Nouns

One Noun, every day, forever.

nouns.wtf

Nouns DAO will go broke next year. 
If current trends continue, the DAO will face major financial strain. While our treasury spending has remained consistent, auction revenues have plummeted. Diversifying our revenue streams is no longer a nice to have. 

Some sobering statistics from the past 30 days:
* Auction Proceeds: 100.2 ETH
* Spending: 69.5 ETH + 2 nouns 
(data from Camp) 
But…. there are five upcoming proposals starting this week with a total ETH request of ~171 ETH.

We can remain complacent and hope auction revenue increases, or take proactive steps to seek out the future of the DAO.

The choice is ours.  “there are no silver bullets, only lead ones” - Ben Horowitz

Thinking about a Nouns Endowment to help ensure the DAO continues in perpetuity. 

Idea is that we set aside some % of the treasury in a stable yield bearing asset (ex. CUSDCv3, sDAI, …). The interest would be used to fund builders, ideally in a stream like manor drawing from what /vrbs has built.  

Thoughts?

https://warpcast.com/wilsoncusack/0x8eead66a
https://warpcast.com/rocketman/0x46b698c5

IMO, Nouns needs to shift to a long term sustainability mindset, be more mindful of spending and prop impact, and start to operate more like a startup. The runway is quickly shrinking.

We need to be proactive, and do things to set the DAO up for long term success, like:
* "Revolving Endowment Fund": https://warpcast.com/spencerperkins.eth/0xcb72c32a
* Sponsoring props with a revenue split back to the DAO
* Decreasing prop runway, anything over 1-3 months should be scrutinized, we should try fail fast and cheaply
* ...

https://warpcast.com/mikegood/0x8ae035f9

What part isn’t clear?

Diversified revenue streams => increased and more resilient treasury 

A concrete example, the auction goes to or near 0. The treasury WILL dry out unless we decide to completely stop spending, but might be too late at that point. 

The “Revolving Endowment Fund” can put the DAOs funds currently sitting in the treasury to work earning low risk yield in Defi. The yield can be used to perpetually fund builders or public goods. Even if the auction goes to 0, this will be a reliable source of revenue. 

The alternative is spending these funds on much higher risk proposals, which from prop history almost none turn into a substantial revenue stream for the DAO (?).

Certainly some of the DAOs allocation should be for purely public goods, but think there need to be a shift to thinking about how we can sustainably continue to do that.

Short term lowering spending to match inflows is good, but it means Nouns will be able to fund less and less impactful projects long term.

not clear to me how any of the other revenue streams make much sense / are meaningful in the near-med term. 

my op is that we should simply lower our spend to match our inflows. if we can rally behind a clear cut metric that constrains us to do that, we can at least start set clear max on the spend.

> operate more like a startup

startups succeed when they have a vision and something to rally around as a group. I don't think nouns has that. We need a compelling success metric that we can start funding and evaluating proposals against

no more "nouns funds your dreams" rhetoric. Too many opportunists come to nouns hoping for free money and part of it is because this is the brand we've been shilling to the outside world for a while with the props we've funded

I think if the DAO could just pay 10x the # of people we’d get a lot more impact and folks interested in buying

Easier said than done obv