TLDR

• What is this?
  • 3 months, 3 zero-knowledge teams, funded by Nouns to design open source solutions for private voting.
  • All outputs are open source, and include detailed designs and proofs of concept.
  • 70K USDC per team + 20K USDC marketing budget to appear on zk pods and newsletters. Total: 230K USDC.
• Why should we do this?
  • Take a huge leap closer to having private voting working on mainnet.
  • Create valuable public goods in the form of the expected open source private voting designs.
  • Attract gigabrain builders in crytography/zk to Nouns.

On Private Voting

There has been a surge of interest among Nouners to experiment with private voting.

The main benefit is freeing voters from biases and pressures. Voters don't have to fear the social costs of voting opposite of what their peers might expect. Furthermore, influential voters by default don't show their vote (they can still choose to share their vote), making it harder for others to copy their behavior, nudging more voters to develop original points of view.

The main concern is that private voting removes reputation cost, potentially leading to riskier voter behaviors. Furthermore, if the tally of votes is only known at the end of the voting period, it may increase voter apathy and lead to outcomes opposite the majority's preference.

We think the benefits are very valuable to Nouns and DAOs generally, meriting further exploration.

Goals

After several conversations with zero-knowledge folks, including the awesome Personae Labs (HeyAnoun), the conculsion is clear: there are no obvious solutions to private voting. Further research is required.

All the designs that have been suggested to us so far come with significant drawbacks; examples include requiring a central trusted party, requiring Nouners to pool their Nouns in a central contract, requiring a registration step before each proposal, linking Nouner balances to their votes, and a few more.

We are still a long way away from deciding if Nouns should use private voting and in what ways.

This round's goal is to better inform us on possibilities and limitations, such that in a few months we'll be able to decide if and how to experiment with private voting. By funding this research we're making private voting more attaintale for Nouns and other DAOs.

Should the DAO choose to continue down this path, we expect to have strong noun-pilled zk teams to help us get there.

Important to highlight: funding this round does not mean a decision to go all-in on private voting; it means we're interested enough in the possibilities for Nouns and other DAOs to take this single step forward.

See the full round spec and the pending prop house round for a deeper dive.

Operations

• One month for teams to apply.
• 2.5 weeks for Nouners to vote; we want to make sure there's enough time to properly make sense of all applications.
• Up to 3 teams get funded. Teams must pass a quorum of 300 prop house votes (30 Nouns) and be in the top 3 to win.
• Funded teams perform ~3 months of research, supported by the verbs team and the tech pod.

Deliverables

• We will hopefully have a variety of approaches to private voting designs that work well with Nouns DAO on Ethereum mainnet.
• We will understand tradeoffs within specific designs and across designs.
• We will hopefully have a few working proofs-of-concept that can accelerate any implementation we may decide on.
• All of the above will be open source, for the benefit of Nouns and the entire crypto community.

Safe

Funds are managed in a 3/5 Gnosis Safe managed by Elad, David, Solimander, Vapeape and Will.

Marketing

We will activate the Nouns community to help raise awareness among all the zk gigabrains out there.

Beyond twitter, we would like to raise awareness through popular zk podcasts and newsletters.

To enable these marketing efforts we're asking for an additional budget of 20K USDC.

Budget

• Mandated round: 210K USDC (3 teams * 70K USDC).
• Marketing: 20K USDC.
• Total: 230K USDC.

The budget might not be fully utilized, because we didn't fund 3 teams, or because we didn't need the full marketing budget. Any remaining funds will be sent back to the DAO once the round is done.

Why should we care?

Nouns DAO is one of the most interesting corners on the internet right now, and it has a lot to do with our continuous iterations on protocols and tools. Let's continue being the first to do many things.

Let's be the first DAO to experiment with fully private voting on mainnet. Let's pave the path for other DAOs, and let's show everyone that we're on the frontier, that we're pulling the future faster towards us.

We will attract brilliant people through this round, who might get totally noun-pilled and accelerate us ever further. This round is a great reason for all of us to make a lot of noise and get Nouns a spike of attention.

This round will grow the set of people at the intersection of (a) caring about the future of crypto and (b) loving Nouns.

People behind this proposal

Huge thanks to Noun 40 for sparking this round and providing tons of ideas, feedback and support.

Huge thanks to Lakshman and DigitalOil; with their detailed inputs the round spec looks so much better.

Thank you Seneca for the feedback and all the prop house support in making this special round work well.

We're grateful for the tech pod's support of this proposal and anything else we do, namely Solimander, Vapeape and Will.

We are the verbs team, David and Elad, working full time on the Nouns protocol.

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