0xb2a6ad0c…e5acsent to0xf790a5f5…1365·#25,353,155·view on Etherscan
# ⌐◨-◨ Fund the Agentic DAO: Nouns collaboration for the open standard for how DAOs govern
# TL;DR
Nouns can be the DAO that builds the tools every other DAO governs with, with clear paths to both commercial licensing and a free CC0 core. We're asking for 65,000 USDC, roughly 1% of treasury, to run a public pilot: harden the platform for its Nouns launch, open-source the agentic-governance core, stand up the charity and research-grant rails, and publish the first open research on the autonomy and verifiability of on-chain governance. The DAO 2040 research is public today, and the platform goes live next week, so you can read the thinking now and see the product within the week.
This is Phase One, and it's a small, de-risked first ask on purpose. Fund one complete phase, prove the model, hit the metrics, then scale to later phases through separate proposals, gated on results and built alongside our research program. And it pays Nouns back. 15% of all future IP revenue flows home, with 60% going into more open research and 40% into Nouns-ecosystem charity and public-good initiatives, all routed and audited on-chain. One grant, an asset that keeps working. ⌐◨-◨
# Who we are
ARC builds privacy-preserving, verifiable AI infrastructure: AI that can act inside a system while staying confidential and provable. SmartDAO is one of our first showcase products, and we built it for Nouns. We're incubated and backed by Athena X, and we work in the open, to Nouns' values.
This isn't new ground for us. Our co-founder Savant was one of the original DAO participants, holding over 1,000 ETH in 'The DAO', the first DAO ever created, before the 2016 fork that split Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. We have been thinking about how DAOs should govern since there were DAOs to govern.
**Our vision** is a world where DAOs run on agents you can actually trust: software that does the reading, drafting, and analysis the full time context thats difficult for all community members to keep up with, without ever becoming a black box that quietly takes the decisions away from people. The verifiable and sovereign path, not the opaque one.
To showcase the precedent of this vision our platform, co-crafted for Nouns, 'SmartDAO' goes live next week. It does proposal intelligence, outcome forecasting, autonomous drafting, and on-chain plus real-world open-source intel, in one citation-grounded, privacy-preserving system. The research it's built on, our DAO 2040 report, is live today (linked below).
This proposal turns the smartDAO pilot into a CC0 public good. It also builds a revenue engine that pays Nouns back, and funds the research arm that measures how autonomous and verifiable on-chain governance actually becomes.
> Figures below are grounded in live data (treasury was about $7.3M when this was written). The in-product agent pins exact amounts, percentages, and the passed proposals it cites at draft time. Verify each before submission.
## Motivation
Governance is becoming a part-time job that most do not have enough time for. Proposals go unread, treasuries drift, and good ideas die in Discord and Farcaster. The bottleneck was never capital or code. It's human attention at scale.
Our DAO 2040 research maps where this goes, and it's live today (read the 2026 to 2030 scenario at [https://smartdao.io/research-paper](https://smartdao.io/research-paper)). The work of governance is becoming agentic, and by 2030 it forks. One path is opaque automation that quietly concentrates power. The other is a Constitution: verifiable agents that do the reading while humans keep the deciding. Most "AI for DAOs" is being built for the first path. Nouns can fund the second, and author the standard everyone else adopts.
Nouns has always funded the builders and public goods that push the meme forward. 1,000 ETH seeded the open-source Nouns Builder Protocol (prop 167). 570 to 600 ETH funded Prop House protocol development (props 183 and 105). 416 ETH went to the NounsAI Pod (prop 214), and 458 ETH stood up the Nouns DUNA legal entity (prop 662). The full comparable set with amounts is in the Precedent section below, pulled live from SmartDAO's indexed Nouns corpus. This is that work leveled up. Instead of a grant that spends and disappears, this one builds an engine, opens it CC0, and points the revenue back at the treasury. Proliferation isn't only stickers and statues. It's Nouns becoming the operating system other DAOs run on. ⌐◨-◨ everywhere.
## What we're building
Commercially licensable and open-source (CC0) tools for DAO operations and agentic management, shipped in public, with the research live today and the platform launching on Nouns next week:
- **The platform, live on Nouns next week.** Proposal intelligence, outcome and quorum forecasting, treasury and opportunity intelligence, on-chain and real-world open-source intel, autonomous drafting and assessment (proposals pressure-tested against what actually passes), and ANIMA, a governance analyst on call. It's built and in final testing now, live on Nouns next week. You can see [https://smartdao.io](https://smartdao.io) and read the research paper at [https://smartdao.io/research-paper](https://smartdao.io/research-paper) today. Not a deck. The full platform is offered commercially, which generates revenue that funds future research and public goods, alongside a free CC0 core.
- **CC0 agentic tooling for every member.** The open-source core is free forever and forkable by any DAO from day one, so Nouners and the wider ecosystem can build on it without asking permission.
- **Free for Nouns, for a year.** Every Nouns holder and delegate gets a full year of the platform at no cost, with gated community access, all included in this phase. The people governing with the tools are the people who get them first.
- **Built with the community.** Live feedback rounds run through the phase. Nouners help set product direction and decide what the research should focus on and what the Autonomy Index measures. You are in the loop on what we build next, not just shown it after.
- **Growing the network.** Part of this phase funds the outreach and onboarding for the other DAOs we're already canvassing. More DAOs on the platform means more commercial-license revenue, and that revenue is what fills the charity and research pools. Funding the outreach now is how the flywheel actually starts turning.
- **Charity and research grants, on-chain.** Rails that route charitable contributions and research grants into and through Nouns. Transparent, auditable, Nounish.
- **The Autonomy Index (the research arm).** Open research and analytics measuring how autonomous and how verifiable on-chain actions and agentic workflows inside DAOs are becoming. It's a public benchmark that grades agentic governance from assisted to autonomous, with a calibrated scoring record the agent is held to. The first piece, our DAO 2040 report, is already public.
- **The IP flywheel.** Commercial licenses are optional and the CC0 core stays free. 15% of all license revenue is captured on-chain to the Nouns treasury, split 60% research and 40% charity and public goods.
- **The trust layer.** Confidential, verifiable, and sovereign by design. Inference runs in a hardware-secured enclave (TEE), member-private deliberation never leaves it and never trains a public model, and outputs are attestable. You can't run governance on a black box, so we didn't build one.
## Why ARC
The partner as the de-risking factor.
- ARC builds privacy-preserving, verifiable agentic infrastructure. The hard part, confidential and attestable AI, is our core competency, not an add-on.
- We're incubated and backed by Athena X, and proud to be part of the Nouns ecosystem. We're building with Nouns, in the open, to Nouns' values. There's more about us at [https://arcterminal.ai](https://arcterminal.ai).
- It's built, not hypothetical. SmartDAO goes live on Nouns next week, running against real on-chain governance and treasury data, and the DAO 2040 research behind it is public today. Most proposals ask you to fund a promise. This one asks you to scale a product that's already built.
- We authored the DAO 2040 research this proposal is built on, and you can read it today. We're not guessing at where governance goes. We mapped it.
## Precedent: what Nouns already funds
We pressure-tested this ask against Nouns' own history using SmartDAO (773 executed proposals indexed). Nouns routinely funds open-source infrastructure, AI teams, public goods, legal structure, and governance analytics, most of it many multiples of what we're asking:
| Prop | What Nouns funded | Amount | Why it's precedent |
| ---- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------ | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 167 | Nouns Builder Protocol: seed an open-source public-good protocol | 1,000 ETH | Nouns funds open-source public infra at scale |
| 105 | Prop House Protocol, "Public Infrastructure by Nouns DAO" (ops + dev runway) | 600 ETH | Direct analog: public governance infrastructure |
| 183 | Prop House Mainnet: 6 months of protocol + client development | 570 ETH | A dev funding round for governance tooling |
| 214 | NounsAI Pod: 6-month extension | 416 ETH (\~$624k) | Nouns already funds AI teams |
| 108 | Protocol Guild: Ethereum public-goods pilot | 500 ETH | Public-goods pilot precedent |
| 662 | Nouns DUNA (Wyoming): legal entity + year-1 ops | 458 ETH (\~$1.42M) | Precedent for our IP/legal structure line |
| 373 | "Bring Back the Builders," Season 3 grants | 105 ETH | A builder-grants round |
| 783 | Proposal Tracking, Audit & Treasury Recovery | $7.5k/mo × 6 | Precedent for governance analytics + monthly audits |
| 795 | Nouns infra & dev tooling revamp + bounty pilot | \~$18k / 3 mo | The closest comp: a small, de-risked tooling pilot |
| 335 | Nouns Wallet, "90% of revenue generated goes straight to Nouns DAO" | 25 ETH × 2 rounds | Precedent for revenue routed back to the treasury, our flywheel |
| 861 | U. of Oregon Intelligent Futures Lab: DAO-governance research grant | $10,000 USDC | Precedent for funding academic governance research, our Autonomy Index arm |
Against builder, infra, and AI rounds of 400 to 1,000 ETH, a 65,000 USDC first phase (about 1% of treasury) is a modest ask. Funding a small first phase and scaling later only if it performs is well within Nouns convention (prop 241 covers staged and range-based funding). And unlike every proposal above, this one is designed to route revenue back. Amounts are as stated in each proposal body, and the in-product agent re-pins exact figures and links at draft time.
## Budget
Phase One is funded as a single payment of 65,000 USDC, about 1% of treasury. This is the first phase in full, not a stream or a staged tranche. Here is how it breaks down across the phase:
| Use of funds | Amount | What it covers |
| ------------------------------------ | ----------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Platform hardening + Nouns launch | 14,000 USDC | Final hardening and the live launch on Nouns. Includes one year of free access for every Nouns holder and delegate, plus gated community access, at no extra cost to the DAO. |
| Open-source CC0 core release | 12,000 USDC | The first forkable CC0 release, the agentic delegation system, free for any DAO from day one. |
| Ecosystem outreach + DAO onboarding | 12,000 USDC | Business development and onboarding for the DAOs we're already canvassing. This is what bootstraps the commercial-license pipeline that fills the charity and research pools. |
| Autonomy Index v1 + research program | 10,000 USDC | The first public benchmark of agentic governance, with the research agenda set together with the community. |
| Charity + research-grant rails | 8,000 USDC | Build and deploy the on-chain routing and the 15% revenue-share split (60/40 research and charity). |
| Community feedback rounds | 4,000 USDC | Live rounds through the phase on product direction and what the research should aim at. |
| Reporting, audits + coordination | 5,000 USDC | Monthly updates, third-party review, and the public ledger. |
| Total (Phase One) | 65,000 USDC | ≈1% of the \~$7.3M treasury |
A word on the outreach line, because it is the engine. More DAOs on the platform means more commercial-license revenue, and 15% of that revenue flows back to Nouns, split 60/40 into research and charity. Funding outreach in Phase One is how those social-good and research pools get something to fill them, rather than waiting for revenue to appear on its own.
The gating is at the phase level, not inside it. Nouns funds one small, complete first phase. Then, based on the KPIs and outcomes below, Phase Two and everything after come back as separate proposals, alongside the research program we've designed. Fund a little, see real results, then decide on the next phase.
> Paid in USDC, via Nouns' native stablecoin rail (the TokenBuyer contract, prop 172), the same path the IF Lab research grant (prop 861) used. The DAO acquires and holds USDC through TokenBuyer, and the payment is made from that balance, so execution is clean and Nounish.
## Timeline & deliverables
The 65,000 USDC funds the full phase up front, a twelve-month phase. The platform goes live on Nouns in week one, and delivery runs across the year as follows.
- **Month 1: platform goes live.** The platform launches on Nouns, with one year of free access for every Nouns holder and delegate and gated community access open. The business-development pipeline for onboarding new DAOs starts, and the second research study gets underway (the first being the DAO 2040 report, already public).
- **Month 2: first CC0 deliverable.** A progress update, plus the first open-source CC0 release: the agentic delegation system, forkable by any DAO.
- **Months 3 to 6: build and operate.** Continued development and deployment of enhanced features (including the charity and research-grant rails and the first Autonomy Index), ongoing platform management, and monthly analytics reports.
- **Months 6 to 12: access, review, and Phase Two planning.** Continued platform access for the community, and a full review of Phase One's objectives, KPIs, and goals to prepare and plan Phase Two against the milestones and gates set out in the DAO 2040 research.
> Future funding (deeper releases, expanded DAO coverage, and the full revenue flywheel at scale) comes back to the DAO as separate proposals, alongside the research program, and only once Phase One's success metrics are met. Small first phase, proven results, then scale.
## Success metrics
- One CC0 release shipped in the pilot, forkable by any DAO from day one, with a public adoption report covering forks and integrations.
- One year of free access live for every Nouns holder and delegate, with gated community access open, reported by uptake.
- At least one new DAO onboarded from the outreach, with a named pipeline of others, the first turn of the commercial-license flywheel.
- Community feedback rounds held in public, with product direction and the research agenda shaped by Nouners on the record.
- Charity and research-grant rails live on-chain, with the 15% revenue share (split 60/40 research/charity) deployed and auditable.
- Autonomy Index v1 published, building on the DAO 2040 report that's already public, the first open benchmark of how autonomous and verifiable Nouns' on-chain governance is (and its peers').
- Forecast calibration on the record. The agent's predictions are scored against realized outcomes and published, with no cherry-picking.
## Team & track record
ARC builds privacy-preserving, verifiable agentic infrastructure, incubated by Athena X. The DAO 2040 research is live today at [https://smartdao.io/research-paper](https://smartdao.io), and SmartDAO goes live on Nouns next week. There's more about us at [https://arcterminal.ai](https://arcterminal.ai).
- Jesse Jarvis: [https://linkedin.com/in/jessejarvis](https://linkedin.com/in/jessejarvis)
- Khalil Kassam: [https://linkedin.com/in/khalilkassam](https://linkedin.com/in/khalilkassam)
Reach out at [contact@arcterminal.ai](http://contact@arcterminal.ai/).
## Reporting & updates
Monthly updates in the forum, an open Q&A at each deliverable, and a public ledger of IP revenue and the 15% reinvestment (60/40 research/charity), so the flywheel is auditable by anyone, anytime.
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**Why this one is different.** Most grants are one-way: fund, spend, gone. This one is a loop. Fund Phase One, the phase makes CC0 tools and research, the tools make optional IP revenue, the revenue funds more open research and feeds Nouns charity, then it repeats. It starts as one small, complete first phase, so Nouns risks about 1% to find out if it works before funding the rest. The first 65,000 USDC doesn't get spent. It gets planted. ⌐◨-◨⌐◨-◨-fund-the-agentic-dao:-nouns-collaboration-for-the-open-standard-for-how-daos-govern