Nounish DAOs: Very OG, Very Base(d)

Nouns have inspired a lot of Nounish DAOs. By our recent count in Map the Nounsverse, we’re tracking several dozen, including 78 (!!) on Nouns Builder.

Today, we’re looking at eight of the most prominent Nounish DAOs and breaking down their governance, treasuries, and voting details.

Shoutout to all the great data from Nouns Builder that helped us put together this research piece.

tl;dr

• We included Lil’ Nouns, Builder DAO, Public Nouns, Yellow Collective, Purple DAO, Gnars DAO, The Park DAO, and EduNouns

• Together, these DAOs manage treasuries of nearly 760Ξ!

• Across all eight DAOs, there are 4,300 unique owners (though there is likely significant overlap between DAOs) with an average of unique holders relative to total supply of NFTs of 40%

• In total, these DAOs have submitted over 630 proposals, with an average of 9% quorum threshold

Most of the top Nounish DAOs launched early in Nouns’ history. These DAOs utilized Builder DAO’s Nouns Builder to spin up Nounish DAOs. Several have migrated from Ethereum mainnet to Base as of this year or are in the process of migrating, like Gnars.

DAOs like Lil’ Nouns and Public Nouns are Ethereum forks of the original Nouns DAO x-NFTs-per-y-timeframe, forever format. What we find most interesting is that new, influential Nounish DAOs continued to emerge as the crypto markets turned down through the end of 2022. Builders kept building.

Treasuries Abound

The top Nounish DAOs command nearly 760Ξ, or about 16% of the current Nouns DAO treasury of 4,811Ξ. Unique holder concentration ranges from 70% on the higher end with Purple DAO to as distributed as 18% on Gnars DAO.

Most treasuries hold ETH. Lil’ Nouns owns two Nouns in the treasury. Some use the same Nounders-reward process used by Nouns to award their NFTs to their own treasury and/or Nouns DAO as a contribution/donation, such as Lil’ Nouns.

None of the Nounish DAOs have active treasury positions (i.e. treasury allocations kept in DeFi, yield, etc.) though we think this is more important for larger DAOs.

Unique Holder Concentration

Nounish DAOs have an average unique ownership % of 41%. We found comparing this metric interesting– typical ERC-20 DAOs tend to consider voter and delegate concentration. We’d love to dive deeper into delegate concentration and how groups of Nouns stakeholders influence prop votes in a future research piece.

Forward-Looking (ish) Statements (NFA)

Generally speaking, all of the Nounish DAOs are decently well-capitalized currently relative to their forward-looking revenue estimates and prop spend. We looked through the past year of prop spend for each DAO. Prop spend has been less than 10% relative to current treasury and forward-looking revenue. Nouns DAO is, of course, the exception.

We have found great use from Nounswap’s revenue : spend stats dataviz as well as Camp’s treasury summary. We made our own simple (DYOR) 1-year forward-looking revenue estimate for each Nounish DAO and compared that to what % of the current treasury that equates to. You can find those (unscientific) estimates here.

Wtf?

Despite the ethos and onchain similarities, Nounish DAOs vary in purpose, treasury, and spend. The biggest, most ambitious bets on Nouns influencing art, culture, and tech come from Nouns. It makes sense that proposals as a % of treasury tend to be much larger.

The Nounish DAOs are more niche in their purpose and efforts (e.g. Park for music, Purple for Farcaster, EduNouns for education, etc.). So it makes sense to us that they would have fewer proposals requesting smaller portions of the treasury as a % of funds. These proposals tend to focus on irl activations, often co-hosted with Nouns or other Nounish DAOs as well as for Nounish efforts driven directly from the treasury.

We also wonder if there is room for more frequent proposals/ideas for use of treasury funds from the Nounish DAOs, with potential room for collaboration. Certainly, that has happened especially at many of the irl events that have multiple Nouns DAOs attending. We wonder if Nounish DAOs have the opportunity to use treasury funds for smaller proposals or to contribute to Nouns prop funding where there is overlap in goals.

Need Mawr Data

If you like Map the Nounsverse and this deep-dive series, please mint our Map the Nounsverse open edition on Zora! See something you want changed? Contact us @decentdao on Warpcast or email us hello@decentdao.org and we will make updates and share them in /nouns.

Let us know what you’d like to see us deep-dive on next:

• $Nounish Currencies: covering the several Nouns-adjacent ERC-20 currencies, their history, tokenomics, and market data

• Nounish Analytics: a look at all of the great treasury, auction, and governance data tools available to Nouns

• So Many Noggles: a review of every Noggles merch project to-date

• …or let us know if you’ve got another idea!