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Memo 0xa8076ceb…446238 on Ethereum

what-is-your-vision-for-nouns-dao?@0xc6a3...96E4 Great answers here, Nouns would be worse off without your contributing your time to this project. > **What’s your story with Nouns DAO?** > > i got into crypto in 2021, had heard about it before but didn't really get it. i'm a fine art & design school dropout so the idea of artists having more control over the distribution of their work and disintermediation of publishing companies, art galleries/ museums, record labels, etc. was really interesting > > i heard about Nouns in 2022, the context was, "they've got $50M and give out grants for proposals!" frankly i didn't care and wasn't impressed by a cursory glance at nouns.wtf. $50M is a smaller VC fund and i hadn't seen/ heard anything else about Nouns to draw me in. > > later that year, Davin ended up in a twitter space my friends and I were hosting. he told us a bit about Nouns & Gnars, then invited us to the Gnars space he was hosting. i shared what i'm up to in my professional life and Davin totally nouns-pilled me. haven' t looked back since > > **What brought you here, and why do you still stay after three forks?** > > the transparency & security of onchain governance. > > whether you think America's 2020 election was completely secure with negligible fraud or was totally rigged & stolen, the fact that my nation - the single best place in the world for capital formation and the singular global beacon for individual liberty - has a system that even allows for this type of unproductive debate to happen is deeply concerning. > > i truly believe we're pioneering a new model for building & maintaining civilization, if we take this game seriously > > **How do you think new members should be onboarded and integrated into the community?** > > i don't have strong thoughts on a particular flow/ process. it's obvious that this is a domain that needs significant consideration. no solution will be perfect, at minimum nouns.wtf needs an overhaul. allowing it to waste away has been a shameful choice by the people who run the Nouns monorepo imo. > > **What has frustrated or hurt you in the past?** > > - insider dealing & collusion between power players. > - reckless grant making with 0 oversight & accountability. > - Noun 40 calling into question my integrity & intelligence for making the statement that food can be a public good. > - Seneca being funded millions of dollars to build then sunset Prop House + chase the short term hype of Rounds while petulantly lashing out on the /nouns timeline at anyone who dared criticize him/ the Nounders > - the Nounders wallet being used to force through a prop to fund Winter's intern for an auction client no one uses > - The Nouns Square being funded 800+ eth total while doing the absolute bare minimum for the past year+ and talking shit about people in the DAO live on air > - JoshuaFisher sitting on $396,999 dollars intended for Free Glasses for Kids for 3 years and providing almost 0 updates + refusing to return the funds, then getting funded for a few more million > - Nounish, the media group, being funded millions of dollars to pivot away from being the DAO's marketing arm to making videos like "What's the Opposite of a Hotdog?" > - The Coffee Shop being obvious collusion between large players, then providing essentially 0 updates and making 0 progress for more than a year > > i'm sure there's more but you get the idea. > > **Have you seen people leave? If so, why did they go?** > > some people will gaslight you and say the first fork was 100% driven by arbitragers. they're not entirely wrong, they're just willfully ignoring the contingent of people who did not agree with the culture of 0 operations + reckless spending > > some people have come in bright eyed and unaware, just to discover how political of a game Nouns has been and threw their hands up in frustration/ disgust > > some people got their money and they ran > > some people fell out of favour with the DAO > > some people seem to realize their era of easy money has come to an end > > **Does the current state of the DAO align with your vision?** > > i started researching the DUNA intensively last March, and Wag presented my research to the Caymans Foundation at their restructuring meeting last June, so kind of. > > i'm not stoked by how deflated the community has become in the process > > **If you could influence the direction of Nouns DAO for the next year, what would you do?** > > 501c3 status. We may need a fiscal sponsor, essentially being under someone else's umbrella, to start because the DUNA is a brand new form of legal entity & the flat structure of a DAO does not fit nicely into traditional 501c3 structures. > > It doesn't stop Nouns from funding public goods technology, artists, and other impactful projects; there is a strong precedent of 501c3 organizations funding the type of projects the Nouns community is interested in. > > Becoming a 501c3 charity would make our tax obligation $0, give corporations, wealthy individuals, & other grant-making bodies a financial incentive to inject capital into the treasury, and impose severe restrictions & reprecussions for the type of insider dealing we've seen in Nouns. > > Major 501c3s like the MacArthur Foundation, which has $8.3B of assets and distributes a few hundred million of grants annually, have been saying for a few years that the historical model of top-down, centralized funding is not really workable and fails to have the impact it could, but don't know what to do otherwise. > > Nouns' decentralized governance model is the answer to their question, if we choose to take up the mantle.