tl;dr

Nouns Stream is a public good for payments across Noun-ish DAOs and beyond. It is an open-source, free, permission-less protocol that enables Phased (milestone-based) or Periodic (recurring) payments. This public good can support various payment modes, including peer-to-peer, DAO-to-DAO, community rounds, and grants without complex setup, shadow tokens, or intermediary protocol fees.

Nouns Stream does more than further the Nouns’ visual brand/meme; it helps push the ecosystem forward with easy-to-use public goods. This protocol has already been audited by 0xMacro and deployed across Ethereum (Mainnet, Goerli), Arbitrum (Mainnet, Goerli), Optimism (Mainnet, Goerli), Polygon (Mainnet, Mumbai) and Base (Goerli).

The protocol developers, who are also Nouns’ holders, are asking for a retroactive grant of 16 eth to cover the cost of the audit (US$25,000 ie ~14 eth) and deployment (US$5,000 ie ~2 eth).

Problem

Nouns and Noun-ish DAOs have no recourse or control over outgoing funds due to a successful proposal. If a team fails to deliver or meet certain milestones, the community cannot vote to recall the remaining funds.

Moreover, contributors to longer-running, phased projects need more certainty. Today they are forced to make a single, big ask for funding or create multiple proposals over the life of their project to secure continued funding. Unfortunately, such uncertainty doesn’t help set up ambitious developers, artists, and creators for success.

Lastly, as the community evolves, it may pay specific contributors— e.g., IRL Events Coordinator — a fixed amount per quarter, paid bi-weekly.

Within the community, we have seen a healthy debate between funding experiments to further the meme while keeping treasury spending in check. Tooling like Nouns Stream helps balance where milestone-based payments can commit to experiments and revert (via Proposal) if a project is not delivering the promised objectives.

Proposal

The Nouns Stream protocol is open-source, free, and permissionless. It allows anyone to set up an escrow account that is funded with funds later disbursed via one of two modes:

1. Phased (i.e., milestone-based)
2. Periodic (i.e., regular intervals)

To further clarify and formally define:

1. Phased: these are milestone-based payments where the funds are set up to be disbursed in predefined amounts on fixed dates. The dates and amounts for each milestone are set up during contract deployment. Configuring payment amounts on a milestone basis allows for unique cases requiring larger upfront payments to bootstrap projects. For example, a proposal for 75 eth might be broken into four parts over some fixed dates like:
   1. 04-10-2023: 35 eth
   2. 04-20-2023: 5 eth
   3. 04-30-2023: 15 eth
   4. 05-15-2023: 20 eth
2. Periodic: these are recurring payouts at fixed intervals defined in days or weeks. For example, a proposal could be set up to pay a community contributor 24 eth for the next three months (12 weeks) at two-week intervals, i.e., they will get paid 4 eth every two weeks from the escrow.

The Controller/Sender (e.g. Nouns Governor’s Contract in the case of Nouns DAO) is the only party that can cancel the escrow and recalls funds. The Receiver can’t withdraw funds before said strike dates. Such controls allow the community to create follow-up proposals and recall funds if a project is not believed to deliver on its promise long-term.

The protocol has a tipping mechanism where payments will be pushed to the receiving address if the payout is set up with a tip incentive. This avoids the need for Receiver to claim/withdraw funds. If no tip percentage is defined during contract deployment, the Receiver has to withdraw funds as they become available manually. Today, the tips are hard-coded to go to a fixed address. The developers will release an update within a few weeks where anyone who helps run these transactions can trigger transactions and earn tips.

With predictable payout timelines, Nouns Square can hold regular Demo Day sessions for projects to share progress against milestones 👀

Some previous proposals that could’ve directly benefited from the proposed payment infrastructure include:

• Fund design, engineering, and community contributors
• Prop House Protocol: Public Infrastructure by Nouns DAO
• Nounish Dataverse, open source data
• Nouns Deli Melbourne: Piloting a Nounish Franchise Model

Nouns Stream distinguishes from existing protocols such as Juicebox and Sablier through focused features, better user experience and Nounish visual branding:

1. It is visually propagating the Nouns meme
2. Providing a point-and-click user experience that any proposer can use to set up an escrow
3. Leverages CREATE2 opcode to provide future contract address, thus eliminating the need to pre-emptively deploy contracts or setup streams before Proposal has passed
4. Phased payment unlocks on pre-determined milestone dates
5. Capability to setup different payment amount for each phase within project
6. Zero fees, forever, and low gas
7. No secondary token to swap and manage
8. Sender/Controller fully controls the funds, i.e., DAO or multi-sig, who adds funds to the deployed contract

Deliverables & Ask

Everything has been built as open source and under the GPL license. The deliverables include a developer (React) SDK, allowing other developers to under this infrastructure within their applications. In addition, 0xMacro has audited the project.

The total ask for this project is 16 eth.

This funding will help the developers (retroactively) cover:

• cost of the audit completed by 0xMacro (US$25,000 ie ~14 eth)
• cost of contract deployment across all networks (US$5,000 ie ~2 eth)

In the future, the developers want to extend Nouns Build and add these payout options natively (via pull request) to the project. However, this Proposal doesn’t ask for funding for any such future development:

Contributors

Matthew (evav.eth, Noun#604, LilNoun#5834+5, Builder#67, Gnar#3750): 5+ years as blockchain engineer who has worked on various protocols including Burrata.xyz.

Osama (osama.eth, osamakhan.eth, Noun#463, LilNoun#5703, Builder#54, Gnar#553): 2+ years blockchain product/engineering and has helped build OlympusDAO.finance and Burrata.xyz.

Osama and Matthew have also been involved in the founding of Purple DAO — flagship Nouns Build DAO based around the Farcaster network.