The Nouners | Jacob, Noun 40, & Noun 22 | Nouns DAO Series Ep #2

Transcript

welcome bankless nation to this second episode of our first ever two-part series on banklist where we are covering the nouns ecosystem on monday i went live with the nounders aka the nouns founders uh about the nouns project this nft project that has really changed the meta of nfts and not just nfts but also dowse it's a very interesting project if you haven't watched that one yet that is the first of the second part series and we are going to skip over all of those same conversations that we already had in the first episode with the nounders like what is nouns how did it get bill like what are the details behind it because we already covered all that and now today on the show we are talking to the now nurse uh three members of the nouns owning

community jacob noun 40 and noun 22 uh the different members of the nouns community that all got pulled into nouns because of what it is and that'll be one of the first questions i ask them like why of all nft projects that are out there why nouns and we'll start from there and we'll overall kind of talk about their the vibe of nouns that they so thoroughly enjoy their vision for noun style and what else about nouns does really particularly excites them so all those conversations are coming up 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 eath in rocket pool and get our eth in return allowing you to stake your

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number 40 and then the bottom left and then in bottom right we got noun 22 the zombie handed down uh now nerves welcome to the show yeah thanks for having me on so thank you guys so much from i'm really going to enjoy some of this perspective as i alluded to in the first half of the show um bankless is interested in a noun as soon as that bank the bank noun gets minted uh we're probably going to snag that one but uh i want to hear about why you guys uh got pulled into the nouns group with the nouns organization the noun style uh what about the nouns projects you guys are all nft dabbling individuals what about nouns really struck your interest and jacob we'll start with you um yeah yes for me

uh it first caught my attention because it it fought the zora auction house as part of its implementation so i and uh i think i was very close to don hoffman at the time he was obviously one of the nouns of the project and um you know a lot of interesting creators and artists that i was a big fan of were involved in it um so i've kind of been following it basically since it launched and then i think the thing that was most curious to me when i was like looking through it was the treasury component um and the like perpetual options and like obviously the combination of those two things well like just from a pure mechanism standpoint that was like really intriguing and i'd like never

seen anything like that before so that's what i initially peaked my interest and then i guess over the kind of like first six months of the project as i kept um coming back to it each day and seeing the options and then um tracking the proposals it became increasingly clear to me that like this was more of an organization than it was necessarily an nft collection or it's like an organization disguised as an nft collection in in a way where i was like wait a second like you're seeing all of these internet strangers who have the collective incentive to work together because they know they're being diluted every day and there is a very straightforward way for these nft holders to like take control

and allocate those treasury for the benefit of everyone which was fascinating in and of itself because you know i think like with the 10k pfp boom or mania or whatever you want to call it like i think it has kind of these structural issues where a lot of collectors can be left screaming like devs do something because you know all of the eth goes into this black hole where they have no control or say over what to do with all of the eats generated from that sale and i think nouns offers like this really interesting alternative to that and it's like instead of devs do something that's down do something and it's like wait oh [ __ ] that's me i'm part of it oh that's us um that's us uh and it's just it's a very simple model and it's set up in a way that means that

you know you have people who come together because they like the art they like the mission of the vision and they have a very simple way to like work together to help propagate that so once i started to like understand that it was you know like six months later or so it was when i ended up um buying the the noun you see on my screen here and then you know since kind of jumping into the project i've just been increasingly mind blown by the powerful model but i guess that's um the initial draw was forking zoro and then and then tracking it and watching it and then being like hang on a second this is this is cool um so yeah that was what got me into it initially something you said that i'd actually like to dive in on um is the dilution

aspect and 22 and 40 uh again 40 bottom left 22 bottom right uh i'm wondering if if you share that same uh uh idea that the the dilution is like this motivating factor for the dow is that something that also stuck out to you guys as well either one of you i know it's hard when i don't point to a particular one of you but just go for it whoever wants to go first sure i mean i thought the dilution was an interesting aspect to it um and by the way thanks david for having us on uh but i can kind of go into you know what drew me to the project which i guess the dilution was part of it but there was like a whole bunch of different pieces that came together uh you know i i had i've been involved

full-time in crypto for a few years now uh and whereas nfts are something that i'm super involved in now it wasn't something that i initially that i initially kind of clicked with me you know i i was involved in cryptokitties in a small way and saw the emergence of punks in early 2021 but didn't really have a strong opinion on them and it wasn't until i guess about a year ago uh there was a mint for a project it's called crypto dick butts uh where everything kind of made itself clear to me um like i'm not kidding uh like it this idea of like instead of a lot of nft projects being based around road map utility and team trying to sustain hype right i it kind of it dawned on me that i think that

what creates a sustainable uh nft project that'll capture value is one that captures attention and then one that is really effectively uh an internet meme uh and i can i kind of kind of understand through that but i got involved in early days in that community uh but basically a larger picture of memes being art uh and and the sense that you know our generation isn't painting church ceilings and we're not carving things out of marvel but the cultural contributions that we've created that resonate with the most amount of people and define our lives our memes and internet memes uh specifically and so it was after and i got involved with that i heard 4156 on a podcast basically you know laying out his thesis for nouns uh you know describing i think punks as the

the citizen kane of nfts but you know we hadn't seen like the jurassic park or the godfather yet uh and i thought that the combination of all these different aspects you mentioned you know the dilution of the distribution mechanism uh the treasury you know the community around a pfp set uh but but really critically to me the the potential to create a viral internet meme you know with just a big treasury and a bunch of smart people seemed like a really interesting endeavor to go on right like it's hard to say how an internet meme gets viral and spreads but i i from seeing some of the people who are involved in the early days i had relationships with people you know who were involved in the first two weeks before i got my now but i thought it would be a fun thing to

do uh and see if we could kind of create this with a well-financed dow with a bunch of smart people in it uh but obviously the so much has changed over the last year but that's how that's what drew me to initially uh 940 you want to walk us through what piqued you about the the whole noun project and why you decided to buy noun number 40. absolutely i think really the um the primitive that uh maybe has been less discussed by uh by jacob and enantiometry here that really dropped to me was the fact that it was uh the everything the artwork and the code base and all the intellectual property was put into the public domain in day one

that was sort of where it all began and the question is is that a thing that can work i think that question really interested me because there's a lot of reasons that you can argue that it shouldn't work because if um board apes didn't sort of manage the brand for example let's say in a way where derivatives were not allowed and only like reputable teams could do partnerships then you could um imagine why that could unravel there could be scams there could be really bad iterations of of comics or films or things that you don't think really represent the brand well so then you would argue that it shouldn't work but the the question about like can this actually work in this chaotic internet

driven way where everything is given up for free and you actively lean into that characteristic where you make it easier for derivatives to launch their own interpretation you make it easier for anyone to share it in any way that they want could that be kind of a superior way in which you build a brand so we've kind of seen these this like studio model of building brands like disney or every sort of fashion luxury brand etc where it's kind of meticulously managed by a group of people but rather if you invert that and say no but we want the complete opposite where you put everything out and you maximally encourage and make it easier and easier by actually funding infrastructure so

that it becomes easier to um create uh those copies or derivatives or your interpretations of it or your tweets um would that be a more competitive model a thing that that grows faster or better um i think was it was a really interesting uh question question that i kind of couldn't stop thinking about uh which then led me to yeah so i asked the nounders this same question and i'll ask it to you guys what what is it is there a shared vision a shared success story for nouns as in do do you think that the dao the nouns

and the nounders combined overall share in the same definition of what like a win condition for nouns looks like or do you think that this idea of like what does the dao want to achieve is that still kind of like nebulous and and up in the air and jacob i'll start with you on that one uh it was a venn diagram of everyone's different perspectives on it i think the thing that would be in the center would be the nouns glasses as like um and then everything else is kind of like secondary to that or in service of propagating the glasses and i think that the mechanism kind of works in a way which is like well the more that the meme is propagated the more valuable the

next nft that goes on sale which means the more treasury there is to propagate the meme which means you know you kind of get this like very simple and powerful feedback loop which might be a pay-per-click maximizer to some extent like it it might go the dow could be in a position in the future where it's like i wonder what building we could knock down and spend five billion dollars constructing like an ounce glasses statue but i think like that is the core the core essence of the the dao is the or the shared vision is is the i'd say that the glasses and then i would say that if there was like a ring around that it would probably be some common ideals and principles around public goods public funding playfulness and then just like fun

it's probably like the combination and then obviously you know as you get wider and wider out i think um the views get increasingly diverse but i think right at the middle it's propagate the meme is probably the most the most fundamental [ __ ] version in my opinion i don't know if that's shared it'd be funny if it's not 40 20 do you guys agree with that the the glasses are at the epicenter yes yeah you go ahead for you yeah yeah yes but i also want to say that the glasses will ultimately become a visual logo or meme that has more meaning to it the same way that you look at the nike swish and you kind of think about athletes that can or empowering athletes i think there will be more um

ideas that it uh the the the meme uh becomes to have and in a way the meme um the true sense of the word is like an idea uh and i think spreading the idea is is part of the uh what's captured in the polar perfect mean and and there's a lot of ideas that are core to that um there are these mechanisms that are new that um brings together and in that sense i think um proliferating that model or mental model of the world or the other sort of values that come with this model being possible uh for example i think jacob was talking about public goods and i think there's a reason that there's that's kind of a thing that um is very closely associated because any digital

artwork or code base or etc intellectual property that is put to the public domain is in itself a public good it's not consumable or um uh it's not depletable in that sense anyways um so i think as nouns an experiment kind of inherently is an experiment about can you scale the production of public goods digital public goods while um also the people that are involved in that endeavor can monetize and uh create wealth in that process as well so um yeah i think personally that is a direction that really does excite me um uh it's it would be a fun thing for uh nouns glasses to kind of be everywhere around the world but i think

if it didn't mean anything um then it could kind of be a dystopian future uh and the meaning that i think i would be excited about is now i'm just kind of representing a new model where um you create abundance uh through a lot of public goods sort of scaled production i'd love to turn the conversation to public goods but 22. do you want to add anything onto this so far yeah sure i i think at its core uh like the other guys are saying that you know the goal here is to proliferate nouns as a meme and i think that you know the glasses the noggles are the most you know memetically potent thing and kind of lend themselves uh to being just put on different places it's easy to communicate see how easy you

understand but i do think that nounishness is something since the early days of the project we've we've struggled to agree on what is now right like what is the mission statement and i i think that nounishness really is like an emerging quality there's certain things that we've seen you know be you know part of the foundation 4156 made an emphasis on public goods in the early days and that's that's really stuck uh but we've seen lots of different types of people and not just people who want to buy nouns but just people who are just enthusiastic about it come into the community and kind of ascribe their own meaning to this to the meme uh and i do think that the the path to scaling this in the future there's a

strong emphasis you know strong culture within the dao you know cc0 and ethereum and nfts but i do think if we're successful in proliferating this that the ways that different people see and adopt and enjoy this are going to seem really strange and foreign to us like if you look at like a doge or like pepe right the the the creators of those memes often found the way that they were adopted to be bizarre or even objectionable and i think that you know we're doing things like creating uh sufobi dolls of nouns in japan to appeal to like japanese doll collectors as a single example and i think that when we see the meme get adopted and like it clicks with that

community or other different communities i i think that the what nouns means when it reaches critical mass may potentially seem very strange and different to what the inner values of the dow are right now um so all it is to say is that it's an emergent value set and i think it's gonna be really exciting to see what happens yeah i think there's a broader conversation uh to have about how well can the noun stout actually retain a grasp over what the nouns meme actually is um all good memes that have propagated throughout the internet like you definitely just alluded to like it's like a pandora's box like each meme uh leaves like the the grasp of its founders and turns and gets like

misappropriated and granted every single meme has not really had a dow and a treasury behind it so that's definitely something that's different about nouns dao versus like other you know web 2 memes if you will and so maybe that's something to explore in this conversation as to like how well can the noun style actually retain a grasp as to what the noun's meme actually is um and and with that i'd like to turn to this tweet that i'm putting on screen from uh punk four one five six uh noun 40 you brought this to my attention and they say uh the glasses the nouns glasses nouns without public goods are just another form of lambo public goods without nouns don't scale one of the opportunities of nouns is to couple them so that so

tightly that they mean the same thing noggles or lambos noggles fund public goods public goods are the new lambo uh noun 40 i'm wondering if you could uh unpack this tweet and what do you think it means for the me and the listeners absolutely so um i think an interesting thing about nouns if you observe it is that the actual holder count is very small right there's only about three to 400 nouns that have been minted so far and if you consider people that are duplicate owners then um probably individuals that own nouns are probably somewhere close to 200. but for some reason you

[Music] feel like there's a lot more fans um and if you compare it to other 10k pfp projects you should um theoretically from just that angle a number of people that own it or that are financially sort of incentivized to talk about it or um uh discuss it with with on twitter etc it should be much less but the the the noise that you hear about it the attention that it attracts should be much less um and i think the big reason that it has such attention is that it has a lot of fans and i think it has a lot of fans because what is the externalities that it's creating is beyond just itself so

the for example nouns um the tao funds things that are let's say is a is a film that is freely uh available to everyone then that is also something that's in terms of content but also there is for example um an open source project like prop house that is building infrastructure to scale dow funding and other datas can use that as well so i think in that way it is it is creating um uh it is allowing the sort of scaled production of public goods um and uh has a mechanism to monetize on that which is i think the difference between

um what was possible before nfts and after nfts the sense that nfts um uh if you understand them as a thing that grows in value if it attracts more attention and provenance then um those things can be captured uh the sort of attention that a public good creates and the provenance that it holds can be captured and nouns and so sort of the symbiotic relationship can can um uh accelerate i think that's what what phone physics is saying where um polo kids doesn't scale without uh nouns like mechanisms uh but then if nouns like mechanisms didn't have any orientations which will look good then it just becomes kind of a wealth signaling like lambo competition

that um might become circular or uh have a limit to how much it can propagate jacob yeah i think yeah yeah yeah i think um a weighted into it the 4156 tweet is like what is what is more valuable uh or like what has more status associated with it too it's like is it spending a hundred million dollars personally on a massive house or a hundred million dollars on a public library and like which is more of a flex and you could probably argue that like the 100 million dollar public library is much more of a flex than like the massive mansion for yourself and you know there's a bunch of reasons for that you know the main one being

that not you know people other than you can use that public library um and there's you know that all of the like positive externalities that um now 40 were talking about you know you can you can start to understand and intuit like where that value is coming from in the library case and i think what the nouns model offers as a kind of value capture system is like well let's say these positive externalities actually get captured back into a meme or a symbol or a brand or whatever you want to call it that means that it can continue to capture value back from just doing good things so it's like if there was a nouns library that you know the dow funded 50 million dollars to create and it's

publicly known as the nouns library what does that do for the sale of the next now tomorrow and it's interesting to like com it's like it may be that the nft value increases sufficiently where it could do something bigger or better the next time um which is quite different to how we think about brand value capture and like the traditional company sense or even in like an esc20 dow sense where it's like if a if a dow in a fungible token construct like like say uniswap was doing the very same action it's harder to understand how that economic value finds its way back to the token because obviously you know the esc 20 token contracts much more tied to

like explicit and provable utility on chain versus like mimetic and brand value off chain that like nft seemed to have it's like magic of capturing so um yeah i feel like there's a lot of pack in there but i think yeah yeah that's a hot take yeah i think i think distilled what you just said is that nfts are more suited to capture the upside from positive externalities positive global externalities outside of crypto than than erc20s which you know at the surface level i think just kind of makes sense um if you can associate like people people that like you know buy like donate to universities to get their name on some

building they're doing that for the flex and that c would definitely seem to be associated with like it's the brand of your name that is the center for doing that uh and so i i i think without thinking about it too much too deeper than that i think i definitely agree that nfts are more suited to capture brand value than than an erc20 token is exactly and that has far-ranging possibilities if that proves to be true which is another reason i think i'm like so fascinated by the model because if we start now thinking about public protocols on ethereum as like versions of public goods it's like well what's actually the right dow construct to be owning and controlling and then sustaining and

propagating them it might be that the unit swap protocol is the most valuable and important protocol protocol ethereum today and that may be true but it could also be true that the current dow construct might not be the right one and that something more noun style could be more effective at propagating and sustaining and evolving that public infrastructure over time on top of the fact that it also means that a noun style type model is not its value is not predicated on fee extraction or revenue extraction versus i think as we're seeing in the massive unit swap debates right now that is kind of the core discussion and it's like a lot of the value on that token you could argue is being pinched on

the ability to actually extract fees so i think that those two factors combined you know add a whole bunch of interesting you know potential scenarios over the next year for the noun style and the nouns down model to potentially be a solution to um a lot of uh you know how we think about dowsing in public protocol sense and then you know then obviously it might get to public goods in the in the physical world but a lot of the stuff in ethereum might be where we see interesting stuff in the short term so yeah there's a lot of interesting things that come from that one thing i'd like to ask about is that when you associate a brand with public goods and you're like mounds is planting their

noggles in the ground and saying our brand is about public goods uh and then they go off and fund some public library and everyone is saying like oh yay yay nouns for funding this public library and that increases the brand value to some degree public goods are inherently hard to monetize they're hard to fund they're hard to support and so i'm a little bit conflicted in saying that okay it's not like we've just discovered this fantastic like dow funding mechanism which is this one like a dao that's got this like fantastic brand about it just happens to be able to donate money to these public goods and receive more money than they gave out

i i would i would i'm skeptical that you can fund a bunch of public goods and like yes you definitely get a brand value kickback but i'm skeptical that you'll get more value than what left the dow than what actually comes back in brand value i'm wondering if anybody has any thoughts on this yeah yeah i can take a step at it i think if you think about it from the perspective of like creating public goods that are completely distant from the the base of fans that nouns has and people that might buy the nfts then you get into that type of really like throwing money out the window and expecting it to come back in some way but really if you think about the public goods problem of like a

um actually a coordination market failure where if you had an economy that had more sufficient sort of optimal levels of production that that economy would be stronger right it would be a more competitive economy if for example there was more open source that was properly monetized and that we had more of that um or if you know ethereum as a protocol would be as an economy would do better if we were somehow able to spend more thought into ethereum research and protocol development which is another public good so um but what i'm saying here is that i think the public goods that we're funding at the moment are actually not very out there things but rather all the things that are internal to our

functioning which is um another we're currently funding alternative nouns clients so we want multiple websites of the nouns option page that is a public good everyone wants more decentralization everyone wants more experimentation about front ends and every every noun holder or every noun fan would benefit from it but there but if it's just an open source sort of code base of a website then there is no monetization to it um and it's a public good uh and but it serves us so i think another example is prop house which is we need to scale funding we need to scale governance and how do we scale governance well by building more tools and that is also again both good basically you think of it as infrastructure infrastructure that gives more leverage because it is uh sort of maximally credibly neutral and maximally

free um and also it can be foreign etc um and so then i think the the thesis would be that that nounish economy would start accelerating its production or productivity at a pace that outpaces maybe in the beginning thus other nfc collections or other pfp collections but then later on could just continue to accelerate um and uh absorb more of of uh crypto's attention or um uh yeah more more broad things so that would be an intuition that that i think about rather than um yeah the collection of that economy just becomes stronger in which it competes better

yeah i think and then maybe if we were to take the more um like let's say assume that fees are a thing that can be sustained in the ecosystem so like to instead of all of the eve having to come from you know the daily auction perhaps like uh noun style dows can operate protocols that do extract fees if you're to compare you know all else being equal endow an erc 20 token form that cannot capture value from brands directly versus a dow that can capture value from brand directly might mean that they're able to undercut that other down fees either way to continue to sustain themselves at the same level so if um so it's like if if you think about protocols as like the most walkable

thing and brand is the most valuable like the least forkable thing then if we have a really good model that helps you know propagate and proliferate a brand far and wide then like that might actually give a competitive advantage to offer the lowest possible fees on a given protocol versus a town that does not have that same construct um if you were to take the case that feeds can be extracted um as well jacob are you kind of making the argument that a noun-ish economy a noun-ish like model can proliferate far beyond just like an nft model and an nft project model but like find its way into like perhaps most of the defy apps like taos et cetera that we see in this space

uh yeah that's exactly that's exactly what i'm saying and i think like what we've actually i think like um yes i think that the nounish model could potentially be used to proliferate many more things other than just memes exclusively i think the memes will be at the core of any good down but i think those memes could be bundled with a protocol or a product or a particular mission that is not just um you know not just like the meme itself so i i actually think that uh nounish style dowels and protocols is a very interesting area to explore and then for like what we typically

expect to see instead of fashion brands or um artist brands like kind of using companies as their core ownership mechanism this may actually be the the dow structure that would make sense for most organizations to actually start us because as now unfortunately saying it solves this like coordination problem you can basically start one of these dows around some shared idea and then it's a very effective model for anyone to organize around it and allocate capital around it so uh we believe this feel like at zoro we believe this view so strongly that we're basically building a tool to help people do exactly that so we're launching a nouns builder which is like hey here's how you very easily launch your own noun style down

um to do whatever you like and then that whole protocol that we built for it is actually going to be noun style style control so like the first out created using this tool is the data owns and controls the whole thing and like ownership of that will be split between nouns and zora and all everything in between so uh yeah i think um i think that model is i think it makes sense for a lot more than just just the nouns now specifically so we want to make it easy for everyone else to do the same thing and just kind of let a thousand flowers bloom and see what happens you talked about uh like dao's a nounish model being good for dallas but like what about like a centralized

company that already has a brand do you think like they could leverage this kind of model i think so and we're gonna try and find out ourselves like we're building this tool in part to use it for a lot of the stuff we're doing for zoro um so it's probably i'd hope it's possible and we're gonna we're gonna see if it is and we're going to try it ourselves um obviously there's a lot of is also a protocol right yeah yeah but it's like i think zora is like we kind of play at the two extreme ends of brand and protocol i think like our brand is like probably one of the most valuable things that we've created cultivated and put a lot of time and energy into and we obviously have a protocol as well that we dedicate about engineering resources to but i think the

nouns the zorra brand in a nouns model could actually work very well um so yeah not every brand i think could make a similar transition but i think in our case we probably could interesting interesting i i do want to quickly note that even though i'm incredibly bullish uh that i don't think everything is suitable for nouns model um and i think really the question is whether a lot of things make sense to take some fee for example um a lot of things make sense for there to be a lot of human operation um and the data structure is maybe might not be that's suitable for different things i mean i mean in the same way that that even though public goods are so great private goods still makes total

sense because you'll still need a car you'll still need a meal um and you need entities that create those things and those entities will not will not be public goods oriented down so i think we will likely see um uh we will discover the boundaries in which this mechanism makes sense but i think i align with jacob in the sense that there's probably a fair amount of crypto protocols in which the style but this this mechanism actually makes more sense um because it not only has that ability to capture that sort of the positive signaling that it creates but on top of that i think we're currently experiencing a fair amount of of difficulty uh where the the best thing for the protocol

would be for it to be a hyper structure uh and and jacob can talk more about the structures but um but basically a protocol that does not have any sort of governance um uh uh leverage to control or take any fees and it kind of is uh maximally credibly neutral and everyone can kind of trust that layer and build on top of it understanding that the um main elements of it will not change such as the kind of how much economic rent it extracts or sort of how the parameters you know should operate etc so then people can like build on top of it i think a lot of crypto's aspirations is to create those types of really important um credibly neutral uh protocol layers that then later things can be built on top of but but those

layers currently um i think because there is no better way of monetizing it i think they're often monetized with governance tokens not necessarily because adding that is the right thing for sort of increasing its sort of credibly neutral uh traits but rather because that is like how you there's the only way that you can fund it it seems um and uh i think for those cases in which what the protocol is actually trying to do is becoming more like a quasi-public good protocol that does not that serves the public for free then in those models i do think this could work really well um and could go beyond the nft pfp collection realm

of things interesting well guys that this has been a very uh meta conversation and started to really open my eyes about why so many people are are nouns pilled i don't know if you guys have a word for this in the nouns ecosystem being noun spilled but uh i i definitely see it yeah i want to turn this conversation to a little bit more granular back to less about noun's philosophy and more about uh concretely the noun style um just about like the current meta of dao governance of the governance over now it's like what are people up to in uh the noun style governance and also some some other questions as well so we're going to go get to all those questions and more right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible there is a brand new staking

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three nouners here believe that this daily issuance of nft mechanism that has a very strong brand associated with it can turn into this funding for public goods uh so say for example that like instead of union swap having the uni token it had this like noun-ish type economy is issuing these like uni nfts in this noun-ish way and people were buying these uni nfts because the brand of unit swap is so strong meanwhile on on the other side of things you have like uniswap which is providing a public liquidity service to like all of defy a public good this this uh protocol that allows us to have so much liquidity on all of our erc20 tokens but instead of that being like funded by this token or even before that like

private equity and all that stuff instead you have this like noun-ish mechanism where you have these people that are buying these assets which are associated with like the uniswap brand and so those assets are like the private assets but the public goods are being funded by these a very small set of individuals who are bringing paying very high prices for like this particular brand and so you have like this public good on one side and then there's like this brand on the other side and you have these speculators or just participants buying these nfts releasing this nounish mechanism and like i think the general gist here is that this doesn't nouns are just the first model of this but we can proliferate this model to so many more things beyond nouns and that's kind of why nouns have this public goods branding associated

with it is that we can create these public goods and then like fund them with a really strong brand is that kind of the gist of what we were talking about yeah that's right i would also add on it's it's not only not owning the nft is not just owning part of the brand or the meme and there are also very hard on-chain rights which is like you have governance control over this shared treasury and it's a growing it's a currently growing treasury but there's also like and right now that treasury is predominantly but it's also starting to accrue ownership in other doubts for example like 10 percent of the little nouns down like that supply is automatically given to the noun staff so it's like if for whatever reason the nouns now wanted to

start participating in that organization's process and treasury and mission it it could so if we start imagining many different noun styles forming and potentially like giving this kind of like kick back in ownership to the noun star treasury you could imagine that the governance value of these nfts is is getting as valuable as like the brand itself um so i think that's like a that's another important piece where i think everything you said is true and there's also like hard on-chain dominance rights that comes with um namely control over whatsoever whatever is in the treasury which maybe you could segue into like what is happening with that treasury and the governance and stuff like that which i know now 22 has a ton of thoughts on 40 you want to say something at all

yeah i just want to say maybe that i'm on the other side of that in the sense that i think um if the governance value as in the your ability to monetize the governance power let's say you could fund certain proposals that you have some sort of economic relationship with let's say you're part of another protocol dao and if nouns pass the protocol to a proposal to sort of um send some economic value that way then um you could extract some value out of the government's power that token has right but i think if those types of things become the main reason in which why people find nouns to invaluable and buy them then i think it kind of in my mind limits um the growth of what this can

become and becomes more like a more like a traditional organization or um uh any sort of org in which sort of capturing the governance of that or where you can extract value from that and um i think that's personally less less exciting and i would be more exciting of of the version in which uh it was more purely the brand value maximally increases and the brand is a public brand in the sense that everyone anyone can do anything with that brand um but what is ultimately privatized and owned is the the provenance value um uh closer to what why a picasso or like jackson pollock would would be worth a lot because it kind of has a claim on

originality of the everything that came after it the influence that it had on society or culture um the the claim on that sort of originality is what makes those pieces very valuable um and i think there's a chance that that nfts can have that same outcome um and uh that would be personally the version that i would be most excited about uh less the version of the governance tokens becoming incredibly powerful and then there being a lot of bribes and an economy that feeds that etc certainly certainly let's turn into uh the governance aspect the actual concrete governance of noun style let's take a peek under the hood there can you guys describe the the meta if you will of what the nouns governors are

thinking about like what are some of the big proposals that have captivated detention what are some of the ideas that people really like is there overall like a theme as to what nouns governance is really going after uh 22 i'll throw this one to you yeah sure it's interesting just because i think that the governance meta that you're referring to is pretty fluid uh and really has been changing with i think a the number of participants we have uh and then b the participants who are active at any given time i guess some of the things we've noticed recently that we just talked about on the call is now that we've scaled to i think there's like 400 ish nouns but 200 unique members and and somewhere between 50 and 60 who are in some degree

active participants i i've just noticed personally as someone who's been involved when there's you know basically like 20 of us uh but with only like five or six people talking on any given day uh just the the the challenges that come uh in some ways with with uh you know scaling this out and getting everyone's voices heard and getting everything fairly considered uh and you know we're starting to see called voting blocks political factions almost no everyone kind of is really on the same page about most things but we've seen an increased emphasis on on people you know being delegated different votes uh to you know to to espouse their viewpoint uh and also where i think there's been with four one five sixes termed uh in the senate uh a difficulty

adjustment uh if you think about other protocols even about like the bitcoin difficulty adjustment that we have recently had towards protocols i think uh noun's success has been has been great and it's gotten a lot of eyes on the protocol though i think that uh without pointing fingers specifically i just we've just seen so many uh so much so much new i mean so many new proposals coming into the dao so many new requests for funding uh that it's been a little bit overwhelming i think it's caused us to go from in the early days we were just happy to you know fund anything that supported us to now being a bit more selective about the things that we fund because we have so many talented builders uh coming to the dow and i think i've upset a lot so i'm happy i'm happy that we can maybe drill

down on any of the points that i just made sure before i before i do jacob hong anything you want to add absolutely i think the meta of the governance is about scaling governance uh and so how do we the nice thing about the continuous option model um and one nft one vote model is that um the complexity is scaling somewhat linearly at least in the member count so as as noun 22 noted you know a year ago we were a few dozen people and now we're a few hundred people and and but that's kind of predictable so so we can kind of build our own infrastructure to adopt to the increasing complexity of larger members and i think one of

those examples that's most concrete is prop house for example prop house is um uh sort of an open source project uh that provides a token voting ui and uh a thing called rounds where prop where each is the thing being auctioned and proposals are the things that are creating the bid and then the token ranking creates sort of the cut off where everything above the certain cutoff gets funded and uh you can continue and that's the for example type of thing that reduces the governance burden because not everyone has to vote to create some sort of appropriate ranking like if even a five percent of the nouns vote then probably the ranking of proposals um that is created is reasonably sufficient um and also that

you can do more things kind of incredibly mutually at scale for example um something that is very hard to do is like an rfp like request for proposal like a foundation wants to build a building what they usually do is they put out a request proposal and then a lot of architects but all those that type of thing is very difficult to do um in a sort of a standard compound governance uh type of model um and prop house for example we recently had two mandated rounds the first round was uh a request to create more nouns clients outside of the canonical main site and there were um uh i think 20 to 30 proposals that are really competent and then the four best teams got funded and then now they're all working on it and

so that type of ability to let's say do request for proposals where then there's no we can just decide that this is the thing that we want to do and then the the which specific team which specific budget those things are kind of um uh put to the to the side and sort of segregated into a separate competition um is a way of for example scaling the governance and i think um that's a lot of where our attention is um because as nouns 22 noted it is getting more complex with more voting members and also more people coming with ideas and proposals yeah i think that's exactly right uh like one of the we basically i guess when i look at it from a top down we we have this treasury right with the stated purpose of some of

it's to be sustainable but ultimately to do things that proliferate the meme uh and as things have scaled like kong was saying you know doing on-chain proposals has become more difficult and now has kind of been reserved for some of the larger bigger asks just because it requires the attention of so many different members uh prop house you know allows us to kind of more effectively like kong was suggesting two rounds where you can say oh you know we have five to ten prizes of two or five and it gets a lot of you know smaller builders funded initially and then the other mechanism that we have is a group that i run called small grants which is basically just a more centralized version you know having you know run this group for the last call of year

uh me and then the other members of the group just make centralized decisions on things that we think are interesting things that we think that we should just strategically fund uh for the good of the dow uh and i'll also just use this as an opportunity to plug that group and say if there's anyone who's listening to this who wants to contribute to announce who has an interesting idea uh to please come to the discord and come to the the grants and retro funding channel uh since if you demonstrate you know a genuine interest in nouns and want to work on it you can get funded pretty quickly and what i think is really exciting about nouns is not just can you get funded pretty quickly but creatives or or technicals or other types people who want to come contribute to nouns and demonstrate a genuine interest can

get funded very quickly to work on a creative project completely of their own design uh you can think of what you're good at what you have a passion for and everyone has their own skill set and i think this is such a a broad open uh project that really anyone can contribute uh so if you think about you know what interests you what you're good at and if you demonstrate a general genuine passion for nouns like we will fund you uh and and it'll be you know very seamless very easy and there's very clear paths to scaling that funding as you deliver as you do things for the dow as you contribute so you know the nouns i think is one of the cleanest america bureaucratic structures there is in the sense that people are can be very directly rewarded for their time energy

and the merit of their compensations to the uh to their contributions to the doubt what's like the biggest proposal that's gone through what was is there like the grand big proposal that got the most funding that did the biggest thing does anything come to mind there i think one that's probably comes to mind as has had the greatest impact outside of the dow and i'm well there's there's two one came from within where i did i want to highlight this one it was called it's noun's vision uh where this one building i think it really illuminates the model what's possible with nouns and nouns funding uh this one builder named salvino came to the dow salvino not his real name a pseudo that he had spun up

uh just specifically for this purpose with a new twitter account and a new discord account said that he wanted to make a luxury brand a luxury line of sunglasses using the nouns design uh you know with with no you know background for us to look up on him he basically came to us i had a conversation with him from small grants we funded him with two or three eve to work on it for a couple weeks and show us some kind of prototype you know we were able to de-risk it see that he was talented uh you know see that his work delivered in the early days and then funded that for a much larger on-chain proposal i don't know if you don't have the exact dollar number uh in front of me but it was one of our more sizable ones uh that included uh giving

salvino a noun uh in in in you know as compensation for his contributions to the dao i think that one was big and then separately we also had one where we gave a noun to bud light in exchange for using the nouns glasses and noggles uh in a super bowl ad which i think was our biggest normie exposure that we've had from other proposals um but i don't know guys is there anything else that comes to mind that i'm missing there probably is uh i think the there's a decent amount of capital that went towards actually establishing and maintaining the the foundation i know that was a really big one and then the second um prop house

um which i think is that's been one of my personal favorite projects just in the ecosystem outside of now it's just generally but i think that was a pretty sizable proposal too to continue development of that that piece of public infrastructure um they're like the main ones in terms of in terms of size there's like some insane proposals just generally that are in uh the dow funded that are just like it's just fun it's like i would i would recommend reading through the proposals and nouns it's very different to any other dao instead of it being like small variable config changes or like treasury diversification the whole time it's like oh what what if we just send like a noun to the international space station and pay nasa

to do that like it's there there's there are some that are truly absurd um and then truly ambitious too so it's like it's a really cool mix um but the the foundation one in the house one of the ones that kind of stick out in my mind is the largest i think yeah that just shows that ranks them by each spent i'm realizing that that's not actually in the ui i mean that's a cool thing for someone to design yeah i think that what's interesting there are there have been some proposals that you know we've spent a ton of money so i've found that taking a ton of money and spreading it out under a bunch of much smaller proposals at least in my experience from stuff that i've seen personally has yielded a better result or i shouldn't

say a better result i should say just a a greater return on investment over time versus one centralized thing so i i think that what's critical to the future of scaling the dow is leveraging tools like prop house or finding out other ways to do small grants programs to get one to two heath in the hands of as many talented builders as we possibly can and then use that as a way to onboard them as a funnel into the dao and scale up their contributions from there uh since i think that really what we're trying to do is get them engendered the most loyal to get the most community members in here and i think that it works more effectively at an individual level this isn't to say that we should not do big proposals but rather say that the big proposals are

uh not are just one part of the the things that we can do to effectively you know proliferate the meme very quickly i think i might have the other side on that in the sense that i i do think the long-term contribution is really great but ultimately what we would want is it's really ambitious things uh that ultimately that talent going through uh a curve and then really attempting truly ambitious things that would take good budgets um and i think we're seeing some examples of that the best one is a recent proposal passed as an esports team pod uh we we had funded a dota team for maybe like 100 or 150 east and then that did really well so then now

we're putting together a sort of a larger pod that would uh sponsor more esports teams and it spent i think maybe 350 ether something like that so i think that's really exciting to me finding a vertical that works that that delivers the sort of attention roi and then being able to spend more and more and more uh and more ambitious things beautiful well guys i sadly have to get to a call so if there's one last message that you guys would like to give to the nouns community i'll give you guys the floor jacob noun 22 940 anything you guys want to say cool yeah thanks for having us and and like i said before if you want to contribute or just want to learn more about the nouns project just come to

discord um you'll find us there cheers well guys thank you so much for for joining me and having this two-part episode on the exploration into nouns i feel much wiser about nouns thanks david yeah thank you cheers guys okay risk and disclaimers everyone i don't have this pulled up ready to go so let's see if i can do this for memory uh ether is risky crypto is risky nouns probably also risky you can lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier i'm glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot you