TLDR: Asking to continue our engagement with nouns for another 12 months.
Accomplishments
Below are some of the things we’re proud of that came into fruition since this term started.
Nouns Fork
The fork mechanism has been used 3 times so far. To the best of our knowledge, it worked smoothly with no hiccups. This is the most significant and risky change to the Nouns protocol to date and we are happy there were no technical issues.
Proposal candidates
A new way to coordinate onchain at the pre-proposal stage. Over 100 candidates have been created so far, and over 40 proposals were created with signers via proposeBySigs.
We believe this widened the funnel of proposals coming into the DAO and created a space where proposers can get attention, feedback and sponsorship.
Proposal updates
The ability to update a proposal before voting starts is a simple change but seems to have been very useful.
Blog
We’ve been more actively publishing long form content on our mirror page in an effort to increase alignment and context on the work we’re doing.
Projects we’ve worked on this term
Our first few months were dedicated to things related to the ongoing forks and arbitrage problem. This has pushed back our planned projects, but we think it was important for us to be reactive to the DAO’s needs.
This work included:
- Reconsidering the fork upgrade due to a potential attack. The original V3 update proposal was canceled at the last minute due to concerns over a potential attack. Together with other nouners, we were analyzing the risks of this attack in order to decide whether to go forward with the V3 upgrade. \
- Driving conversation in the DAO on how to mitigate arb. After the first fork, we were taking a leading role in driving the conversation in the DAO on how to mitigate the arb problem introduced by the forking mechanism. \
- Implementing the burn and pausing the effort due to complexity. We implemented the burn mechanism and were ready to start a security audit of the code. After additional thought we decided that the introduced complexity was not worth the benefits and recommended that we put this on hold for now. \
- Modeling arb in Nouns. In an effort to find alternative ways to mitigate the arb problem, we wrote a post modeling the arb and showing which potential levers the DAO has to address the problem. Proposal 439 increased the fork threshold as a followup to our research and seems to have at least broken the status quo where only arb minded buyers were winning the auctions. \
- Nouns Governor and Client Incentives initial designs.
Going forward
We are currently focused on two big projects that we want to ship in the next term:
- Nouns Governor: an NFT focused governor contract instead of the current governor bravo based contracts. We’ve outlined our motivation in this blog post. \
- Client incentives: a payment mechanism in which the nouns protocol rewards clients (frontends) for facilitating interactions with it.
Other projects that we will potentially work on:
- L2 voting: join forces with experienced teams building on L2s to explore and potentially build an L2 voting solution.
- Private voting: work with one of the teams who participated in the private voting prop house round to build a working private voting solution for nouns.
- Fork V2: upgrade the forking mechanism to prevent a chasing-after attack in which an attacker can follow the minority into a forked DAO and force them to quit. This becomes possible with Nouns Governor.
As we did in this term, we will respond to the DAO critical or time sensitive needs as they come up.
Compensation & terms
In this proposal we are asking for a 12-month stream. We think we’ve established enough trust to try a longer stream so that we can spend less time worrying about the next proposal, and more time shipping.
We still think shorter streams are essential to mitigate the DAO’s risk with new builders, and hope the DAO will continue with that standard, while being open to longer stream experiments with trusted community members.
In addition, we’re committing to posting propdates every 3 months with a status report of what has been done and what is currently being worked on; your feedback is meaningful and often helps us make better decisions.
The rest of the terms are similar to our previous proposals.
- 12 months engagement starting February 1, 2024.
- Payment done via streams controlled by the DAO, cancelable via proposal.
- $37.5k per person (2) per month (6) paid in USDC.
- 1.5 ETH per month for 6 months to solimander, for time spent meeting with the team, reviewing designs and code, and supporting audits and rollout.
- Total: 900K USDC, 9 ETH.
- Additional funding for things like audits, mandated rounds and other experiments will be requested separately as needs arise.