This is the fourth of a series of 12 discrete stories about how a variety of web3 projects (ranging from crowd-funding platforms and NFTs to DeFi and gaming) have approached decentralized community building. You can read an aggregated overview of insights across all of these projects here.

Nouns: Community Synopsis

decentralization spectrum:

Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized

how it started: Pixelated Art About People, Places, & Things

The first Noun, sold one year ago, on August 8, 2021, for 613.37 ETH (~$1.9M at the time). Wtf. 

Nouns are 32x32 pixel characters with attributes of people, places, and things, and a new Noun NFT is up for auction every 24 hours, forever. As is noted in their documentation, Nouns is a completely public, open source project and protocol. The code lives on Github, the art is open source, and everything lives on the public domain. Just as you can build on open source code, anyone can build and contribute to Nouns artwork. This is part of what they refer to as the “Nouns virtuous cycle.”

Notably, the founding team (so-called “Nounders”) decided that their only payment would be awarding every 10th Noun (that’s the NFT itself, not any profits from it) to their multisig, to be vested and shared among the founding members for the first five years of the project. The unique compensation model means that they will never collectively own more than 10% of the ownership of the voting rights: The other 90% is delegated to the community. (There’s also no possibility of a rug pull.)

Also unique to typical NFT projects: 100% of the sales from a Noun auction go directly into a treasury, which be deployed as is seen fit from Noun holders. One month after the first auction, the first proposal was approved on Nouns DAO’s voting page: a donation of 5 ETH to six different charities, with a vote of 7 for, 0 against. Within a couple of months, the size of the treasury had already grown substantially, as more and more crypto-native builders and creators gravitated toward the possibilities that existed around a fully open, fully decentralized CC0 – or creative commons project.

One builder, Robleh, leaned into this early momentum with Proposal #6, the development of an iOS and Apple Watch app for the Nouns community. It was approved unanimously, and 100 ETH was transferred to his team to make and deploy the app, which is now available for download. When I asked Robleh what initially sparked his interest so early in building for this community, he said:

“A Noun forever is fascinating to humans. They’ve created this ‘bigger than us’ model. They have engineered an incentive model that’s miles ahead from everyone else. Most NFT projects are 10,000 units, all upfront. This is one a day forever, with 100% of auction proceeds going into a treasury.” 

how it’s going: 

As of today (August 9, 2022 – just a year and a day past the original launch of Nouns), more than 400 Nouns have been created, and the size of the Nouns treasury is nearly 27,000 ETH (more than ~$40M today). This week’s so-called  “nouniversary” was celebrated through a 24-hour live Twitter Spaces dialogue, in addition to a variety of activations, contests, commentary, and more – a testament to the ongoing community support of this project.

Due to the high price point of a Noun (it costs an average of 80-100 ETH to win an auction), I’ll admit that I was initially skeptical about the democratization of this project, which felt largely inaccessible to “the everyday person.” But the more I dug in, I was surprised to see the trickle-down effects of the broader community, which now not only includes highly passionate DAOs dedicated to fractional ownership of Nouns (ie: SharkDAO), spin-off projects for affordable “forks” of Nouns assets (see: Lil Nouns and NounsTown), and a myriad of educational initiatives among community-led proposals, from children’s books to curriculum content for schools.

The spinoff of derivative projects and building on top of the creative commons properties has launched an impressive creator network as well. The past year has surfaced 130 community proposals for projects seeking funding from the treasury (all of which can be seen here), ~80 of which have been approved. These proposals span everything from baked beans and Art Basel installations to charitable donations for humanitarian assistance in Ukraine.

Robleh described Nouns to me as a “creative playground for builders” and likened it to open sourcing games like Mario or Pokemon. Maybe that’s why over 19,000 people have joined their Discord and top creative minds are coming together to surface exciting new possibilities like Nouns! The Animated Pilot.

why it worked:

Nouns was one of the first projects to lean 100% into decentralization but they didn’t get there by accident. What’s the difference? 

For one, their founding team of “Nounders” includes heavy-hitters like @gremplin, the artist behind CrypToadz, @punk4156, a prominent thinker and investor, and @dom, creator of Vine, Loot, and other apps. As Robleh put it:

“The people who work on the project are already crypto OGs. I’ve learned a ton from them: The way they think about projects, how they think about designing an open source brand, a lot of people talk about protocols. This is a brand protocol, they are taking tech thinking and apply it to brands. Nouns is the Nike Swoosh of web3.”

Second – The unique incentive structure and creative commons promise inspired a lot of early traction of Nouns on rinkeby, which inspired others to get involved fast – and ultimately just have fun together on the Internet. The origin of SharkDAO is proof enough of that. Why would a group of strangers band together in a matter of days just so they could bid on Nouns collectively? Because they wanted to play together.

Echoes of fun permeate throughout all aspects of the Nouns community – ranging from the daily Twitter Spaces events, “Noun’o’clock” in the Noun Square to the cheeky projects and banter of the community. For a lot of active contributors, it hearkens back to the early days of web 1.0, with strangers simply have fun together on the Internet.

Over time, the community-led, open source model has led to more and more complex, creative, and expensive ways to spend their treasury. Done correctly, their brand affinity may make it all worthwhile.

how decisions get made:

• All funds flow to the treasury
• New proposals for use of funds flow through: https://discourse.nouns.wtf/ 
• Noun holders vote on proceeds (1 Noun = 1 vote)

top 3 web3 vibes:

• Incentive model: The zero take rate structure and immediate CC0 licensing of Nouns NFTs leveled the playing field to invite others to build with them
• Grassroots community-driven projects & proposals: Nouns is perhaps among the strongest NFT projects in bringing together derivative and offshoot projects
• Feel-good vibes: From the playful depictions of each NFT to the FOMO Nouns sessions and the fun Nouns unlocked in other groups like SharkDAO, it’s among the most playful of web3 communities today

advice to founders & builders in web3:

Don’t be afraid to put a project out there that doesn’t feel fully complete. Invite others to build with you and you’ll stumble upon potential outcomes you may never have imagined yourself. As punk4156 put it on Twitter on the day of the Nouniversary:

“I’ve had the privilege of working on a lot of projects over the years, enough to know how rare and special it is to be even a small part of something like Nouns. I think it's possible that we’ll look back on the first year with the realization that we were present in the early days of a huge cultural movement: our Warhol, or Disney, or Hip hop, when it was still brand new and rough around the edges and when the space of possibilities was so wide open that new discoveries were being made every week and sometimes every day.”

Special thanks to Robleh for their help on this narrative. You can also view the complete repository of articles and references across all projects as part of this study.