Hey everyone,
We’re long-time Nouns followers and excited to announce a16z crypto will begin participating in NounsDAO with Noun 657. As part of our broader governance program, we’re increasingly focusing on cutting-edge projects that are exploring innovative ideas, delivering new products, and experimenting with unique business models and organizational designs. NounsDAO is at the intersection of many of these currents. Moving forward, we’re planning on contributing to community research efforts and actively voting ourselves, with a bias towards action.
What first brought you to Nouns?
The unique issuance model, the sustained involvement of the community, the DAO infrastructure initiatives, and the commitment to trying new things. We see a broad spectrum of projects working on crypto governance, but Nouns stood out to us as a unique example of community bootstrapping and viral brand proliferation.
There are plenty of experiments and projects happening in the Nouns ecosystem, which ones are interesting to you?
Research and projects with the capacity to deliver on-chain and real-world impacts.
DAO infrastructure. Projects like Nouns Builder and Nouns Agora represent some of the potential pathways for Nouns to fund important tooling. Agora is already in use with other projects like Optimism. It’s introducing new delegation infrastructure that has the potential to fundamentally change how on-chain communities make collective decisions. Likewise, Nouns Builder is offering a pathway to rapidly spin up DAOs with a recurring revenue model.
CC0 pilots. We’ve long been interested in CC0 as a new avenue that leverages some of the incentives built into the web3 model to distribute content and build brands. One example: a16z research advisor Scott Kominers described how CC0 could change the content creation industry.
Research. NounsDAO has fostered a culture of technological innovation by supporting proposals related to the research and development of privacy-preserving technologies, including private voting and Noun Nyms. For on-chain governance to reach its full potential, we will need new cryptographic tools to build systems that are more robust, secure, and expressive than the ones that came before it. We look forward to collaborating with the community on these research efforts.
If you could teach everyone on Earth one thing about crypto, what would it be?
The first era of the modern internet [~1990-2005] was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network: users and builders. The second era of the internet [~2005-2020] favored siloed, centralized services. Most of the value accrued to a handful of large tech companies. We are now beginning the third era of the internet – web3 – which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of the first era with the advanced, modern functionality of the second era. This unlocks a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurship.
Quick! What’s something Nouns is missing?
A Formula One partnership!
What kind of music have you been listening to recently?
a16z crypto Spotify playlist.
Barbarian, Bard, Druid, or Rogue?
“Druid” - the governance team