Prop House 2024

tldr: The Prop House team is asking for $63k per month for 12 months to help bring new participants into Nouns at scale.

What’s happened over the past 12 months:

• Helped 50+ communities award $1M+ USD by running close to 200 rounds which resulted in 5.6k+ proposals submitted and 19.5k+ votes cast.
• Notable communities that ran rounds within and beyond our immediate vicinity include Lil Nouns, Gnars, Nouns Esports, Purple, Base and ApeCoin.
• Memorable rounds from this year include Nouns Short Shorts, Private Voting Research Sprint, Hack Week and Onchain Summer for Base.
• Post-fork, we restarted efforts to activate builders with Nouns Garden, a new approach to voting that selects a neutral voting body to offload Nouns voter attention.
• We launched Nouner Scout rounds to help bring in long-term aligned players into Nouns. While still in its infancy, results so far are pomising: we now have ex-animator from Rick and Morty and a real life transformers engineer as nouners.
• Delivered Prop House onchain:
  • A suite of smart contracts that enable the execution of rounds to happen entirely onchain.
  • Meta transactions that leverage Starknet's lower execution costs to enable users to propose and vote for free using an Ethereum signature.
  • Onchain vote tallying and winner determination, eliminating the need for manual distribution of funds without added trust assumptions.
  • Audits by Nethermind.
  • The Prop House SDK for developers to experiment with new user experiences on top of the core Prop House model.
  • A brand new web app that redefines how end-users interact with onchain rounds.
• Everything we've built, including the web app and protocol, is open source.

Roadmap ahead:

Now that development of the protocol is behind us, we can can shift our resources to execute at the product and sdk level to push the boundaries of what's possible with Prop House.

Rounds as a primitive: In contrast to proposals, rounds are open-ended. This represents less friction during creation and a multiplayer approach during execution. There is less friction because proposers do not need to know every detail of its execution but rather have a high-level idea of what they would like the round to achieve. It is multiplayer because it serves as an open invitation for new builders to participate. To enable Nouns to make full use of this new onchain primitive, we intend to implement round creation such that any nouners can create a round just as easy as they can create a prop.

Infinite round support: The protocol currently has the capability for infinite rounds, and in the upcoming months, we will be adding support in our UI to make this round type accessible and just as user-friendly the timed rounds.

10x improvement in round creation UX: While our new round creator is a significant improvement over our old UX, it still far too complex to attract round creators who are looking to create on-the-spot rounds (eg rounds to be used on the same day). One of the goals for the coming year is to make round creation easier; ideally making “one-click” rounds possible.

Protocol upgrades

• Support for Ethereum L2s (Base, Optimism, etc)
• New proposing & voting strategies (Nouns delegation, Delegate Cash, etc)
• Arbitrary execution experiments - The protocol allows winners to do more than claim an award. Rather, round creators can allow winners to execute a custom function, like minting an NFT or executing a milestone-based Sablier stream. We want to take some time to explore this functionality further.
• Scaling the number of possible round winners from 25 to 100+
• Vote with reason

Weird little guy

We made a substantial effort to make a fresh variation of the Nouns form. Our aim was to design something that retained its association with Prop House while embodying a distinct nouns-like quality but also ensuring it wouldn't be mistaken for actual Nouns. Thanks to the fantastic work done by Gremplin, SloppyPencil and Danny Cole, we nailed it.

While fun and silly on the surface, we think this weird little guy can act as a powerful incentive. Given the majority of individuals and communities do not have a treasury they can liberally spend, we can use our to-be-named weird little guy to incentivize action. Ideally allowing non-treasury communities to run rounds without traditional money but rather with their own currencies (the weird little guy currency).

It also functions as a way to export nounish culture through evoking the good emotions that are associated with earning an award:

"think this might be the first purple thing I won, and its the best as well! Better than any money"

Bringing people onchain: Aligning under the same motif that Zora and Base uphold, we believe Prop House can be used as a fun way to bring new people onchain. With solutions like privy and the low cost of layer 2s, non-crypto natives can come to Prop House to propose and earn their first bit of crypto.

Structure: What started in 2022 as a small experiment to deploy the Nouns treasury quicker has evolved into an elegant mechanism to award people onchain. After having spent over a year in the discovery and development process, we're ready to start executing at a faster pace. That means building a product that scales how Nouns and value-aligned communities award and onboard participants, while also making strides towards sustainability. We intend to turn on fees on volume of assets awarded through Prop House as a means to earn revenue so as to not depend entirely on Nouns for funding.

Ask:

We are asking for $63k per month for a total of $756k for the coming year.

• 25% upfront (3 months of the total ask).
• A 9 month stream beginning April 1st, 2024.

The breakdown of the budget is as follows:

• $45k/mo: comp for the two core team members (soli and seneca)
• $15k/mo: comp for outside contributors on a need basis for frontend, design and community support.
• $2k/mo: ongoing SaaS expenses for the infrastructure Prop House runs on.
• $1k/mo: subsidize user costs + incentivize growth via experimental rounds.