ProposalsProposal 200
Nouns Mail: A Token-Gated Email Address
Defeated
For
14
Against
164
Abstain
2
Quorum: 84
Proposed by
0x0BC6...ADe6
ProposalsProposal 200
I'm not convinced that this is solving a core need for Nouners at the moment - I would guess that folks don't want to use yet another communication channel, and don't really have trouble communicating privately and securely with others already. I do think the tech is cool, but not sure it's a fit for the DAO at this time.
Again excited to see Nouns drawing in creative proposals from such talented people, but I am voting against this one. I am not sure that NFT-specific email addresses are the right model: seems more likely that something tied to your address, which can't be transferred, will work better in most cases. I am also not really compelled by the email-gated use cases: I think Nouns biases open, and I also think that the web3 integrations we see in Discord will be in a lot of other apps soon. Grateful for the time and energy put into this and wish this team the best!
Nouncil Vote:
35 Yes, 20 No, 1 Abstain
8 Nouncillors abstained from the decision
YES WINS
Vote Reasons & Discussion
lilpizza.eth | "Amazing utility. Really into this idea."
RyanMac ⌐◨-◨ | "Nouns having a delgated email address per owner to use for on-chain activity is a great idea"
ChrisCoCreated | "anything that helps people flex their noun adds value"
Graphic.⌐◨-◨ | "would be a great way to communicate with one another and like everyone business it would be cool for nouns to have there own 😃"
bradq | "This seems like an interesting idea but I'm not convinced there is need for it. And I think Nouners only is too narrow a focus. This idea for a couple hundred active Nouners max, and probably far less doesn't seem to make sense. Appreciate the builders and effort, though."
Mach | "Novel idea but don't think the use case is that widespread that it's something that should be funded like this. Limited scope and small chance for adoption"
Josep | "I do not think it is the best way to add value to the DAO to allocate this amount of resources to a service that I doubt will become the primary form of communication in Nouns DAO, which is why I am against funding this project."
Blu ⌐◨-◨ | "So looking at this, Skiff still run their own servers but messages are encrypted so they don’t have access which could be an issue. If skiff gets shut down though then emails don’t work. Wish something like this could merge with handshake to make it truly decentralized. That being said I voted for it to see what they come up with since it’s a great idea."
Benbodhi | "I love the concept and tech but feel like it won't get a lot of use, especially with the limited subset of users that are interested noun holders. It also seems har to evaluate the work involved. Looks like the build is a token gated claim for custom domain and frontend interface for claim, which if this is the full development requirement, seems like it's possibly overpriced. Unfortunately I have to vote no on this proposal as it is."
Mindtoasted | "Love the idea, an exclusive email address. I think the request is quite big in my opinion, but still curious about what will happen if this idea goes on chain. I would like to vote yes on this."
0xDariush | "i don't see any demands for this in the ecosystem, at least at the moment. or maybe I'm not nerd enough to get it"
Sasquatch | "I hate email"
For more Nouns DAO proposal discussion head to the Nouncil Discord: https://discord.gg/nouncil
I love the concept and the tech. But I’m not sure how valuable it is to the DAO right now. I think only a small subset of nouners would utilise it and it possibly wouldn’t have much proliferation effect.
Voting no due to low expected utility and concerns raised by Nounders.
devcarrot: I recommend we vote against this. The main issue I have is that this creates a man-in-the-middle attack vector either by whomever is operating the platform or any defects in the software that's used and a false sense of security. Skiff may be interesting as it encrypts skiff-to-skiff emails (in this case emails sent between @nouns.email users) and incoming emails at rest but it doesn't magically grant the user the ability to have encrypted communications with "all emails sent and received"; emails from, to, and including non-Skiff users are still sent in plaintext. I believe the prop made this detail ambiguous at best.
I'm also concerned around a centralized location for Nouners' emails, this would be an attractive target for attackers.
I wish the Skiff team the best and would personally be interested in playing with their platform, but I don't believe this proposal should pass due to the ambiguity around privacy.
I appreciate the time and energy that went into this proposal, but unfortunately I do not think this is a product that I or most other DAO members would ever use. I already have too many different emails, discords, telegrams, whatsapps, imessages, etc, etc, and would prefer to reduce the number of messaging surfaces I have, not add more
Thank you to Lakshman Sankar and Maksim Stepanenko for delegating Nouns to submit this proposal.
We would also like to thank Prop House and Nouns voters for their support in Open Round 13. This proposal serves to update the community on our progress and request the remaining funds necessary for the development of Nouns Mail.
A token-gated email address for every Nouns holder to pseudonymously communicate and access the rest of the internet.
Nouns is the most interesting experiment happening in decentralized governance and community. Yet, large swaths of the internet remain segregated from on-chain identities. Currently, Nouners cannot connect their Ethereum wallets to access Twitter, collaborate on a Figma document, or even engage on the Nouns forum.
Email addresses remain a necessity to access most platforms on the internet. Existing email providers do not natively integrate with Nouns identity, compelling Nouns to manually link aspects of their on-chain identity to off-chain platforms.
We elaborate more on this problem and discuss solutions in The Identity Gap.
Every Nouns owner will be able to claim a unique, token-gated email address under @nouns.email, or another domain decided by the DAO. Claiming this email address will be enforced by querying to an Ethereum node verifying ownership of a Noun.
Use cases
Here we suggest four initial categories of how our proposal can provide utility for Nouns. Should the proposal be accepted, we hope to assist in building out these use cases — like a weekly email newsletter or a @nouns.email domain-gated Figma.
We encourage the community to suggest additional use cases — Nouns Mail is a primitive that can unlock a Cambrian explosion of creativity.
Greater utility for owning a Noun (through Nouns Mail or otherwise) increases the demand for minting Nouns or paying royalties on secondary transactions, leading to a larger treasury for the DAO.
Implementation
NounsDAO allocates a domain to be used as the official email domain for Nouns holders. We suggest nouns.email because of its familiarity, but any reasonable domain owned by the DAO or available on the market would suffice.
We will be using Skiff Mail, an open source, end-to-end encrypted mail provider, as the interface and mailserver for the custom domain.
All emails sent and received by Nouns email addresses are encrypted with elliptic curve crypto (Curve25519 keypairs), and emails that are sent or received to other Skiff accounts (e.g. other Nouns holders) are end-to-end encrypted. Ownership of EOAs is verified by generating a unique challenge token, requesting an ECSDA signature, and verifying the signature’s validity. A full description of Skiff’s protocol and threat model can be found at skiff.com/whitepaper.
As previously mentioned, verification of Nouns ownership occur by querying an Ethereum indexer on the Nouns token contract.
Example User Experience
A user connects their wallet — if it’s detected that they own a Noun, a dialog prompts them to create their email address.
After clicking Claim email alias , the page directs them to choose their unique Nouns email address.
Afterwards, Nouners will be free to send and receive email from this address.
Revoking Email Address Ownership
One open question is what would happen to an account who sells or transfers his Noun after previously claiming his email address. Because owning a @nouns.email email address reflects one’s on-chain identity, it would be reasonable that ownership of this address is lost after losing the underlying Noun.
To implement this, Ethereum oracles on Skiff would listen for transactions where existing Noun email holders sell or transfer their last remaining Noun. Then, following an optional grace period, the email address would become disabled, becoming unusable until the account owns a Noun again.
Phase 1A: December 2022 [COMPLETED] After Prop House Open Round 13, we successfully implemented the backend endpoints for Nouns Mail. You can view a video demo here (this test account owns two other NFTs, but not a Nouns and therefore is unable to claim).
Phase 1B: January 2023
The first phase will involve implementation of claiming Noun email addresses with the UX flow described above, including a full integration with the @nouns.email domain. We anticipate this taking around 2-3 weeks to fully build, test, and launch. Pending successful execution of the proposal, we are targeting a launch date of January 20, 2022.
Phase 3: February 2023
In phase 2, we plan to take an active role in creating Nounish utilities based on Nouns Mail, including newsletters, domain-gated workspaces, and integrating better verification banners for the Nouns forum. We anticipate this process taking around a month, depending on the scope of utilities. We will launch these Nounish utilities as they are created, working actively with the community throughout development.
Joseph Zhang - Designer, currently at Skiff and Azuki. Previously Apple, CMU design.
Richard Liu - Engineer, currently at Skiff. Also contributor to IBC and Osmosis. Previously Blockchain@Berkeley, Figma.
We anticipate completion of phase 1 and 2, as well as initial maintenance and marketing, taking ~2 months. With one engineer and designer at a rate of 8 ETH per contributor per month, the cost of the domain at ~3 ETH, minus the 1 ETH already awarded from Prop House, we are requesting 34 ETH.
Revoking Email Address Ownership
One open question is what would happen to an account who sells or transfers his Noun after previously claiming his email address. Because owning a @nouns.email email address reflects one’s on-chain identity, it would be reasonable that ownership of this address is lost after losing the underlying Noun.
To implement this, Ethereum oracles on Skiff would listen for transactions where existing Noun email holders sell or transfer their last remaining Noun. Then, following an optional grace period, the email address would become disabled, becoming unusable until the account owns a Noun again.
Thank you to Lakshman Sankar and Maksim Stepanenko for delegating Nouns to submit this proposal.
We would also like to thank Prop House and Nouns voters for their support in Open Round 13. This proposal serves to update the community on our progress and request the remaining funds necessary for the development of Nouns Mail.
A token-gated email address for every Nouns holder to pseudonymously communicate and access the rest of the internet.
Nouns is the most interesting experiment happening in decentralized governance and community. Yet, large swaths of the internet remain segregated from on-chain identities. Currently, Nouners cannot connect their Ethereum wallets to access Twitter, collaborate on a Figma document, or even engage on the Nouns forum.
Email addresses remain a necessity to access most platforms on the internet. Existing email providers do not natively integrate with Nouns identity, compelling Nouns to manually link aspects of their on-chain identity to off-chain platforms.
We elaborate more on this problem and discuss solutions in The Identity Gap.
Every Nouns owner will be able to claim a unique, token-gated email address under @nouns.email, or another domain decided by the DAO. Claiming this email address will be enforced by querying to an Ethereum node verifying ownership of a Noun.
Use cases
Here we suggest four initial categories of how our proposal can provide utility for Nouns. Should the proposal be accepted, we hope to assist in building out these use cases — like a weekly email newsletter or a @nouns.email domain-gated Figma.
We encourage the community to suggest additional use cases — Nouns Mail is a primitive that can unlock a Cambrian explosion of creativity.
Greater utility for owning a Noun (through Nouns Mail or otherwise) increases the demand for minting Nouns or paying royalties on secondary transactions, leading to a larger treasury for the DAO.
Implementation
NounsDAO allocates a domain to be used as the official email domain for Nouns holders. We suggest nouns.email because of its familiarity, but any reasonable domain owned by the DAO or available on the market would suffice.
We will be using Skiff Mail, an open source, end-to-end encrypted mail provider, as the interface and mailserver for the custom domain.
All emails sent and received by Nouns email addresses are encrypted with elliptic curve crypto (Curve25519 keypairs), and emails that are sent or received to other Skiff accounts (e.g. other Nouns holders) are end-to-end encrypted. Ownership of EOAs is verified by generating a unique challenge token, requesting an ECSDA signature, and verifying the signature’s validity. A full description of Skiff’s protocol and threat model can be found at skiff.com/whitepaper.
As previously mentioned, verification of Nouns ownership occur by querying an Ethereum indexer on the Nouns token contract.
Example User Experience
A user connects their wallet — if it’s detected that they own a Noun, a dialog prompts them to create their email address.
After clicking Claim email alias , the page directs them to choose their unique Nouns email address.
Afterwards, Nouners will be free to send and receive email from this address.
Revoking Email Address Ownership
One open question is what would happen to an account who sells or transfers his Noun after previously claiming his email address. Because owning a @nouns.email email address reflects one’s on-chain identity, it would be reasonable that ownership of this address is lost after losing the underlying Noun.
To implement this, Ethereum oracles on Skiff would listen for transactions where existing Noun email holders sell or transfer their last remaining Noun. Then, following an optional grace period, the email address would become disabled, becoming unusable until the account owns a Noun again.
Phase 1A: December 2022 [COMPLETED] After Prop House Open Round 13, we successfully implemented the backend endpoints for Nouns Mail. You can view a video demo here (this test account owns two other NFTs, but not a Nouns and therefore is unable to claim).
Phase 1B: January 2023
The first phase will involve implementation of claiming Noun email addresses with the UX flow described above, including a full integration with the @nouns.email domain. We anticipate this taking around 2-3 weeks to fully build, test, and launch. Pending successful execution of the proposal, we are targeting a launch date of January 20, 2022.
Phase 3: February 2023
In phase 2, we plan to take an active role in creating Nounish utilities based on Nouns Mail, including newsletters, domain-gated workspaces, and integrating better verification banners for the Nouns forum. We anticipate this process taking around a month, depending on the scope of utilities. We will launch these Nounish utilities as they are created, working actively with the community throughout development.
Joseph Zhang - Designer, currently at Skiff and Azuki. Previously Apple, CMU design.
Richard Liu - Engineer, currently at Skiff. Also contributor to IBC and Osmosis. Previously Blockchain@Berkeley, Figma.
We anticipate completion of phase 1 and 2, as well as initial maintenance and marketing, taking ~2 months. With one engineer and designer at a rate of 8 ETH per contributor per month, the cost of the domain at ~3 ETH, minus the 1 ETH already awarded from Prop House, we are requesting 34 ETH.
Revoking Email Address Ownership
One open question is what would happen to an account who sells or transfers his Noun after previously claiming his email address. Because owning a @nouns.email email address reflects one’s on-chain identity, it would be reasonable that ownership of this address is lost after losing the underlying Noun.
To implement this, Ethereum oracles on Skiff would listen for transactions where existing Noun email holders sell or transfer their last remaining Noun. Then, following an optional grace period, the email address would become disabled, becoming unusable until the account owns a Noun again.
