Nouns

One Noun, every day, forever.

nouns.wtf

I wanted to write a bit about prop 604, my involvement in the wave protocol, and why I think it's a good prop for us to support.

Long thread below:

The wave protocol was born out of prop 244 -- prop lot. The intention behind prop lot was to provide nouns with a single source of truth for ideas to live before they became proposals. It's important to understand that at the time, nouns did not have candidate proposals, and so ideas were fragmented between discord, discourse, and twitter. We spent a few months building prop lot, but unfortunately (fortunately?) candidate proposals launched at the same time and essentially made prop lot irrelevant.

We launched a POC of prop lot for nouns and got 0 users. A tough pill to swallow. The code lives on...

Crypto, nouns, malleable software, interfaces, running. // working on @agora // https://0xmcg.com // /the-pond

The wave protocol was born out of prop 244 -- prop lot. The intention behind prop lot was to provide nouns with a single source of truth for ideas to live before they became proposals. It's important to understand that at the time, nouns did not have candidate proposals, and so ideas were fragmented between discord, discourse, and twitter. We spent a few months building prop lot, but unfortunately (fortunately?) candidate proposals launched at the same time and essentially made prop lot irrelevant.

We launched a POC of prop lot for nouns and got 0 users. A tough pill to swallow. The code lives on...

https://github.com/prop-lot/v2

We faced a tough decision. Candidates seemed like they were going to be the new meta for aggregating ideas before they became proposals, so it didn't feel right to keep investing time into a product like prop lot that wouldn't be used. So we decided to do what a regular tech startup would do, and pivoted away from our original idea and to something new. That new thing is the wave protocol.

The wave protocol attempts to introduce something totally new to the governance space and is a protocol that can permissionlessly run with or without nouns support. It aims to solve three problems for three different groups: proposers, delegates, and supporters.

Proposers:
In order to get an idea to the voting stage you either need to own two Nouns, you need to know a nouner who will delegate their noun to you, or you need to put up a candidate proposal and hope that a nouner sees it. Nouns lacks a contributor highway. If you have an idea and want to get funding from nouns, it’s not clear what steps you need to take. There is no playbook. If we can improve the clarity around getting an idea on-chain, we will see more ideas and more people excited about, not exhausted from, interacting with nouns.

Delegates:
Reports show that at current spend, Nouns has anywhere from 8-14 months of runway before the treasury is completely dry. Like it or not, nouns needs it’s treasury to succeed, and we need more ways of funding the treasury that are independent of auction off a noun every day. Nouns has 560 treasury nouns sitting around doing nothing. We believe allocating a few nouns to the wave protocol could be an effective way to monetize the voting power of those nouns and fund the treasury in a new way.

Delegates:
Reports show that at current spend, Nouns has anywhere from 8-14 months of runway before the treasury is completely dry. Like it or not, nouns needs it’s treasury to succeed, and we need more ways of funding the treasury that are independent of auction off a noun every day. Nouns has 560 treasury nouns sitting around doing nothing. We believe allocating a few nouns to the wave protocol could be an effective way to monetize the voting power of those nouns and fund the treasury in a new way.
https://www.nounswap.wtf/stats/treasury

Supporters:
Many people are interested in nouns, but have no track record to show for themselves. This makes it challenging to secure a delegate or even to be taken seriously in things like the nouns channel on Warpcast. Currently, those with no voting power can participate by “supporting” a proposal and leaving a VWR, but it can sometimes feel futile to do so since there is no guarantee that your efforts are seen, there is no refund for support actions, and you likely need to be consistent with your support on many proposals to be recognized.

Supporters continued:
We believe the wave protocol offers a new avenue for those interested in participating in nouns — the scout model. In the traditional VC world scouts help VCs with deal flow by sourcing startups and sending them to partners at the firm. In a similar vein, “nouns scouts” could mint ideas that they think have potential and should make it to the voting stage. Since you get an NFT for supporting ideas, over time scouts build up reputation that show they have done an effective job sourcing deals. This is a new way of building social capital in the nouns ecosystem.

As mentioned earlier, the wave protocol can run with or without nouns support. This is the beauty of web3! However, prop 604 is asking for 2 nouns so nouns DAO can participate as a delegate of the wave protocol. This would signal a vote of support from the DAO that we think the wave protocol is an experiment worth trying. We are proud to be building alongside Nouns which has long been a leader in pushing forward the governance space, and believe the wave protocol could teach us something new about how different players interact with governance.

The prop lot team will not own these nouns. They are going to a multi-sig that is controlled by 3 signers (@adel, @krel, @joel) 2 of which do not belong to our team. This multisig can return the nouns to the treasury at any time should we decide we aren’t finding value from the wave protocol anymore. This multi-sig will also be responsible for claiming any yield from the protocol and returning it back to the treasury.

In summary, the wave protocol is the culmination of the prop lot team's attempt to try something new in the governance space. We hope you enjoy it and hope it can serve as an example of new governance experiments along side nouns which has long been a leader in pushing the governance space forward.

Also:

We used the wave protocol to get prop 604 on-chain! It's the first example of using the protocol as intended.

Also:

We used the wave protocol to get prop 604 on-chain! It's the first example of using the protocol as intended.

https://www.waveprotocol.wtf/idea/1

We faced a tough decision. Candidates seemed like they were going to be the new meta for aggregating ideas before they became proposals, so it didn't feel right to keep investing time into a product like prop lot that wouldn't be used. So we decided to do what a regular tech startup would do, and pivoted away from our original idea and to something new. That new thing is the wave protocol.

https://www.waveprotocol.wtf/