Nounlets are an experiment to allow for collective ownership over one single Noun from Nouns DAO, the project that elevated CC0 to a new level. Each Nounlet represents one percent of a Noun, including a vote in delegating the Noun’s governance rights.
The project is powered by Tessera — formerly Fractional. Noun 315 is the first Noun to be fractionalized in this way; each Nounlet has unique IDs and metadata, but the same head as the vaulted Noun.
The most important part of owning a Nounlet is the ability to vote on a delegate for the vaulted Noun. Collective created a platform for Nounlets to create Delegate Profiles to campaign for votes to be delegated to them.
Once all 100 Nounlets are minted, it’s possible for a Nounlet owner to make a bid to buy the entire Noun out of the vault.
Why Own a Nounlet?
The main point in owning a Noun is to have a voice in Nouns DAO, which has a treasury of $3.8 million as of posting. One Noun equals one vote in the DAO. Today, you can only participate in Nouns DAO governance by owning a Noun (around 50 Ethereum in current auctions) or participating in subDAOs, like Lil Nouns (which holds 8 Nouns in its treasury).
For each Noun that is forked into Nounlets, one delegate in that Nounlets’ community will represent the Noun in Nouns DAO governance. All Nounlet owners vote on a delegate for the Nounlet. The active delegate will be able to join the official nouns-private Discord channel.
Nounlets aims to be a more accessible, easy-to-follow subDAO of Nouns. Its advantage over a subDAO like Lil Nouns — which has an entire ecosystem of its own — is that you only have one job as a holder: campaign for people to delegate their Nounlets to you, or delegate your Nounlet to someone else.
Delegating Nounlet Votes
Deciding who to delegate your Nounlet to is the most important part of owning a Nounlet. As a Nounlet holder, you have to keep up with whose core beliefs for Nouns DAO you align with, or campaign your own beliefs to earn delegate votes.
But currently, it’s not always apparent why potential Nounlets delegates want votes delegated to them.
Collective created a platform for Nounlets to create delegate profiles. On delegate profiles, Nounlets holders can add context on why votes should be delegated to them, what they believe in, and how they would contribute to Nouns as the Nounlets delegate.
After reviewing delegate profiles, Nounlet holders can delegate their votes on Collective by clicking “cast votes” and signing the transaction.
You do not have to own a Nounlet to create a Nounlet delegate profile on Collective. Just visit collective.xyz/nounlets and click “Run as Delegate”.
Nounlets Traits
Like Nouns, all of the artwork for Nounlets is on-chain. All of the traits are generated randomly, but have the same head as the Noun they are based off of. For example, all Nounlets for Nouns 315 have a brick head. The traits include Backgrounds (2), Bodies (30), Accessories (137), Glasses (21), and Head (1).
4-Hour Auctions
While regular Nouns have one-day auctions (one Noun a day, forever), Nounlets have 4-hour auctions until all 100 are minted. The first set of Nounlets for Noun 315 took about a month to finish minting.
The final prices landed in the general range of 0.6-0.9 Ethereum for the first set of Nounlets. The very first Nounlet sold for 4.2 Ethereum.
98 percent of the sale proceeds are automatically sent to the original Noun owner, and the other two percent is kept by Tessera. Every time the auction is over and settled, the next auction kicks off. This is a unique way of monetizing your Noun if you have an original one.
TL;DR — Nounlets by Tessera
Nounlets lowers the cost barrier for people to join the NounsDAO and get more involved in Nouns governance. In the Tessera Discord, owners can verify ownership of their Nounlet and connect with other owners. On Collective, Nounlets can create and view Delegate Profile to decide who will hold the governance rights to the Noun.
Alongside Tessera, Nouns is continuing to push what’s possible with subDAOs and on-chain governance. You can follow along in the Nounlets mint process with this Dune dashboard, or at Nounlets.wtf.
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Blog image created in collaboration with DALL-E 2 by OpenAI.