Description:

What started as an experimental approach for Nouns DAO to deploy capital has become core infrastructure to onboard and fund builders within the Nouns ecosystem. Consequently, the idea has been spreading. From ENS, to Ape Coin to AAVE, communities across the broader crypto space have expressed interest in using Prop House.

I propose building the Prop House Protocol as public infrastructure with the aims of it being a tool for all to use while proliferating the Nouns meme at the deepest level.

Where we are today:

Summary:

• 300+ proposals submitted
• 2,000+ votes allocated
• 5 active houses
• 157 ETH committed to 52 builders across 10 funding rounds
• prop.house UX continues to improve
• External interest:
  • ENS building their own version of Prop House
  • Ape coin and Aave are amongst the 10+ communities that have expressed interest in setting up their own house
• Please review the Expenses report for an overview of all things Prop House financials

Proposals:

At the time of writing (06/18), 18 proposals have had enough time elapse since being funded to make a judgement on whether or not they executed. So far, only 1 out of 18 proposals has had a no-show. Overall, quality of proposals corresponding to amounts funded are still desirable. With the launch of Nouns Combinator (25 ETH single winner house), we hope to see more ambitious proposals be submitted.

Houses:

We are currently running 4 nounish houses with another two coming online soon:

• Nouns Launchpad
• Lil Nouns
• NounPunks
• Nouns Combinator
• Nouns DAO Japan (coming soon)
• SharkDAO (coming soon)

Within the main Nouns house, quality has stayed consistent while proposals are averaging ~38 submissions per round:

To view all the proposals that have been funded so far, please visit prop.house

Two experiments were run with external houses:

• Zorbs failed due to the round being endlessly spammed. Beyond the spam, there was a clear misconception in what Prop House was to be used for, hinting at more education content being needed.
• Mfers house has been quite a success. The announcement tweet rallied the community and the subsequent reaction points to Nouns earning goodwill as a leader in the CC0 community.

The Protocol

The protocol refers to the suite of smart contracts and open-source software that would enable anyone to run their own auctions and/or Prop House web app.

Why build the protocol in the first place?

Currently, Prop House runs as a centralized system. Each round and all of its parameters are decided on by a few people. More importantly, the Prop House multi-sig handles all the funding. As volumes grow, it increasingly becomes a risk factor.

Building Prop House into a protocol would enable the DAO to have more control over how the capital is deployed. To illustrate, the following scenario would be possible with a live protocol:

• An on-chain proposal to the DAO to set up 10 rounds at x ETH for y winners over the next 3 months

Why build it as public infrastructure?

Beyond proliferating the Nouns aesthetic, I believe building public infrastructure proliferates the meme at a much deeper level hence it being the way forward.

Nouns is uniquely positioned to capture value via novel means. One of the drivers for auction demand is how aspirational the meme is. Akin to luxury goods, demand is in large part driven by psychology, not just ad spend or certain KPIs. It then follows that building public infrastructure that sets Nouns as the most forward-thinking community also contributes to auction demand.

Much more than a brand or a visual meme, Nouns is an invitation for others to join us in taking the new tools we now have at hand to rethink how we build the world around us. To that extent, public infrastructure for all is the Nounish thing to do.

To continue exploring:

Along with building the protocol, we are looking forward to:

• Experimenting with bigger rounds
• Integrating with Snapshot
• Exploring new auction formats
  • Infinite auctions
  • Retroactive rewards
  • Pod and mandate specific houses
• New nounish houses (Nouns DAO Japan, SharkDAO are coming soon)
• Updates around the UI (past winners, voting data, etc)
• Helping other communities onboard

Budgets

Past:

Total funded by the DAO since Dec ’21 through via proposals 23 & 62: - 95 ETH paying Prop House contributors (~50% still remains for Jul & Aug) - 150 ETH in funding Prop House builders

Current Ask:

Operations (600 ETH):

• 100 ETH: Adds two solidity developers to payroll for remaining 2 months (July and August)
• 440 ETH: Extends Prop House development runway by 4 months (Sept - Dec)
  • Team on payroll consists of 2 solidity devs, 1 backend, 1 frontend and 1 designer (solimander, vapeape, devcarrot, seneca, toastee)
• 60 ETH: Misc expenses
  • Smart contract audits
  • Helping Nounish communtiies get set up (e.g. Nouns DAO Japan was ~10 ETH)
  • Operations (infura, linear figma, etc)

Funding Builders (400 ETH):

• Capital to deploy through funding auctions. We're currently at a ~80 ETH / month rate. 400 ETH would allow for 5 months of funding across all nounish houses.

TOTAL ASK: 1000 ETH (600 PH contributors, 400 for funding builders)

With this grant, the funds received for one year (Dec '21 - Dec '22) of Prop House discovery and development over the three proposals would total:

• 710 ETH for funding development
• 550 ETH for funding prop builders.

Deliverables

• Suite of smart contracts that allow anyone to fund and deploy their own funding auctions
• Open-source front-end for anyone to fork and run their own web app
• Documentation to help developers and communities alike get started

Sustainability

We are exploring ways to make Prop House sustainable such that no future ask is required from Nouns DAO. While we are still open to any paths forward, one that seems plausible is creating Prop House DAO where Nouns DAO has meaningful ownership of the newly formed DAO. This would allow Nouns DAO to continue to capture any upside that comes from Prop House while aligning incentives accordingly.

Multi-sig

The multisig is currently 3/5 where the signers are seneca, devcarrot, toastee, cdt and vapeape. The addresses are as follows:

safe: 0x5BcD6f3B0a5519D448FBDf33204091bbE097C992
seneca: 0xfC9e8dB5E255439F430e058462360Dd52b87cB4f devcarrot: 0xB1C41C71d36cedEa7DdCd5f8D5c5C32BA8f3CBFc toastee: 0x5F99FC2d2A98e046t9689d3117e0F96bb5c640d88 cdt: 0x1Bf87eAd2Fc2A4751CF5Bda011E5Afa320391cc2 vapeape: 0x88f9E324801320A3fC22C8d045A98Ad32a490d8E