NounsDAO

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

What do NounsDAO & 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.

As of this writing, the most recent notes, G# & E, sounded on September 5, 2020, and the next note, G#, was scheduled for February 5, 2022.

The final note will take place on September 5, 2640.

There will also be a new Noun auctioned off that day.

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

Each Noun is a generative 32x32 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.

At the time of writing (August 31, 2021), 24 Nouns control 3260.6022 Ethereum ($11,003,847.70 at an ETH price then of $3,374.79).

Since 100% of auction revenue gets deposited into the Treasury, the founders (Nounders) will be gifted every 10th Noun for the first five years - a window that, counting from the August 2021 launch, runs out in August 2026.

Rather than having a typical centralized command center, NounsDAO intends to enable all participants to have a substantial stake and say in the trajectory of a project.

With each passing day, the NounsDAO Treasury gets slightly more decentralized and the previous Noun owners' say gets slightly more diluted.

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 the NounsDAO, which require at least 5% of Nouns to be involved. Proposers can be one person, or it can be a group of people who all own Nouns. With an average price at the time of 135.86 ETH ($458,493.654), you needed at least 679.29 ETH ($2,292,468.27) worth of Noun NFTs to submit a proposal.

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

Given that this project is barely three weeks old, the community is still new, and the DAO has not had much time to submit and enact proposals.

Although they have succeeded in doling out a total of 30 ETH ($101,243.70) to 6 different charities, and you can see that the 30 ETH have been disbursed in the internal transactions tab on the NounsDAO Treasury address on Etherscan.

It's too bad governments don't have a public ledger for spending our money.

Derivatives

Derivative projects appeared within weeks: a hand-drawn "Improper Noun" set whose artist released a new one daily, and painting sets generated with the AI process known as GAN.

It's Interesting

The elephant in the room is that the Nounders and their beneficiaries will have more control over the DAO than they should due to their receipt of every 10th Noun.

Maybe there will be a proposal to remove this stipulation but until then that's always a risk.

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.