In celebration of Nouns’ 3rd Nouniversary and Decent DAO’s candidate to improve post-proposal accountability, we present Map the Nounsverse, an open-source, illustrated family tree of all Nouns communities, projects, and subcultures.

Foreword: “I looked at 700+ Nouns communities and nearly 600 proposals. Here’s what it taught me about B2B SaaS…”

I don’t mean to give you the whole backstory of the recipe, but Nouns have had me in a trance for the past few months. I started learning about Nouns last year while writing about governance team structures. If you wanna’ jump into the data and findings, skip one section below.

Auction ends in 15m 10s

It’s early morning– almost 3:00am. I’m watching another Noun auction through bloodshot eyes…again. It’s mesmerizing. What started as a small art-meets-sociology project with my colleagues at Decent has turned into an obsession this summer. I’ve watched nearly every auction since early July. My four-year old affectionately refers to Nouns as “the cute bitcoin guys with glasses…” when he sees them on my screen.

I never quite caught the broader NFT wave when I started working in crypto in early 2021. But I watched things unfold. I’ve always been impressed by the brief, generally fleeting, Icarus-like touches with mainstream pop culture NFT collections have had over the past couple of years. And equally irked by claims of “community” where there was simply price speculation, or hype, or often a combination of both. Especially as a marketer in crypto. And yet, I’ve found myself reading and commenting on proposals with Metacouncil. Liking art in /nouns. Asking about the treasury and burn rate. All without a Noun (until a couple of days ago).

Nouns are different. I’m intrigued by how many people share this obsession with Nouns art, projects, and culture. Nouns aren't perfect, no decentralized community is. If nothing else, Nouns has built a resilient, highly decentralized community. And the community data we’ve collected reflects that. All of crypto moves from peak vibes to survival and back again. And three years on, Nouns has lived through these cycles, too. And we’re still here.

Earlier this year, the crypto community heralded Pudgy Penguins for getting their plushies into Walmart. And yet, Nouns have created over 40 physical goods, including Noggles, NounsWatch, Nounish toys and figurines, a Nouns-branded Ledger, books, comics, and seven beverages including coffee, whiskey, and beer. Nouns goals are not explicit in nature (though we’d love to see more ROI/ETH-positive proposals grow the Nouns treasury!).

We hope that Map the Nounsverse helps new Nounish builders find their niche in this vast community. Or, even better, blaze a new trail and create something we can all be proud to call Nounish.

LFG,

Dara, Head of Marketing @decentdao and Noun #1204

Made with 💜 by Decent DAO as we continue to obsess over Nouns ⌐◨-◨

Introducing Map the Nounsverse Open Edition

Through the will of the creators in the community, Nouns has funded a variety of commercial, artistic, and public goods efforts alike. Nouns are Lindy– we think that resiliency bodes well for the future of this intricate, exciting ecosystem. And to think, it all started with builders wanting to do cool things with friends on the internet. Nouns deserve a map so new Nouners can find their way around the community.

Decent DAO has created a limited open edition to celebrate v1 of Map the Nounsverse. It includes all Nouns through #1193 and pays homage to 30+ of our favorite communities and projects from Map the Nounsverse. The edition is free to mint, and protocol fees are sent to Nouns DAO. If you want to see more Nouns analysis from Decent DAO, let us know what you think @decentdao on Warpcast.

tl;dr: Nouns Do Numbers

Nouns have cut a swath across the decentralized internet in four years. We’ll cover each main node in the tree, but if you want to get a sense of the breadth and depth, we found over 600 Nounish groups, communities, projects, and tools.

Nounish DAOs and Communities

• 75+ Nounish DAOs built on Nouns Builder with treasuries >250ETH, another 100+ Nounish DAOs/NFT projects, and 150+ Nouns art projects/NFTs on Zora

• 15+ geographically-focused Nouns groups across Asia, Latin America, and Africa

• 80 Rounds.wtf communities with over 115 ETH and 1M $DEGEN distributed to-date across over 4,200+ contributors, 16.5K submissions, and 120 rounds

• 7 affinity groups including Nouns Run Club, Extreme Sports/Gnars, and Nouns Trees

• 6 ERC-20s tied to Nounish projects or Nouns vaults ($NOGS, $NOUNS, $NOUN, $SPACE, $NNSFRNS, $RAINBOW)

Nouns Projects irl and url

• Over 40 physical goods including merchandise, clothing, beverages, and five variations of Noggles

• Over 30 forms of media including 4 news publications, 3 feature-length films, 7 documentaries, and 5+ podcasts

• 20+ Nounish apps to support the community, 11 games, 4 AR projects, and 6 music projects

• Donations to 14+ charities including supporting children in need, the environment, and crypto advocacy

• 10+ events sponsored and cohosted including pizza meetups, Nounsfest, and FWBFest

• 10+ places and spaces, including The Skatepark, Nouns Deli, The Nouns School, and Nouns Play Corner

• 10+ data tools to slice and dice various aspects of Nouns including Nounswap, Proptracker, Auction Tracker, Propdates, Pronouns.gg, and @maty’s Proposal Dashboards

Governance

• 15+ subDAOs, foundations, and councils participating in governance

• Nearly ~30 DAO tools and services across discussion/candidates, voting, post-proposal accountability, transacting/treasury, privacy, and tools

• 7% voter turnout across all proposals this year including individual Nouns holders and delegates as well as groups holding more than one Noun

• 5,000ETH, 200K USDC,and 557 Nouns in treasury funds

Nounish DAOs and Communities

Since Nouns’ inception, off-shoot communities with varying degrees of ties to Nouns have sprung up. Often, these groups leverage the Nouns artistic style along with a combination of tools built for Nounish communities to build and grow. In many cases, these Nouns groups make their own proposals and in some cases, grow their own treasuries through NFT mints to join the community. Like Nouns, though, many empower new community members to contribute without buying their NFT. What’s most interesting to us is how many communities have formed without receiving funding for a specific proposal.

Nouns communities can broadly be broken down into five categories:

1. Nounish DAOs built using Nouns Builder, with communities designed on the same governance framework as Nouns.

2. Nouns groups and NFT projects, which include the original Nouns subDAOs, Nouns-inspired NFT collections, and Nouns collaborations with other prominent NFT projects

3. Nouns on Farcaster: primarily composed of communities participating in small grants via rounds.wtf

4. Worldwide Nouns: international groups operating globally and in countries across Asia, Latin America, and Africa

5. Nouns on Zora: a collection of NFT projects inspired by Nouns

Nouns Builder has served as a Nouns-in-a-box solution that helps teams spin up community quickly. Earlier this year, Rounds.wtf replaced Prop House as a means to fund smaller projects. Since then, Rounds has benefited from being built on Farcaster: there are over 80 channels

Some of our favorites (links in Mind Map): Nouncil, Yellow Collective, Purple DAO, Public Nouns, Builder DAO, Nouns Amigos, /nouns-animators, Shark DAO, Gnars DAO

Nouns irl

Nouns show up in meatspace– a lot. We think that’s incredibly valuable. Indeed, the power of our space is the genuine connection, friendships, and collaboration that fill the space between our remote work, together.

We categorize irl projects by these four groups:

1. Merchandise and physical commercial products: several iterations of Noggles, the NounsWatch, several clothing brands, and merchandise stores. This group also includes toys, hardware, food and beverage, books/comics, and other physical items.

2. Events and meetups: sponsored and cohosted events such as Nouns at FWBFest, EDCON, Nouns x Pizza DAO events, and Nounstown

3. Affinity groups that leverage Nouns to bring community together such as Nouns Extreme Sports, Nouns Running Club, and Nouns Breakers

4. Places and Spaces: permanent and temporary physical spaces that leverage the Nouns brand including Nouns Deli, The Skatepark, Nounspresso/the coffee shop, Nouns Play Corner, and activations like with John Hamon in France.

Some of our favorites (links in Mind Map): Glasses for Kids, Nouns on the Ground, Nounish Friends, Nouns Espresso/Coffee Shop, Nouns Breakers, The Nouns School, Nouns Factory

Nouns url

Nouns are builders, so naturally, this category is large and hard to categorize everything in just one group!

This section has the most sub-category nodes of any of the others. Here’s how we broke things down:

1. Media, including news/writing, shows/films/storytelling including longform, shortform, and documentaries, and podcasts

2. Nounish apps and tools: software that supports Nounish communities like social apps, reference, bots, and a wide variety of other tools that were so unique they were hard to categorize

3. Games and apps including sprites and other game assets created for other builders

4. AR and social tools, mainly filters and Nounish VR/AR experiences

5. Nounish music

6. Donations to charities including the original prop1 donations, children’s charities, and crypto advocacy such as donations to Protocol Guild, Open Source Relay, and ZachXBT.

7. Investments like Verse Labs.

Some of our favorites (links in Mind Map): Three Artists, One Noun, The Rise of Blus, Nerman, Nouns Terminal and tabs.wtf, pronouns.gg, Base Runner, The Park, Nouns x A Song a Day, Nounswap.wtf

Governance

Nouns governance has evolved over time. Today, discussion, voting, and post-proposal activities happen across multiple dapps and social channels.

Governance has evolved with Nouns. Today, discussions are happening in different places in various tools at each stage of a proposal. We categorized governance by:

1. Metagovernance and subDAOs: groups of longtime, trusted Nouns community members that help coach teams looking for grants and participate in voting with one or more Nouns

2. DAO tools and process which vary in use depending on which stage a proposal is in, including:

   1. Candidate/Pre-Proposal Discussion

   2. Voting and signalling

   3. Post-Prop Accountability including Post-Prop Governance

   4. Tools that support governance including transaction/treasury tools, privacy tools, and others with varying degrees of use today

Smaller Grants

This year, Nouns sunset Prop House after two years, 350+ rounds, and $3M rewarded to creators. Prop House was funded to give Nouns better agility when funding medium-size grants. Rounds.wtf has replaced Prop House with a more flexible model: Rounds.wtf. Each community has week-to-week participation data and a live stream of contests, submissions, and prize pools. Leaderboards showcase the most engaged community members.

Post-Prop Governance is the new Post-Prop Accountability

When it comes to larger proposals, i.e. those >10eth, we have a lot of thoughts. Nouns governance happens in many places across multiple tools. Decentralized governance at-scale can evolve that way. And yet, we believe there is a lot of room to help consolidate conversations happening across platforms, standardize expectations for larger requests from the treasury, and put onchain controls in place to protect the DAO.

We believe thinking deeply about milestones and returns to Nouns in the form of community growth and protocol fees alike are critical to ensuring Nouns is a going concern for the long-term. Serving as a public good investing in art and culture and growing the Nouns treasury is a delicate balance. As we discussed in our candidate:

“Prop spend has exceeded auction revenue by over 4,000 ETH in the last year. At current pace this gives Nouns DAO an effective “runway” of 1 to 3 years, optimistically. Over 3,200 ETH and nearly $595,000 USDC has been issued to Props currently in Abandoned, Behind, or Uncertain status with almost no recourse for Nouns DAO to recover funding.”

This thread reinforces our belief that Nouns needs more onchain controls to direct how funds are spent once issued to builders. And that Nouns (or trusted parties, depending on the proposal, funding size, and length of time needed) can be stewards in a way that does not significantly impede decentralized ethos. Nouns should be able to pause– or clawback funds depending on whether goals and milestones are met.

Some of our favorites (links in Mind Map): Nouns Agora, Camp, Propdates.wtf, Nouns Client Incentives, Governance Pools

FAQs.wtf/About Map the Nounsverse

Why map the Nounsverse?

Nouns are one of the most impactful DAOs across cultural impact, art, and technological advances (along with many learnings about the challenges of decentralized governance). For new cryptonatives wanting to participate in Nouns, it can be overwhelming. It’s our hope that Nouns old and new alike find value in categorizing the community to-date and make it easier for Nounish people to find their niche– or blaze a new trail.

Map the Nounsverse was created with 💜by Decent DAO.

I’m new to Nouns. What are the best ways for me to get involved?

Build and create on Nouns! Join the communities on Farcaster, participate in Rounds, and find your niche (or create a new one).

What counts as “Nounish?”

Nouns and all Nounish projects are based on creative commons, or “no rights reserved.” That means anyone can build using Nouns. The developer tools, Nouns Builder, communities, and artwork all reflect that ethos. For the purposes of Map the Nounsverse, we kept consideration for inclusion very open.

Where can I find the information from Map the Nounsverse?

A Map the Nounsverse is open-source and available to anyone to build off of.

Hey, you missed my project/I think you should move x project to y node/feedback

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.