Nouns

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nouns.wtf

nounspace

Howdy there Nouners and friends! I wanted to share some of my feelings and side of the story on a recent prop candidate - "Double down on nounspace.wtf". 

Some of you might not know me that well, so I'm gonna kick this thread off with a quick intro:

I’m a dev on one of the teams that were granted funding to build a Nounish farcaster client (through prop 498 and 509). I’ve been heads down working on the /nounspace farcaster client since day zero and I feel super lucky to have the opportunity to be building this project.

Building /nounspace | Founding Member /atxdao | Creating community and good vibes wherever I go.

I am genuinely thrilled that I get to work on something every day that I feel gives people a ton of creative freedom and has the potential to make the online and onchain world a better place. And I’ve got a lot of love for this community helping us get off the ground.

Our goal is to bring nounspace (and along with it, the Nouns brand and community) to as many people as possible. We want to build this platform into a real business that can sustain itself and continue making an impact in the world.

So it was really hard to see some of the negative responses this morning to our follow up proposal asking for funding to help push our project further towards that goal. 

Not that the community can't say no to our request!

So it was really hard to see some of the negative responses this morning to our follow up proposal asking for funding to help push our project further towards that goal. 

Not that the community can't say no to our request! 

https://www.nouns.camp/candidates/double-down-on-nounspacewtf-06ae622bf2029db79bdebd38f723f1f33f95f6c5

But I wanted to clarify a couple of points about what we’ve built and our intentions. 

First, nounspace is free for every Nouner! If you have a Nouns NFT in your wallet, you can mint one of our early access NFTs for free. We built this client for the Nouns community first and foremost and we would never gate access to the community that helped start us.

These early access NFTs are helpful to our team in a couple ways. Having a financial gate to nounspace to begin with keeps the quality of creators on the platform high in the alpha, so that we can be sure that there are plenty of high quality spaces before we open completely to the public in the beta version. Creative tooling can be wonderful, but it also opens to door to lots of abuse that our small team might be ill equipped to manage just yet. They also help our team get closer to a sustainable financial model so that we can continue to develop nounspace and build new features for it far into the future.

I really don’t feel like I or anyone else on the team has generated “free” money from this project. We’ve worked incredibly hard to get nounspace off the ground. We’ve got five people on the core team (not counting @nounspaceTom) - three devs, a product manager, and a growth expert. We’ve all been working at well less than market rates with hours that are well beyond a traditional 9-5. I know I personally put in several 70-80 hour weeks right before launch to make sure we would hit the three month target in the proposal with the best platform possible.

The $SPACE token also isn’t a money grab.

Our goal with $SPACE is to try to create one of the first truly community owned social platforms (with a community that can grow and extend beyond just the Nouns community). We’re doing a fair launch for the token to give it the initial capital necessary to be stable when it actually launches in September. And we’re doing it in the safest way possible for our early supporters. Folks who want to contribute are putting the yield from their staked ETH into the initial token liquidity. So their initial capital is never at risk, and at launch, the tokens will already have inherent value from that liquidity.

Furthermore, we’ve set up a governance system for this token that gives the community complete control over how it is distributed. So at launch, each of the five distribution buckets (capital investors, community treasury, users, third party developers, and team) will be receiving a 20% portion of the tokens emitted, but at any time, the $SPACE holders can vote onchain to change the ratios of allocation.

So the team isn’t directly getting funds through this. At most we’re getting access to 1/5th of the capital being put in the liquidity pool if we were to sell all of our tokens. Our intent is to funnel any value produced on the nounspace platform back into the $SPACE token so that it benefits all holders.

It’s pretty tough to get to the point of sustainable income for a social media platform after only 3 months of work with no intent to take funding from VCs. So we’re coming back to Nouns asking for more funding to help us reach that point without needing to dilute our ethos.

I hope some of y’all will agree with this perspective and help support us in building nounspace into the best farcaster client. 

But I would really appreciate not being belittled or treated like mercenary treasury drainers when we’ve delivered everything that we originally promised and more.

Our whole team has worked really hard over the past three months to create the first spark of the vision that we have for nounspace. We not only built the platform that we promised, but we’ve also brought together an awesome community of folks who are excited about what we’re building (over 1000!).

/zoz ✊☀️ autofollow list created #qDAU

It really is. Thanks for your support! 🙏