We will be winding down prop.house over the coming months. Effective June 1st, 2024, the web app will no longer support creation of new rounds. All current rounds will continue to run as expected.

Prop House started in November 2021 as an alternative mechanism for Nouns to deploy its treasury. Since then we’ve helped 80+ communities reward $3M+ USD to their contributors via 350+ rounds. The lessons we’ve learned over the years have resulted in a new product that will continue the Prop House mission to make it easy for communities to reward their contributors: rounds.wtf.

Several things came together that led us to decide to pause Prop House development in its current form.

Decentralization first

In line with the Nouns ethos, we developed the onchain version of Prop House to be maximally permissionless and compatible with all Ethereum tokens. Complete decentralization necessitated onchain voting, which is prohibitively expensive on Ethereum. To address this, we utilized storage proofs on Starknet to determine voting power and relayed results back to Ethereum.

This decentralized approach added significant complexity, slowing our development. Additionally, delays in the launch of new Starknet features required for storage proofs, a Starknet programming language migration, and a pivot by our storage proof provider all contributed to delays in the release of the protocol.

By the time the protocol shipped, the market had moved on to new technologies. The complexity of a fully onchain, cross-chain solution greatly hindered new development. Without a foundation to develop, test and iterate quickly, we are playing a game we will inevitably lose.

New Technologies

When we started developing Prop House onchain, neither Farcaster nor Base existed in their current forms. Prop House being an inherently social product, rebuilding on top of Farcaster’s  social primitives was an obvious choice. Base being a low-cost Ethereum L2 coupled with its strong cultural pull, it has allowed us to move much quicker than ever before. Thanks to these new technologies, a new modality of Prop House is being unlocked through rounds.wtf.

All of prop.house is open source. You can find the docs here.

Thank you to everyone who’s been with us over the years. Special thanks to the Nouns community for always supporting our efforts. We see the past 2.5 years as proof of work only to get started on the beginning of something truly special.