# Verbs Team Six Month Extension

## Table of Contents

* Recap of the current term, with a primary focus on DAO V3.
* Retro thoughts, e.g. we should over-communicate our decisions and status.
* New projects we’re excited to work on next, including:
    * **Nouns Governor**: An NFT-first governor contract that includes granular delegation, removes snapshot block confusion, and enables a more secure DAO fork flow.
    * **Collaborations**: Collaborate with leading crypto teams to create innovative projects, such as L2 voting and private voting mainnet POCs.
    * **Rank-Choice Proposals**: Allow proposers to offer multiple variations in a single proposal, hitting optimal DAO<>builder agreements faster.
* Ongoing Projects: Ensure the completion of DAO V3, private voting wrap-up, and a frontend for fork DAOs.
* Asking for $450K + 18 ETH, the same budget as [our previous 6-month term](https://nouns.wtf/vote/192).

Your support allows us to keep innovating for Nouns DAO. We invite you to read our full proposal for comprehensive details.

## What We've Done During This Term

We spent most of our time and energy (by far) on the upcoming [**DAO V3**](https://twitter.com/eladmallel/status/1661510219342524417?s=20) upgrade:

1. Designing [Nouns Fork](https://mirror.xyz/0x10072dfc23771101dC042fD0014f263316a6E400/iN0FKOn_oYVBzlJkwPwK2mhzaeL8K2-W80u82F7fHj8).
2. Merging it into the original V3 scope.
3. Testing this version and getting it audited by [Spearbit](https://spearbit.com/) and [code4rena](https://nouns.wtf/vote/302).

Other projects:
* Led the [private voting research mandated round](https://prop.house/nouns/private-voting-research-sprint), which we believe so far to be successful in making Nouns interesting to other Ethereum and zk folks; we hope to preserve this momentum in the near future.
* Shipped [Nouns Streamer](https://twitter.com/davidbrai/status/1625215669582147585).
* Landed on an Airdrop design through [a Snapshot vote](https://snapshot.org/#/nouns.eth/proposal/0xebe4aec5b96dc5c008902da341bcd4936f5aa09baf73daaa545259183b203089).
* Gave [a talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw_GU6Gs81o) at ETH Denver.


For even more context, [see our previous proposal](https://nouns.wtf/vote/192).

## Retrospective

### On Communication

**TL;DR: We should over-communicate our decisions and our status.**

Working for the DAO means addressing diverse stakeholders and their varied views, and dealing with new members unfamiliar with past discussions or decisions. While it's impossible to appease everyone, we aim to strike a balance between involving voters and maintaining autonomy to execute tasks efficiently.

In our current term we revived [our Snapshot account](https://snapshot.org/#/nouns.eth/) and involved the DAO in choosing its favorite "airdrop" design, and in confirming our sense that most Nouns wanted the fork to get shipped ASAP. We will continue to use this communication channel whenever we identify a decision important enough to ask for such attention.

Despite our intention to keep the DAO informed, we've heard that some feel out of the loop, and some are concerned about how and why decisions were made.

Moving forward, we'll prioritize frequent communication about our projects, rationale, and key decisions. We'll use varied formats like blog posts and Twitter discussions to update and receive feedback or ideas to optimize our service to the DAO.

### On Organization

Decentralization, or resilience, seems very important to the DAO. Many voters want to ensure Nouns does not have a single point of failure anywhere, so Nouns may live long and prosper forever(ish). And we've heard some concerns saying we could be doing more on this front.

So we've been wondering: how might we get more talented builders creating software for/with Nouns? How can we have more parallel processing in areas like smart contracts and other infrastructure needs, much like the success we've had with the governance clients and private voting mandated rounds? And how can we design process and tech to become more resilient and unstoppable?

We don't have a fully worked-out answer to these questions, but we're curious to try different ideas in this vein. Some questions on our minds:

* How might we better incentivize multiple autonomous teams to contribute smart contracts to Nouns?
* How might we create more collaborations with top crypto teams?
* What should be the future of nouns.wtf? Sunset or maintained as an important reference client? and if maintained, by whom?
* What are distributed work practices we can adopt from others like the Ethereum Foundation and its collaboration with the various client teams?

We believe figuring all this out can be instrumental in positioning Nouns as a leader in the Ethereum space, and one of the most attractive places to join as a Nouner, builder, delegate or fan.


## What's Next

We expect technical work to continue taking up the vast majority of our time and energy; this term we plan to spend more time than before on proliferation of Nouns tech and collaboration with more tech teams.

### Technical

We're sharing below our current plan, and emphasizing again that it's absolutely subject to change as we learn more doing the work, or if community members share ideas that are worth changing priorities for.

#### Follow-Through

We hope these items won't take up much time, but making it clear that as long as these items need our attention, they are top priority.

1. **Art storage compatibility break**: in the next Ethereum upgrade [EIP-3540](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-3540) should go into effect. This change means our current art contract will not be able to store new art, while it can still read existing art. We will come up with a plan to handle this change.
2. **DAO V3**: monitor this version on mainnet, be around for questions and any bug fixing that may arise.
3. **Fork DAOs frontend**: for forks to have UI for governance and auction, a minor modification of the nouns.wtf code.
4. **Private voting**: help the DAO crystalize learnings from this prop house round, and decide how to proceed.

#### High Priority

These projects get us really excited. We would start on these as soon as V3 is live and the above musts are in good shape.

1. **Nouns Governor**
   Nouns DAO was launched as a fork of Compound Governor Bravo, and to this day remains similar in key aspects. Since then a lot has changed, the DAO landscape has evolved, and here specifically at Nouns we're hitting some walls continuing to rely on the original design. It's time to go back to first principles.
   
   The foundation of this new governor design is using NFT-based voting. In today's design voters have a numeric votes balance, an inheritance from Compound's ERC20-based DAO. A Nouns design would be NFT-based, where NFTs are the voters rather than wallets. Some of the benefits of NFT-based voting:
   * No more snapshot block confusion.
   * Granular delegation, one Noun at a time.
   * Fork V2 (see below).
   * Token owners can override their delegate's vote.
   * and more.
   
   Other changes we're considering are too raw to articulate here; they will be part of our preliminary research, and will be communicated to the community as soon as possible.
2. **Collaborations with other teams**
   We'd like to work with leading teams in their fields, to help move the needle for Nouns and the DAO ecosystem. Key examples are:
   * **Private voting**: work with leading zk teams (likely from the first mandated round) towards building experimental private voting governors on mainnet.
   * **L2 voting**: collaborate with leading teams to experiment with voting on L2.
   
   We will explore additional collaboration opportunities as well, including other teams building governance smart contracts.

#### Medium Priority

Big projects:

1. **Fork V2**
   The full scope of improvements requires further research. We can say we're hoping to mitigate the current flaw where a majority can follow a forking minority into their fork, making the fork DAO yet another bad environment for the forkers; a solution we have in mind involves NFT-based voting, or other technical approaches that were out of scope for this first version.
2. **Rank-choice proposals**
   A long-standing favorite of ours we deemed less urgent so far; it can enable builders to offer multiple variations of their project in a single onchain proposal, hitting more optimal DAO<>builder agreements faster.
   
Smaller projects:

3. **Tip governance clients**
   We're super excited about this one! the idea is for the DAO to send ETH to governance clients' wallets the more they generate votes and proposals onchain, to better incentivize them to create the best UX and features for voters and proposers, and have long-term sustainability.
5. **Undo vote**
   Like Gmail's undo send shortly after you send an email, only for votes, to help people fix their voting mistakes (yes, they are still happening).

#### Low Priority

1. AuctionHouse V2: mainly introduces a new onchain price history feed. The project is already coded, next we'll need to run more tests and get it audited.
2. [Airdrops](https://snapshot.org/#/nouns.eth/proposal/0xebe4aec5b96dc5c008902da341bcd4936f5aa09baf73daaa545259183b203089): we would follow the DAO's choice to build a Nouns Buyer contract. 
3. DAO-controlled multisigs: a Gnosis Safe extension such that multisigs created for Nouns proposals will include the DAO as an admin that can execute arbitrary transactions from those Safes.
4. Streamer frontend: a web client showing all streams created by the DAO, allowing recipients to view and withdraw from their streams, and allowing Nouns voters to propose to cancel any open stream.


### Proliferation & Collaboration

We would like to do more in this area than we've done so far, while still dedicating the vast majority of our time to the technical projects mentioned above.

Some examples on our mind:

* Github repo house cleaning, for forkers and community members to easily use
* Initiate new collaborations with well-known teams, as mentioned above.
* Create more compelling content about Nouns tech, e.g. by working with Nounish.
* Research ways to onboard more autonomous solidity teams, e.g. incentivize and fund teams to create alternative governor contracts.

We believe a multi-governor future can be exciting, however this vision isn't clear enough yet to elaborate in this proposal. We'd like to continue discussing this vision with other token holders and community members who feel excited about it.

## Compensation & Terms

* 6 month engagement starting August 1, 2023.
* Payment done via streams controlled by the DAO, cancelable via proposal.
* $37.5k per person (2) per month (6) paid in USDC.
* 3 ETH per month to Solimander, for time spent meeting with the team, reviewing designs and code, and supporting audits and rollout.
* Total: 450,000 USDC, 18 ETH.
* Additional funding for things like audits, mandated rounds and other experiments will be requested separately as needs arise.

---

For any questions, we're available on the NCD discord server and on twitter.


[david](https://twitter.com/davidbrai) & [elad](https://twitter.com/eladmallel)
verbs team ⌐◨-◨

Outcome: EXECUTED