The Nounders | 4156, VapeApe, Seneca

welcome bank this nation to this very special episode where we cover is it gonna be a two-part series this is gonna be our first ever two-part series we were talking to the nounders of the noun style in the second episode we will talk to the now nurse of the noun style if you haven't guessed the nounders are the founders of the noun style so in this particular episode we're talking to three of them uh we got four one five six punk four one five six who i now think just goes by four one five six also vape ape and seneca so these are three nounders uh of the announced out projects and the noun zap project has

taken the crypto ecosystem by storm and as to why it's taken the crypto ecosystem by storm it's an interesting question one that we will unpack in this episode because is nouns an nft project is nouns a dow is it a defy app yes to all of these things so we're going to explore what about the nouns project has captured just the love beloved attention of so much in the crypto space and how it's perhaps brought something new to the table as to something that can be copied and pasted and brought forward into the

future as a primitive for so many different things to unpack uh and so i hope you guys enjoy this podcast we're gonna talk to these three founders in just a quick sec but before we do we're gonna talk to our friends over at forta and as we all know defy is risky we say this every single time on the podcast and forza offers real-time security and operational monitoring or whatever value that you have in the crypto world whether you're a defy app you're an nft project or you've got governance contracts or you're a bridge florida is a real-time monitoring network and so uh

you know those little like those games uh there's an asteroid game back in the 80s or 90s and you'd have to shoot down the asteroids before they hit the earth that's like forta and your incoming malicious transactions trying to rob you or your d5 projects of their treasury it'll monitor some shady shenanigans going along in the mempool and it will destroy those incoming transactions to the best of its ability before those transactions come and mess up your day and so you can check this out there's a link in the show notes bankless dot cc slash florida top protocols like maker lido compound

balancer dydx all are leveraging ford to make web3 a better and safer space for us all so you can check them out also at forta.org all right and so as we before we go into the show i just want to talk a little bit more about uh one moment a little bit about the show format so i do these show formats every now and then we call them are there alpha leaks or panels and amas basically if you are part of a community part of an organization and you think that the bold case for that org needs to be presented on bank lists you got to let me know and

here's what you got to do you got to grab up to three members of your community maybe just one maybe just two maybe just three no more than three though uh who can articulate the bull case for your for your project for your whatever you're working on you gotta slap an agenda together and let me know uh and so i know for a fact that the rocket pool team has do is doing this right now they've got a thread in their dow about their their bowl case or rocket pool agenda on bank list we've done this a few times before with the treasure dow community if you've got a bowl case for your project your dow your community or whatever and you think that

it needs to be told you gotta get fined up to three people produce an agenda together you send it my way and we'll get that story told uh and so today we're telling the story of the nounders uh the nouns dao with the nounders uh this is like i said a two-part series uh there is the now nerds the community members of the noun style then they are coming on the show on wednesday uh this is our first ever two part series just because there's so much to unpack here in the nouns organization so let's go ahead and get that started with unpacking this story of nouns from the

noun durs side of things so we will be right back with three of the members of the nounders side of the noun style right after we get through some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible rocket pool is your decentralized ethereum staking protocol you can stake your eth in rocket pool and get our eth in return allowing you to stake your eath and use it in defy at the same time you can get four percent on your eth by staking it with rocket pool but you can get even more by running a node rocket pool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating ethereum nodes setting up your rocketpool node is easier than

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is defy so follow maker on twitter at maker dow and learn from the oldest and most resilient dow in existence ladies and gentlemen introducing the nounders in the top left corner we have seneca and his uh beautiful cute little noun with head looks like i don't know what his head looks like seneca what is your head you're talking to a milk carton milk carton with a milk carton head in the top right corner we got vape ape which is an ape vaping actually not a real noun i just discovered this uh right before right before going live vape

april welcome to the show thank you thank you for having me and then in the bottom left corner we got 4156 with a horsey head and a lull shirt 4156 welcome to the show thanks for having us like like i alluded to in the intro uh the nouns project has just captured the attention captivated so many of us for so many different reasons like uh is it an nft project well almost certainly because it definitely comes with a jpeg um but it also is a little bit like a defy app in this like auction that goes on every single day but it's also like a

dow because the nft is also like a governing chair over this org we're gonna unpack like the full story of this but we gotta start at the beginning where did the idea for nouns come from like who who should tell this story four one five six i'll throw this to you yeah sure so um yeah i mean now this was i guess to a certain extent my my brainchild um i had been uh you know i've been in the crypto space for for almost a decade but um you know i've been been spending a lot of time in the in the crypto punx community

um and and you know just generally around the nft space uh and had been thinking for a while about you know what what could crypto punk's 2.0 look like um you know what what what were the sort of like primitives missing from from that project that that could make it you know more crypto native um could could uh potentially kind of elevate it so that so that it could kind of do things beyond mostly just kind of cheerleading the price um and so i you know i had been chatting with some friends been writing down different ideas about you know what what

what could this look like um and then you know one one day i just had this kind of like moment of inspiration where i decided that i was going to write everything down um tweet it out in in like twitter thread format and just see if anyone wanted to work on it um so the the white paper if you want to call it that for four nouns is the twitter thread you can still find it on my twitter i can i can send you the link um and um yeah it basically you know describes a lot of the the properties and very high level that nouns has today

um and um kind of at the end it says like you know does anyone want to work on this with me um and of course and seneca are two of the people that said yes i'd actually like to explore the the crypto punk side of things because crypto punks have captured there's a significant overlap between nouns and crypto punks and i think you know you already alluded to a little bit as to why it seems like both projects tried to capture some of this like ethos of crypto that well we can't really articulate it the vibe is there right it's just like it's the same vibe it's

not it's not the board apes vibe it's a little bit more of a bottom-up community-driven project but what would you say are the the weaknesses of the crypto punks project that led you that motivated you to start thinking about what a crypto punks 2.0 could look like yeah sure i mean i i wouldn't necessarily call them weaknesses like the way i've always thought about it and i've said this on other other podcasts are that like crypto punks are sort of like if you want to use a filmmaking analogy crypto punks are like the citizen kane of the medium right like they they define the form

um and so it you know it it's inevitable that that like when you push things to it to a certain extent when you kind of define the form there are certain things that will be missing just because you know by by way of defining the form you you've covered you know 80 percent of the interesting ground but but maybe there's an additional 20 percent or or more that that hasn't been covered um i mean for for me i think that the two the two big things were like one that the sort of like lack of of organizational structure like lack of i

guess dow infrastructure is how how the problem was solved um or maybe actually three things the the the the kind of the lack of organizational infrastructure such that like the punks could kind of on chain coordinate their activities to do things together um the distribution mechanism so like is is there a way that's that's kind of like more fair in terms of distribution um uh for for the kind of building of the community right can can that happen over a longer period of time rather than just being a function of like you know who happened

to be online you know on a thursday in in 2017 when these were all released and claimed um and then the third thing was just this idea and i i guess i was probably most vocal about this and and this was one of the major motivating factors behind nouns the the idea that um you know that the the the jpeg you know the the the thing that the token is referencing um should kind of have this symmetry with the token itself where it is as as permissionless and open as the token so um effectively putting

all of the intellectual property into the public domain and and making it cc0 so that people could use it and build on top of it without worry of of what what might become of the ip certainly and uh four one five six is actually the name of your punk not your noun uh and so there's still still a homage paid to the crypto punks there and that's also shared by you uh vape vape uh your your twitter handle is punk four four six four and uh so vapa i'll throw it to you when you read four one five six tweet thread what stuck out to

you as like ooh neat and and uh captured your attention yeah i think there's a lot of components around drops that were happening at that time it's kind of like the ico era of the nfts where there's a lot of 10k pfp drops and 4156 really laid out i think uh you know materially different and novel mechanism uh for both launching distributing and governing a set of nfts and so that was initially you know very intriguing to me

seneca what about you but what about the uh the tweet thread stuck out to you yeah the the one thing that that really stuck out to me was the infinite aspect of it the fact that it could go on so long as ethereum lives on um nouns could go on forever and that that i feel is very unique to to blockchain something that couldn't really be done before and so that that unique property of it really reeled me in and got me thinking in a million different directions

all right and so as we've alluded to there's a number of different things about the announced project that has captured so many different people's attentions i think the distribution mechanism is a primitive that this industry is going to be able to take forward and use and we've already seen this being used by little nouns and i bet you there's a number of projects that i'm not familiar with that are using this mechanism and i'm sure there's hundreds more that have yet to be released that are thinking about using this distribution mechanism so who wants to take how do we define what this distribution mechanism is who

wants to define the distribution mechanism for our audience out of you three i mean i i can give it a try um you know i mean i think we've sort of like taken it to take into calling it uh nounish distribution whether it's you know used in the context of nouns or outside of it but you know this idea that of like a continuous auction i think is is powerful for a few different reasons you know one i think one is is um that it it's just more fun fundamentally fair

like we alluded to when when talking about crypto punks you know this idea that you know crypto history if you've been around for a while is just kind of like littered with with these these like very narrow windows of opportunity right like were you were you here when the ethereum crowdsale happened you know were you here when uh the punk's distribution happened you know we can probably collectively think of like a dozen of these examples um and and so this idea that that you know there could be equal opportunity for participation over this like

extraordinarily long window of time and and that equal opportunity would would create this kind of um you know more more credible neutrality more more fundamental fairness at the protocol layer i think and ends up being quite important um the the other thing i would say is is um that that you know the the nounish distribution mechanism the the kind of like um continuous cadence um it ends up um being important um for for the reason that it it

potentially could create like a perpetual source of funding for an organization right um this idea that um to the extent that that there is a bid for for nouns forever that that the organization always has this this uh perpetual inflation to rely on to fund itself to organize itself and of course you know we've seen kind of uh in in the context of like ethereum versus bitcoin this idea that like inflation is necessary to keep things working um i think is is this this kind of important idea in crypto

and just to concretely define what this mechanism is one noun per day is minted and sold and in perpetuity forever and was there any supply ahead of time or anything other than this mechanism or did it did the supply of nouns literally start at one and increase serially up from there yeah so the the the second tweet in in the original kind of like white paper thread um is initial supply of zero so there were no nouns initially um and and on the first day one one noun was

created and what was what was the price for the first noun if you can remember like who set that price how much did that go for um here we can we can pull it up you guys do you have it off the top of your head so i care of you i think it was around 600 600 around there wow what about the second there that was a big drop that we would have to look up so yeah i've got it here noun 1 was 6 613 eth and then noun 2

was uh here one second go ahead 69.69 of course this is one of the things that has really captured uh captivated me is because you know because there's such a strong supply constraint that it these prices of these nfts are off the charts uh i mean for a 10k pfp project that releases 10 000 all at once

they do like a mint price of you know 0.03 or like 0.5 if they're really expensive but nouns are going for like the lowest nouns for a while i saw it going at 60 and now they're going at like a hundred or so and it's off of like it's in such an er with a such a low supply that you like you actually can command such a high price for these things even when it's like so early in the project right and i thought just like this this model of extremely constrained uh nft release

is actually a fantastic pricing mechanism uh because it's commanding prices that all the other nft projects would have dreamed of uh vape if you have any thoughts on this yeah i think it's an interesting dynamic where all the demand for the project really gets funneled through this daily auction every day and so we've seen relatively you know compared to other projects relatively low secondary market movement usually happens after somebody's been outbid several times on the primary auction and they kind of capitulate and then go to opencm we'll buy it by a noun there

but this has been a really interesting mechanism for driving demand directly through the the primary auction you sort of get this continuous you know pricing of the noun as these auctions are happening every day um i think it's acted as a funnel for a lot of the the community too to come in sort of the front door look at the primary auction um and try to compete there first before they ever go to secondary to try to score it down that way you know the there's also i i think there's a couple of other like interesting components related to nouns as a meme right where it kind of like

benefits from one this this idea that there's like a daily event you know we call it nine o'clock this this like daily cadence that happens every day where people want to pay attention to the project and then you know the other thing that you know it's a bit more in the weeds but this idea that that um you know there's not kind of like explicit trait scarcity in the nouns universe like all nouns are in essence like equally rare but the thing that is sort of notable in that in that context like the thing that that becomes rare is um the timestamp right

like the date on which the noun was minted you know is it a christmas noun and then also the id you know how how long have you been around the community how long have you been in the project if each idea sort of like to an extent corresponds with with day um the the the id like sort of carries this this meaning about about you know time-based participation interesting interesting i mean if we i was shocked to hear that noun number one went for 600 plus eth but i mean if this nouns project is actually massive having now number one is is kind of equivalent

to a flex even though the noun number one is largely going to be like indistinguishable from now number like whatever because like the properties are so random it's it's actually the number one uh place that's actually kind of the unique thing about that isn't it that's right yeah we've seen lower id nouns go for a premium as well so like a two-digit noun or a one-digit noun obviously fetches a higher premium than the current primary auction price one one thing to add there with regards

to the daily auction is that it's served really well to prevent crazy hype uh cycles so because you have the daily uh inflation you tend not to see the you know the pump and dump mechanics that you see in a fixed supply pfp project which is nice because it sort of infiltrates the culture as to focusing on on other things that are not price related right the emphasis on the daily auction rather than the secondary market

uh removes some of the uh the bull market shenanigans that we saw with nft projects how much secondary market liquidity is there though uh and why would somebody go to the secondary market rather than be patient and wait at the uh wait for the primary yeah i think um you know with nouns there is a a real sense of i want to find my forever noun so given that there's only one daily auction right there's only one head that

is being auctioned off with through the secondary you can find the auction that that you prefer right the one that you actually want to hold okay so so is it so i'm sure some people would love to buy their forever noun off the daily auction and be like oh that this daily auction's mine but uh i mean we well you know full disclosure i mean me and ryan have been waiting for like the bankless noun to pop up and it hasn't really have popped up yet and so at some point in time we're far gonna

have to peruse the secondary market to find like somebody with a bank head or something uh and but uh i'm sure many many other people are playing games like this i'm sure that is true the the the auction is a big uh a big party every day as uh 41 kind of stated um bidding winning the audience that surrounds the auction every day is pretty fun um so yeah there there's a whole event around the the auction end which which we call nine o'clock can we talk about some of the uh the

properties uh first off who is who is the artist behind all of the properties how are they decided how is the art decided let's lean into like the art and the property side of things i just who wants to who wants to tell this side of the story yeah sure i can i can tell this side of the story um yeah so so you know like again shortly after this tweet thread went out we we were kind of assembling the team of ten nounders um in in the discord channel um and it was a i think it was roughly like six kind of

technical nounders and and four um four kind of our artistic nouns so there was uh gramplin who's a of course a very well known nft artist uh eboy who um you know they're effectively like the the godfather of the pixel art uh timpers uh who who is uh also a well-known pixel artist um and then i i worked on on the artwork artwork as well uh to an extent so it was really like the the four of us that that um kind of attempted to define the the nounish uh aesthetic um and and that happened like

relatively quickly um after we started working on the project um and uh what about uh just the properties who decided on what properties how did that happen um yeah i mean so so i think we knew early on um that we didn't really want to emphasize kind of trait scarcity so so like really we just started drawing stuff um and and um i think we one of the the

kind of early decisions was that it would be pixel art and that ended up being kind of very important in terms of storing the nouns actually on on chain right and being able to kind of compress them such that they would fit on chain um and then you know we we started trying to draw you know these characters with different kinds of heads um i believe so like i i think the the initial genesis was um uh gramplin drew this this like sort of like duckman type character uh and and it had

the eyes like the you know the very kind of contrasty characteristic eyes that the nouns have and i i just kind of like took that image with another prototype i'd made and i i don't think it was like a a moment of genius or insight or anything it was just like goofing around i just drew the glasses around his his eyes and you know just fired it back into the discord channel saying oh hey you know i think this looks kind of cute with your eyes and the glasses um and then we all i think we all just very quickly agreed that that it would be interesting if every single one of them was wearing

the glasses and the the glasses could be this kind of like iconic you know central meme of the project um and again you know it was this i think like the creation of nouns was was this like pretty special time both in terms of the wider space but also just in terms of like aggregating 10 like really world-class builders in a discord channel and just like you know going off for for a couple months and so like almost everything we did happened very very quickly you know i think within about 24 hours we had sort of defined the nounish

aesthetic and then we went on twitter and just started like asking people what what sort of noun heads they'd like and and then drawing the noun heads for them that was like the initial genesis of of like coming up with the different ideas for the heads and well i'm sure you guys didn't have any specific criteria as to like what kind of head you would accept as an idea and what kind of head you would deny as an idea but like overall like what was the vibe like what kind of ideas past like oh yes we will do that as a head versus like oh no that's a bad idea was there any sort of like social contract

about this um i mean you know we i think we we did ultimately like filter and reject cert certain ideas like you know we didn't want to have like a gun like you know there are certain properties of nounishness that um you know it it's a kind of optimism uh and kind of like absurdity and silliness um so i think those were our filters um you know we ended up with about 235 heads in the collection altogether and i i think we cut probably about another 50 or so so we we drew 300 heads all together which is of course you know

that's a lot of artwork um so so you know we kind of took to like within the the discord channel all just kind of like listing out nouns and then the artists kind of like picking up on the ones that they they thought were funny and and drawing them so you know it would be like a list of like igloo aardvark hair you know goldfish and then someone would go and draw the aardvark and and then we iterate on it from there so what are all the properties of a noun so you have the shirt you have the head you have the color of the glasses and then the hair what are all the properties

yeah sure so uh there is a background so it can be warm gray or cool gray which i actually think is kind of to only only two yeah and i i actually think this is like one of the kind of underappreciated traits of of nouns because if you have like this sort of like binary trait you can do all sorts of fun fun things with it right like someone could could create a game that's like warm gray versus cool gray or you know maybe it's notable when there's like you know seven seven warm grays in a row that's like seven heads in a row and that's like a

form of scarcity in the collection um so so the background color is can be warm warm or cool gray um there's a body um and and so you know the the body is is like the torso with with the kind of characteristic one arm um there's an accessory which in most cases is is just like an overlay on the body and then some of the more kind of the complicated looking accessories just kind of completely overlay the body um there's the head of course which is really what we define as as as the noun and then there's uh the glasses so

there's about uh roughly about 20 different uh types of glasses and if for so 4156 you have lol on your shirt seneca has pop on on his shirt their shirt uh are these the accessories or is that something else yeah that's right that's right that's the accessory okay so there's there's not very many parameters there's not too many properties out there yeah that's right components yeah components excuse me yeah uh how many different shirts are there do you know off the top of your head

uh here hang on it's on now's wtf and uh while you're thinking about that i'll ask either seneca or vape vape just like what what's the uh what was the talk a little bit more about like the the choice behind not really having rarity in the properties why was that important yeah sure um i i think it's important because within you know pre-nouns um the focus of a lot of

pfp communities was always the the trait rarity right so it in in effect you'd have this hierarchy within the the community and i think one of the the goals within nouns was not to emphasize any sort of hierarchy between one member or the or the next but rather we're all sort of more or less the same right that said there are rarer heads just because one head can pop up you know once a year and another can pop up five

seven times a year but you know to your question it's it's not to build a hierarchy with within the community wait so are those heads programmed to only show up once a year versus other heads or are programmed to show up more often or is that just a that was just a an example of what could happen so how quote-unquote rarity is defined although no noun is particularly rare there can be rare nouns because randomness right so not too long ago we had i think three

voids three void heads happen one after the next right and so if you think about the the the amount of heads that there are which correct me if i'm wrong there's 230 something yeah it's about right it's about one a year more or less one and a little bit more right so you'd expect that but given randomness you can uh you could see multiple heads happen in one year or three in a row as we saw recently right but it's not it's never ever programmed rarity and i really like

this this concept because if every if all properties are not are the same or treated equivalently then you have like emergent rarity right and so it's more about just like the random uh serendipity of certain properties coming together or like you said like the random serendipity of the days of of time in a row or just like rather than like controlling for rarity and having top-down uh rarity created by like the organizers you have like this bottom-up community