(👆 click on video for a Nouns Prop House teaser)

tl;dr: We’ve reached the one year mark since the inception of the idea for Prop House! Over that time period, Prop House has become a core piece of infrastructure for the development of the Nouns ecosystem – onboarding a sizable percentage of the most impactful builders while spreading the Nouns meme far and wide. We are requesting 570 ETH to continue to fund development of Prop House over the next 6 months (Jan ‘23 - Jun ‘23).

State of the Prop House(s): On Dec 1st, 2022, Seneca hosted an open call to update the community on what we’ve been up to since the proposal #105. You can view the slides and recording of the talk here.

Onboarding builders

The most important outcome of Prop House for Nouns has been its ability to onboard a large percentage of the most impactful builders in the ecosystem. More than funding, the core feature of Prop House is about activating builders. Whether it be for folks who had never heard of Nouns before or those who were just hanging around, Prop House was the mechanism that took them from inactive to building within the ecosystem.

Given Nouns is about bottom-up brand building as opposed to top-down centralized direction, we hope that Prop House can continue to serve as a tool to execute on that Nouns vision. Below is a list of some of the builders who’ve been activated by Prop House:

Where we are today by the numbers

Our last proposal (#105) passed on July 18, 2022. Since then, we’ve made substantial progress on all core Prop House KPIs:

All our charts are seeing sustained month-over-month growth despite market downturns:

The funnel from prop award to prop completion has maintained a high conversion rate. Close to 85% of all prop winners go on to complete their proposed work. Below is an analysis on all prop winners from all funding rounds within the Nouns house (18 funding rounds and 105 awarded proposals):

Spreading the Nouns meme

Over the past 5 months we’ve onboarded several communities, most notably Meebits via Ape Coin DAO funding. By doing so, Prop House has spread the Nouns meme far beyond our immediate community. In tandem with Prop House growth comes furthering the reach of the Nouns meme along with what Nouns stands for: building.

Product

The Prop House team has been busy working on the core product (prop.house). A brief summary of what we’ve done follows:

• Contracted one the best designers in the space (0xHab from Rainbow)
• Revamped UI across the entire app
• Implemented multi-round houses
• Upgraded voting UX
• Open sourced the repository.
• Released a GraphQL interface for Prop House data which lead to projects like NounsAtlas, Voters.wtf and Nounish.cv

Protocol

We’ve also made strides in the development of the Prop House protocol.

The protocol leverages both Ethereum and Starknet in an effort to provide the best possible user experience. This dual-chain architecture enables Prop House users to propose and vote by signing a message, while decentralizing the entire funding flow.

We use Ethereum as the operations and execution layer, where houses are managed and payouts are made, while Starknet handles all user actions that occur within a funding round.

All of the code is publicly available today in the Prop House repository.

Below are some of the core pieces of infrastructure we’ve developed to support the protocol, where we are currently, and what to expect as we near mainnet launch:

• The protocol itself, which has been deployed to Goerli.
• The Prop House SDK, which simplifies interaction with the protocol (L1 & L2).
• The Starknet Relayer, which is responsible for submitting signed proposals and votes to Starknet on behalf of users.
• Ethereum & Starknet subgraphs, which are currently in development.
• Current blockers:
  • Cairo V1 Migration
  • Support for V1 on StarkNet (expected Q1 ‘23)
  • Protocol audits (pending testing on testnet)

Assuming no major hiccups, we aim to deploy the protocol to mainnet before the end of Q1 2023.

Financials

The Prop House financials doc is publicly available here

Over the course of one year and three proposals (#23, #62, #105), Nouns DAO has funded the Prop House team 555 ETH for deploying towards Nouns builders and 695 ETH for development and operating expenses.

Note: current burn rate for Nouns funding rounds is low (~20-30 ETH / mo). If at any point the DAO chooses to have another party deploy Nouns House Funding, we will return all remaining funds to the DAO.

What’s next?

Protocol launch

We are aiming for a mainnet launch by the end of Q1 2023. What follows is the timeline we are executing against to get to launch:

• Migrate to Cairo V1
• Complete Goerli testing
• Finalize Prop House SDK & Starknet Relayer
• Launch subgraphs for Ethereum & Starknet
• Developer documentation
• Protocol audit

Product development

Alongside the transition to the protocol as the data layer, we will continue to develop the UX of app:

• Core UX: better proposing, discovery and voting user experiences.
• The launch of house and round managers such that anyone can create a house, deposit funds and initiate funding rounds.
• Implementation for infinite rounds for grant pods to run their entire operation via Prop House.
• Develop social features for communities.

Sustainability

There are several avenues to explore on how to make Prop House sustainable. For the time being, we are continuing to pursue funding by Nouns DAO as we believe it to be a positive sum engagement. Below we dive into potential avenues:

Nouns DAO funded (current)

To date, Nouns DAO has funded development costs of Prop House over the past ~12 months (695 ETH). For the current model to continue to work, Nouners would have to agree that the value created for Nouns by Prop House is higher than that of the development costs. In this framing, Nouns DAO is a patron to Prop house where its ROI is the onboarding of high impact builders, the attention generated by Prop House as public infrastructure by Nouns DAO and it being infrastructure for Nouns to run on.

Fees for usage

The true and tried approach is turning on fees at the client and/or protocol. This approach would require a substantial increase in volume (to the order of about 50-100x) to maintain current burn rates. So while feasible, it is not a solution for the short term.

Experimental

Nounish DAO In prop #105, we posed Prop House DAO as a plausible avenue to making Prop House sustainable. While it is still a potential route, there are concerns as to whether or not the DAO makes sense at all. At the core of it is whether the Nouns DAO format is appropriate for non-purely meme driven protocols. There’s also the question of whether every protocol needs a DAO and a corresponding governance token. So while the DAO is not out of the question, we believe that with experiments like Nouns Builder, the answer will become clearer over time. Pure Meme NFTs There’s a case to be made where Prop House NFTs are minted to hold provenance value. This alone could capture long-term upside in the same way a visual artist and their collectors do.

Funding Request

570 ETH to fund development of Prop House protocol & client over the next 6 months (Jan ‘23 - Jun ‘23).

• 486 ETH: 3 engineers, 1 designer and 1 all hats.
• 84 ETH for OpEx including contractors, infra, audits, bounties, translators, etc.

Funds would be received by the Prop House team multi-sig (3/5) where the signers are Seneca, Solimander, CDT, VapeApe and Devcarrot.