully customizable platform. Um we've also got Nars which I gave a little demo of earlier. uh clanker space a space for system for the entire clanker ecosystem. Um there's a ball community who's here today as well with Zol. Uh we just did multiple book.space a space system for these open clock agents and skatehive a community just

Communities Already Using Blankspace

for skateboarders and hopefully we'll see some else communities up there soon. Uh another thing we're very interested in is uh not only enabling communities to connect their existing token but also launch a token that's natively integrated with their space system. We think this can be a great revenue opportunity for these communities and we want to help these communities basically add real utility to their token which you all you get out of the box with token gated functionality in your app. Um we think yeah a lot of these community tokens are just memecoins and if we can help these communities add more um utility that can be a great revenue opportunity both for these communities and for for blank space in a way that doesn't cost the communities anything.

Token Utility & Revenue Opportunities

Uh another thing that we have a proof of concept working for right now is an agent launchpad. So, um, I haven't talked much about Nounpspace Tom, but many of y'all might have already met him. He's got more followers than me. He's very active on social. Um, and Tom is pretty amazing. He's like been the biggest driver of Nounspac's growth so far. Um, because he's just a 247 ambassador for the community. He's awesome. Uh, he's we we've spent a lot of time refining and fine-tuning um, Tom and contributing back to the Eliza ecosystem. Um, and yeah, we just now over the past week and a half, as Shawn mentioned, uh, OpenCloud came out and it's enabled these agents to do all sorts of incredible things. So, um, we deployed through this proof of concept Tom in the cloud on OpenClaw. And it was

Agent Launchpad & Autonomous Community Agents

just so cool how in a few minutes we could teach him to just by talking to him, tell him to get a wallet and start voting autonomously on the nouns proposals, which we had previously done manually, uh, and casting about it every time. It's so amazing that you can configure these agents just by talking to it. And we think every community should have one of these agents that can not only be an ambassador, but as these tools get better, um start doing a growing number of things that otherwise humans would have to do. Um so the next steps for us um we're going to be inviting communities from the weight list. Um, we're hoping to secure some more grant funding. And the real goal with that grant funding is not only going to be to continue maintaining and improving uh the blank space ecosystem, but to really decentralize it

Future Plans & Decentralizing the Project

so that this can live forever as an open- source public good um that can be like a core Lego and Ethereum and isn't dependent on the team to continue to continue building. But yeah, so a lot's changed in the past week and a half since I scheduled this talk was scheduled. Um, not only has Farcaster been uh the protocol been sold to Nanar and the future of Farcaster is is kind of up in the air, hoping for the best there. Um, but you know, the AI ecosystem has changed radically in the past couple weeks and both my co-founder and I um had these new opportunities materialize to take on full-time roles uh with some awesome projects. So, we're still going to keep maintaining and um uh blank space and we want to find out ways to we have the team in

Brazil that's interested to continue working on it full-time. So, our hope is to basically get some funding from nouns um to decentralize it and to keep building this out so they can continue contributing to it. But the kind of the future of blank space is up in the air and we're very open to different ideas. Like the main thing that we want to see is that this lives on. Um and yeah, we're not trying to get any more upside. I would it would be awesome if this could produce some recurring revenue for the nouns uh community and treasury but very open to different options for how to continue um improving and growing blank space from here but it works and it's it's powerful and already can do a lot of things and you can build on top of it. So my new role um I'll tell you

Venice AI Integration & Private AI Models

guys about is I'm head of product at Venice as of this past week. If you guys haven't heard of Venice, it's an awesome platform. It's like OpenAI um but it's private and not only can you get anonymized access to like the OpenAI and anthropic models but fully private access to open source models including uh fully uncensored models. Uh Venice also has an API so it actually powers a lot of the AI functionality in blankspace powers noun space tom and they have some very cool tokconomics where you can basically buy or mint DM with VVV and each DM gives you a dollar of inference forever. Uh so a really cool way where you can instead of paying a monthly subscription, you can accumulate some DM and basically power uh AI functionality with that DM in

Nouns Ecosystem Status & Community Call-to-Action

perpetuity. So thank you all so much especially for uh the patience during those technical difficulties. Um I yeah I encourage everyone to join a nounish community. Um there's a few here onchain creators uh nouns build I will say the nouns ecosystem is is kind of in an interesting place right now. um somewhat captured. Um but the community, there's still a lot of awesome community members. We're still funding some ideas. Humpty reminded me yesterday that Nouns has been captured a few times before and has prevailed. So um you know, we're still here. We're still building. But there's also a lot of other awesome nouns communities and you can launch your own on nouns.build.

Discord Integration Philosophy

Also, everyone can come customize our space on nounspace.com today. And if you sign up for the blankspace weight list, we're going to be inviting more and more communities each day. Awesome. Thank you all so much. Hope you have the best day ever. Come tie-dye with us at 3M in the Boulder Park before the uh afterparty. We're going to be tie-dyeing swag. >> Totally. Um and we're not necessarily trying to like replace Discord. I think Discord's an awesome tool. I think it'd be very hard to replace it. More the way we think about it is that we would love to like integrate Discord. So, right now, Discord is just like fragmented from Farcaster and social and all these other things and it's not very customizable itself. It's not really the best homepage for the community, but we don't want to necessarily like if a community is on Discord, we don't want

to try to replace that and have them migrate. We would rather just embed Discord uh in in the platform. Yeah, >> I think Discord is just a really good chat app, and it's actually really hard to build a really good chat app. Um but uh yeah, we do have live chat, but we don't have anything near as like sophisticated as what Discord has. And again, yeah, I think like there's so many awesome tools out there rather than try to compete with each one, what we what we're really interested in is how can we like aggregate all the best tools and and make it customizable because every community is unique and different. And some use Discord, some use Telegram, some just are on social. Um, so we felt that like customizability and modularity was the only way to build u community tooling that can work for every

Modularity & Community Tooling Vision

community because as probably a lot of you guys know, community tooling is really hard and it's also hard to monetize. Uh, a lot of these communities don't have a lot of money to pay for this stuff. So, it's part of why we're really interested in h uh how can we make this not only free for communities, but ideally even help them generate revenue. So, this can be a revenue positive thing for them. >> Any other questions? >> Awesome. Thank you all so much.