Nouns is a protocol for proliferating Nouns
To understand why this is true, imagine the project without any of the characters we know and love. It would be nothing more than an awkwardly structured hedge fund.
Conversely, imagine the characters without the DAO or treasury ↗︎. The art would be delightful, but Nouns would be one among a growing ‘sea’ of avatar projects.
No, the real magic happens when we add these features together. The characters and the cadence create the culture, which benefit the treasury and the DAO.
But this is only half of a virtuous cycle. To complete the cycle, we must feed the treasury back into the culture via the DAO. It is this critical step that can elevate the Nouns project from a fun and exciting experiment, to a virtuous cycle that reaches the world and forever impacts cryptocurrency and governance.
If Nouns is a protocol for proliferating Nouns, how do we use it? How do we leverage the treasury to strengthen awareness and strengthen the culture in such a way that we benefit the treasury and the DAO?
Like Ethereum, Nouns as an open source project and protocol. The code ↗︎ that creates Nouns, and critically, even the art ↗︎ is open source; we put it in the public domain ↗︎ so that anyone can build on the artwork, just like they can build on the codebase.
I propose that we can mimic Ethereum to create a Nouns virtuous cycle. Ethereum is what it is today for many reasons, but we can distill as follows: