0x32d1a53f…d4f5sent to0x6f3e6272…223d·#19,648,571·view on Etherscan
To the extent that Ethereum is an emergent organism, my money is on Nouns becoming something like its heart.
The daily auction, our primary inflowing ventricle, can at its best feel like a celebration of this process. For much of our history it has been a testament to its challenges; pathogenized into lethargy, opacity, adversariality.
What does it do to us to watch this organism attacking itself every day- tearing at its own efforts to forge a soul?
How can we ask new entrants to pour all of themselves into a de facto paternalistic governance context, where the majority of ultimate influence, however wielded, tends to concentrate via winner-take-all economics into a handful of wallets, & a smaller # still of coordinated subgroups?
For instance, I acquired this block of nouns mostly post-fork 2. While not without risk, under certain demand conditions the existing forking structure creates a too-easy path to dao dominance (which I have purposefully stopped well short of), an existential exposure to Nouns in the wrong hands. Still, because of the persistent drain and non-accretive engagement at auction, some minority interests in the dao have begun to voice support for raising the threshold above 50%. If this occurs, unresolvable capture becomes a concern.
Beyond the security risks, the endless anon bidding is culturally demoralizing. What will there be to celebrate at Noun O' Clock in the new cafe? How do we explain to the Noun-curious that the governance participation rate for new Nouns since fork 0 (excluding this block) is < 1%? How can we observe the ongoing market impact of our collective efforts if we can't properly gauge auction demand? How do we attract long term thinkers when the short game dominates valuation? How will we hold on to good-faith Nouners in a capitulating market when the game theory screams run-on-treasury?
% Exit is a potentially transformative tool for Nounish daos. Speculators hoping to extract excess auction revenue will vanish from NoC. Entities with conservative charters, for whom systemic arbitrage is a dealbreaker, can begin to consider participation. It offers low-friction, infinite capital recombination with full minority rights preserved at each instance. What could be more Nounish (and charismatic!) than a protocol that gives every token holder equal agency; that decisively leaves the door unlocked?
I often feel that I take it all much too seriously, and am then reminded in some way or other how exciting it might be if we increased our capacitance for interesting new participants with a more complete incentives design; how much more fun Nouns would be if it felt more deeply free.
There is no more vital cause in Nouns or possibly crypto generally than to devise ways to resist the centralizing force of token vote, and EXIT is one of the primary fronts in that effort.
Please consider exploring this alternative.