Thank you to Lakshman Sankar and Maksim Stepanenko for delegating Nouns to submit this proposal.
We would also like to thank Prop House and Nouns voters for their support in Open Round 13. This proposal serves to update the community on our progress and request the remaining funds necessary for the development of Nouns Mail.
tl;dr
A token-gated email address for every Nouns holder to pseudonymously communicate and access the rest of the internet.
The Problem
Nouns is the most interesting experiment happening in decentralized governance and community. Yet, large swaths of the internet remain segregated from on-chain identities. Currently, Nouners cannot connect their Ethereum wallets to access Twitter, collaborate on a Figma document, or even engage on the Nouns forum.
Email addresses remain a necessity to access most platforms on the internet. Existing email providers do not natively integrate with Nouns identity, compelling Nouns to manually link aspects of their on-chain identity to off-chain platforms.
We elaborate more on this problem and discuss solutions in The Identity Gap.
The Proposal
Every Nouns owner will be able to claim a unique, token-gated email address under @nouns.email, or another domain decided by the DAO. Claiming this email address will be enforced by querying to an Ethereum node verifying ownership of a Noun.
Use cases
Here we suggest four initial categories of how our proposal can provide utility for Nouns. Should the proposal be accepted, we hope to assist in building out these use cases — like a weekly email newsletter or a @nouns.email domain-gated Figma.
We encourage the community to suggest additional use cases — Nouns Mail is a primitive that can unlock a Cambrian explosion of creativity.
Greater utility for owning a Noun (through Nouns Mail or otherwise) increases the demand for minting Nouns or paying royalties on secondary transactions, leading to a larger treasury for the DAO.
Implementation
NounsDAO allocates a domain to be used as the official email domain for Nouns holders. We suggest nouns.email because of its familiarity, but any reasonable domain owned by the DAO or available on the market would suffice.
We will be using Skiff Mail, an open source, end-to-end encrypted mail provider, as the interface and mailserver for the custom domain.
All emails sent and received by Nouns email addresses are encrypted with elliptic curve crypto (Curve25519 keypairs), and emails that are sent or received to other Skiff accounts (e.g. other Nouns holders) are end-to-end encrypted. Ownership of EOAs is verified by generating a unique challenge token, requesting an ECSDA signature, and verifying the signature’s validity. A full description of Skiff’s protocol and threat model can be found at skiff.com/whitepaper.
As previously mentioned, verification of Nouns ownership occur by querying an Ethereum indexer on the Nouns token contract.
Example User Experience
A user connects their wallet — if it’s detected that they own a Noun, a dialog prompts them to create their email address.
After clicking Claim email alias , the page directs them to choose their unique Nouns email address.
Afterwards, Nouners will be free to send and receive email from this address.
Revoking Email Address Ownership
One open question is what would happen to an account who sells or transfers his Noun after previously claiming his email address. Because owning a @nouns.email email address reflects one’s on-chain identity, it would be reasonable that ownership of this address is lost after losing the underlying Noun.
To implement this, Ethereum oracles on Skiff would listen for transactions where existing Noun email holders sell or transfer their last remaining Noun. Then, following an optional grace period, the email address would become disabled, becoming unusable until the account owns a Noun again.
Deliverables and Timeline (Post-PH Update)
Phase 1A: December 2022 [COMPLETED] After Prop House Open Round 13, we successfully implemented the backend endpoints for Nouns Mail. You can view a video demo here (this test account owns two other NFTs, but not a Nouns and therefore is unable to claim).
Phase 1B: January 2023
The first phase will involve implementation of claiming Noun email addresses with the UX flow described above, including a full integration with the @nouns.email domain. We anticipate this taking around 2-3 weeks to fully build, test, and launch. Pending successful execution of the proposal, we are targeting a launch date of January 20, 2022.
Phase 3: February 2023
In phase 2, we plan to take an active role in creating Nounish utilities based on Nouns Mail, including newsletters, domain-gated workspaces, and integrating better verification banners for the Nouns forum. We anticipate this process taking around a month, depending on the scope of utilities. We will launch these Nounish utilities as they are created, working actively with the community throughout development.
Team & Compensation
Joseph Zhang - Designer, currently at Skiff and Azuki. Previously Apple, CMU design.
Richard Liu - Engineer, currently at Skiff. Also contributor to IBC and Osmosis. Previously Blockchain@Berkeley, Figma.
We anticipate completion of phase 1 and 2, as well as initial maintenance and marketing, taking ~2 months. With one engineer and designer at a rate of 8 ETH per contributor per month, the cost of the domain at ~3 ETH, minus the 1 ETH already awarded from Prop House, we are requesting 34 ETH.
Revoking Email Address Ownership
One open question is what would happen to an account who sells or transfers his Noun after previously claiming his email address. Because owning a @nouns.email email address reflects one’s on-chain identity, it would be reasonable that ownership of this address is lost after losing the underlying Noun.
To implement this, Ethereum oracles on Skiff would listen for transactions where existing Noun email holders sell or transfer their last remaining Noun. Then, following an optional grace period, the email address would become disabled, becoming unusable until the account owns a Noun again.