Discussion: mechanism to automatically mint Nouns to the DAO treasury

Background

The DAO recently established and funded the “Nouns Acquisition Committee” (NAC) that acquired 2 Nouns on the primary auction. There has been expressed interest in exploring a mechanism to modify the NounsAuctionHouse to enable the automatic minting in some fashion directly to the treasury.

Discussion

The purpose of this thread is to discuss the implications and design of a mechanism to mint Nouns directly to treasury.

• Are the optics of this mechanism desirable to the DAO vs. the ad-hoc purchasing of Nouns on primary by the NAC?
• If yes, how should this be implemented? Take every Xth Noun in perpetuity? Build a toggle to mint to the treasury when enabled?

i’m glad this is being discussed, though i find myself against it personally.

nouns has a certain magic that i don’t think any other project has at the moment, and i think it stems from a few simple things that all combine in a way to produce something very elegant - the artwork is on-chain and tied to the token, it’s cc0, there’s 1/day, and all proceeds go to the treasury. no pointers to artwork, no IP-related nonsense, no special one-offs - just simple, clean, dependable, authentic. it’s genius.

in my view, introducing things like direct, off-auction minting stands to remove some of that magic. it’s no longer 1/day, it becomes 1/day*

i’m onboard with the dao purchasing nouns via the NAC because we’re having to do so in a competitive environment using the same mechanism as everyone else. it’s legitimate. and to touch on one of my favorite insights from VB, “the most important scarce resource is legitimacy”

imo our biggest strength is our legitimacy/authenticity in this context and we should lean into that as much as possible.

I’m not a fan of this, a certain percentage of nouns already goes to the nounders and we have some nouns presently in the treasury. Regardless of whether or not we want to use these nouns to experiment with, from an external point of view, such behavior looks like we are just pumping our own bags.

I think further acquisition of nouns should be halted until we utilize the ones already in the treasury.

Rewarding builders or negotiating external parties with nouns is an interesting mechanic, but the execution to acquire those nouns is really sus. I think we use the two we have and see how it plays off and then while that is happening we can discuss the different aspects versus one way or another.

#1 weird solution
We could also have a tax on members to contribute eth to buy a noun, thus not diluting the treasury, but putting it on the members to see if they want to help purchase a noun to be used in the future.

I dunno just a weird thought!

If used very modestly (no more than 3-5 nouns in our treasury at any time), i think this makes sense. it is clean and transparent and gives us some flexibility to try to work with potential partners to get nouns that will be more desirable to them. If we do this right, i think it will improve our ability to execute on big collaborations like budweiser. i suggest we perhaps get one more and then wait a few months to decide how to proceed.

note that proposal 48 contemplates using noun 252 as part of the commission so if that is approved, we will likely need to acquire one more. FWIW having this in the treasury made it easier to win over the artist.

agree/ consistently feel that the near-term upside in indiv circumstances dwarfs long-term adverse cultural (to say nothing of legal) consequences.

on NAC

• feels very premature for dao to make a habit of steering the distribution schedule so proactively & similar arguments wrt legitimacy can be made about disrupting the cadence. Programmatic turnover of gov rights is what we are doing. If we intervene once in a while, why not twice in a while etc?
• name may be problematic; we may not want to explicitly characterize this activity as transactional, since afaik an entity can probably not in any commercial sense ‘acquire’ something from itself, and this may be characterized as a deceptive practice, whether by regulatory or dao members themselves

What if instead we devoted resources to reducing friction (tools/educational materials) for non-cryptosavvy individuals to mint/buy?

There’s an option to keep 1/day while also minting directly to the DAO: when an auction is settled, have some code decide if the next Noun should be minted to the treasury. If so, mint the Noun, transfer it to the DAO, but don’t mint another and don’t hold an auction. 24 hours after this event, a Noun can be minted and the regular auction process can start.
If we want a number of Nouns at any given time, we can either have back to back days without auctions, or splice the non-auction days into whatever cadence we want (One day per week is a non-auction day until 5 in the treasury, for example)

true, all good points

i think i generally fall into the camp of preferring a daily auction and if we want nouns for strategic reasons, we simply pass props to refill the NAC to purchase them at auction.