From Scenes with Simon by Simon de la Rouviere

What is Nouns?

Nouns combines a lot of what I’m interested in: experimental economics, generative art, and media production.

Each day, it automatically sells an onchain NFT collectible through an auction. The funds go into a reserve where the all the NFT owners then are able to vote on the usage of the funds. It’s got art (onchain at that, my favourite kind), automated smart-contract mediated auctions, collectibles, and a glorious experiment in governance.

After Nouns forked last year (with the fork taking almost ~17,000 ETH (about ~$28m at the time) with it), the original Nouns currently sits on a treasury ~4337 ETH (~$11m USD). While I believe that pure membership voting organisations like this isn’t the best mode for DAOs, it’s still had great success in proving that from simple mechanics, it can actually create a headless brand *and* make an impact in the market more broadly.

It’s done things like:

But the one I find the most interesting, is Delivery At Dawn.

Delivery At Dawn

The Protocol Guild, an organisation that helps to direct funding to open source developers in the Ethereum industry, proposed to Nouns to fund a short animation to celebrate the arrival of EIP 4844) an infrastructure improvement that led to cheaper scaling). They asked for $400,000 from Nouns.

Once production completed, the animation could be seen publicly and was sold as an open edition NFT Collectible through Zora. Proceeds were split 80/20 between The Protocol Guild and Nouns. From early March to April 1st, anyone could mint a copy as a collectible, paying .004844 ETH (about ~$15-$20) at the time.

In total, over 31,000 collectors raised about 200 ETH. After the platform fee for Zora, at the time, $529,000 were sent to open source developers and $130,000 were paid back to Nouns.

Thus, in essence, while Nouns didn’t make all its money back, it helped promote Ethereum, Nouns, and the support of open source developers.

While this model isn’t new, it’s one of the more successful ones. The short gist or idea is:

In fact, entire networks and platforms now work on this premise. Zora slow pivoted to a feed based network where likes are replaced with mints.

It’s currently doing about 5m+ mints a month, netting creators about $1m/month.

(Graph via PandaJackson)

On the one side, platforms like Zora are growing, and on the other side, you have projects like Delivery At Dawn, that’s larger and thus it presents an interesting, ongoing question.

The collectible media model has users, but what is its ultimate medium?

With a piece of media there’s multiple layers of interaction, parts that one could likely collect (and pay for) and the right abstraction has either already been found, OR it’s still waiting to be unearthed. A question I always had with this, is that if it’s treated at the level of merchandise, a film ticket, or a feed, could be it done at a large scale?

For example, in the extreme: fund a $150 million movie and earn more from it *not* by theater tickets, but through open distribution and minting alone. The format might not make sense as the medium is inappropriate, but with Nouns and Delivery At Dawn, it feels like it is proof that the scale at least *can* be more than just cheap memecoins and smaller scale media. Perhaps it means that in order for collectible media to exist at that scale, it needs to have a secondary function (like funding open source)? Who knows? But now we have some proof.

So while Delivery At Dawn shaped the history of Nouns, I also believe it’s a milestone for what the production of collectible media could look like. It shows a promise of being able to use the collectible media model for larger scale works. The continued exploration of new media and new finance owes a hat tip to Nouns for willing to fund such experiments.