NounsDAO

All prices, balances, and schedules below are a snapshot from August 31, 2021, three weeks after the project launched.

What do NounsDAO and John Cage have in common?

In 1985, contemporary composer John Cage wrote a solo piano piece called ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) that can last anywhere from 20 to 70 minutes.

In 1987, Cage adapted it for organ, and in 2001, 9 years after Cage's passing, a small German church constructed a customized organ to perform this piece over the next 639 years.

The organizers chose this duration as that was the age of the church in question.

At publication, the most recent notes, G♯ and E, had sounded on September 5, 2020, and the next G♯ was scheduled for February 5, 2022.

The performance is scheduled to end in 2640. Under NounsDAO's original design, daily auctions would also continue indefinitely, but no present-day software or community can be assumed to operate for six centuries.

NounsDAO is an NFT project built on Ethereum that harnesses time as a method of distribution and decentralization.

Each Noun is a generative 32 × 32 pixel NFT comprising people, places, and things.

Their features are random and controlled by a smart contract that transfers the Noun to the winning bidder's wallet while simultaneously creating a new Noun for auction 24 hours later. 100% of the auction proceeds are deposited into the NounsDAO treasury and governed by Noun NFT holders.

Noun 5. The image above is the SVG returned by the immutable Nouns token contract for token 5.

On August 31, 2021, the treasury held 3,260.6022 ETH, worth about $11.0 million at the quoted ETH price of $3,374.79, and 24 Nouns had been minted.

Under the original auction contract, 100% of auction revenue entered the treasury and the founders (Nounders) received every 10th Noun for the first five years, through August 2026.

Rather than having a typical centralized command center, Each Noun carried one vote, so direct formal influence required owning a Noun or receiving delegated votes.

Each new Noun diluted the voting percentage of existing Nouns. It did not necessarily decentralize ownership because one bidder could win several auctions.

On-chain features

To do everything that NounsDAO is doing, you need blockchain technology. Smart contracts govern the distribution and governance of the protocol and proposals to NounsDAO. Under the August 2021 rules, submitting a proposal required voting power equal to at least 5% of the Noun supply. With 24 Nouns minted, that threshold rounded up to two votes. At the quoted average auction price of 135.86 ETH, two Nouns would have cost about 271.72 ETH, or roughly $917,000 at the essay's ETH price. Governance rules have changed since then.

These proposals can be anything from donating to charities to changing the amount of Nouns supply required to submit proposals.

At three weeks old, the community was still new, and the DAO had not had much time to submit and enact proposals.

By August 31, 2021, the DAO had disbursed 30 ETH, then worth about $101,244, to six charities. The transfers were visible through the legacy treasury address.

Derivatives

Derivative projects appeared within weeks, including daily hand-drawn and generative collections. Their existence showed that the CC0 artwork could be remixed; it did not establish durable demand.

The governance tradeoff

The Nounders and their beneficiaries received every 10th Noun during the first five years. Each founder Noun had the same one vote as an auctioned Noun, but the group's recurring allocation could concentrate voting power. Whether that allocation was excessive is a governance judgment.

John Cage's ASLSP and NounsDAO run on the same idea: let a fixed schedule, not any person, decide what happens next. The organ in Halberstadt commits to one note change at a time across centuries; the auction contract commits to one Noun per day, diluting early owners with every sale. ASLSP has an end date and NounsDAO doesn't, which means the dilution, unlike the music, never has to stop.

Primary project source: NounsDAO's auction and founder-allocation summary.