TL;DR

We’d like to seek funding to keep developing Agora in order to improve the governance efficacy of Nouns through delegation. Our goal is to significantly increase the participation rate of nouns through a combination of software improvements, and delegation drive programs over the next quarter.

Progress so far

We got funded on August 31 via Prop House mandates to build an MVP. In less than one month, we’ve built a delegate platform for voters to broadcast what they want to see, and for builders to find voters who might support their proposal. To illustrate the outcome with some numbers, so far we’ve seen:

• 19 statements from delegates representing 127 nouns (>25% of all votes!)
• 25 statements from builders who are seeking delegation
• 5 nouns delegated via Agora (that we know of)
• Hosted a delegate race to “auction” 3 more votes to delegates
• Proposal passed to deploy on lil nouns, as well as inbound interest from many other DAOs

In sum, Agora has created a hub that turned delegation from an invisible, behind the scenes activity, to something the community can see, participate in, discuss, and improve upon.

Roadmap & Goals

Now that we’ve landed an MVP of a delegate platform, it’s time to start leveraging it to meaningfully drive delegation & governance participation. We expect to complete these goals and achieve their resulting outcome in roughly one quarter. Note that all points here consist of our best plan of attack today, but as we continue to build Agora, we expect the roadmap to naturally evolve as we double down on what’s working, and deprioritize what’s not.

Goal 1: Dramatically reduce friction to delegation:

• Integrate with nouns.wtf to propose “post-win” delegate suggestions
• Enable direct delegation on Agora (where today we borrow the nouns.wtf flow)
• Enable time-bound, fractional, and supercedable delegation by a proxy contract to unblock funds & whales who are currently unwilling to delegate
• Productize delegate race so that Nouners who don’t want to pick a delegate can let the community pick for them

Goal 2: Make governance and delegation more transparent and easy to understand

• Continue investing in surfacing more delegate and voting data on Agora
• Build a governance activity feed that highlights delegation, ownership change, voting, and other governance related activities.
• Make other general improvements to Agora to make it a first class experience for governance participants

Goal 3: Activate nouns holders to either vote or delegate

• Direct outreach to inactive Nouners from Agora team to find them a suitable delegate
• Implement an inactive nouner bounty program, highlighting and incentivizing the community to reach out to inactive holders.
• Run a marketplace experiment to allow anyone to rent votes from Nouns holders
• Run a direct reward (in both ETH and NFT prizes) experiment to directly incentivize voting

Target objectives in 3 months:

• 75% of new nouns are delegated to voters who vote on more than 50% of props they're eligible to
• 50% participation in a rolling average of past 3 proposals

Transparency & decentralization

As a governance platform, we will take measures to maintain transparency and avoid centralization of power by taking the following measures:

• Make Github repo public within 1 month (with proper documentation to come over time)
• Publish all data monthly to public google sheets, or equivalent (such as API or onchain mirror)
• Current Agora team members added together will commit to not represent more than 5% of nouns.

Team

Yitong – Project lead & designer: co-founder of Vector DAO, and previously design + product at Coinbase. Prop builder for #87, contributor to Nouns Vision, delegate.

0xcaff – Engineer: Built the v1 of Agora, previously engineer at Coinbase.

Tom Taubkin – Protocol Engineer: Contributor to several defi projects, previously engineer at Coinbase

Mrtn – Ops / Community: Delegate from nounlets, funded via Prop House as governance historian, deployed Agora on lil nouns, previously pm on nouns.builder, and pm at Google.

Funding request & terms

Funding request:

We’d like to request $221,000 to fund the team for a quarter (170ETH @ $1300/ETH, a 20% decrease from previous ask) and 20 ETH to incentivize voter participation.

Fund transfer mechanics

50% of the team portion & the participation incentive will be immediately deposited to the team’s wallet

50% of the team portion will be streamed over a period of three months from a 3/5 multisig held by trusted members of the community. Signers for this safe will be: Elad, Krel, Yitong, Seneca, and one more to be confirmed.

As of this writing, $221,000 is 170 ETH. In order to account for ETH volatility, we will request a 30 ETH buffer. Upon fund release, $221,000 worth of ETH will be sold, with half deposited to the Agora multisig, and half deposited to the stream multisig. The remaining ETH will be sent back to the treasury.

Appendix: some illustrative mocks

These are purely concepts to illustrate some of the areas we’re going to invest in. We’ll need to iterate on these designs a lot before implementing them, so please take them as general directions vs exact specs.

Enable time-bound, fractional, and supercedable delegation by a proxy contract to unblock funds & whales who are currently unwilling to delegate

Implement an inactive nouner bounty program, highlighting and incentivizing the community to reach out to inactive holders.

Run a direct reward (in both ETH and NFT prizes) experiment to directly incentivize voting