The Yellow Collective: A New Onchain Club, Powered by Nouns Builder on the BASE L2

Summary

The Noun Square is excited to announce the launch of 🟡 The Yellow Collective 🟡, an onchain club by and for our world-wide Nounish community that will be launching this month.

"Collective Nouns" will be deploying as a daily auction on Nouns Builder, on the BASE L2 for ultimate accessibility (and to continue our ongoing support and education around the OP stack.)

We are requesting a grant of 5ETH from Builder DAO to kickstart a nounish creator flywheel while promoting creativity, collaboration and ideation within our community. All proceeds from TYC grants and auction sales will go to fund and empower nounish artists and content creators via art contests, creative Prop House rounds and content commissions.

Examples of some amazing nounish art that has been funded by our past contests.

Yellow: A Collective by the Community, For the Community

When launched, all of the nounish heads for this collection will have been created by community artists and voted on by Nouncil in a Prop House round. Over 400 entries were received from artists all over the world, and the Top 50 shown here will be included as the first cohort of heads for Collective Nouns.

For some additional Noundry-style fun, The Yellow Collective will also host a YELLOW RUMBLE every quarter and let the community vote for the best noun head added to the collection during that period, and we will then sponsor a proposal to have it graduated and potentially added to the main Nouns DAO protocol descriptor!

What is Our Mission?

Part of our mandate at The Noun Square has always been to act as an educational resource for our community, and we have spent a lot of time and effort this year teaching about the benefits of using Ethereum L2s. For example, we migrated our NOMO Nouns Daily Open Edition collection to Optimism this summer, and have been offering Onchain versions of our weekly video podcast Zero Rights Reserved as free mints on the Zora L2.

Launching Collective Nouns on BASE is the final "Infinite Stone" in our multiprong approach to bring the Nouniverse firmly onto the Superchain.

We have been planning to launch an onchain club for our community for a long time, and are very grateful to the Nouns Builder team for shipping L2 compatibility for the tool so that we can finally bring that vision to life.

This grant will help us to build momentum behind The Yellow Collective and drive interest in our upcoming contests and content funding rounds over the next 3 months, so that we can attract existing creators in our ecosystem (and new ones from outside) to come, collaborate and create together onchain!

How Will The Funds Be Used?

All funds will be used by the Collective to fund a minimum of 4 nounish art contests promoted and administered by The Noun Square over the next 3 months. These will all be Nouns-themed competitions and at least one of the contests will be explicitly about the Nouns Builder tool to bring more specific awareness to artists and builders in our network.

Having some initial funds in the treasury to begin will help us to drive more interest in the daily auction, as these tokens will be used to vote on future art contests, as well as the contests to add additional traits to the collection every 3 months.

Over time, we hope to keep this momentum and flywheel spinning so that future contests and nounish media commissions can be funded solely by daily auction proceeds.

Important note on how the treasury will be managed in the early days of TYC: We are deliberately structuring this org as a Collective / Club and not necessarily as a DAO. While we do broadly believe in the ethos of DAOs and specifically decentralization, we believe that in order to be successful, onchain groups need strong leadership in early days, coupled with progressive decentralization later on.

To this end, the Yellow Collective treasury will be managed by a trusted multisig made up of 4 core TNS founders (Toady Hawk, Benbodhi, Robotfishgirl, Joshua Fisher) to begin. TYC token holders will have input into the cadence, themes and prizes for the art rounds, and will be able to vote on winners, but the multisig will ensure that there is no incentive in early days for anyone to buy tokens with the express intent of extracting, and simultaneously guide momentum in the direction of the Collective's founding vision: to fund and empower the next generation of Nounish artists and creatives.

How Does This Benefit Builder DAO?

The Builder DAO tool is undeniably a public good, and its value to the commons is only magnified by the number of successful DAOs and Collectives that are bootstrapped by the tooling and grants you provide.

Prof Werder often speaks about the importance of "Minimum Viable Community" in founding DAOs, and in our case we believe that we have a Maximum Viable Community, with 20,000+ followers across our social and daily earnest engagement on all our educational content and art contests, which we have been producing consistently for 16 months.

For this reason, we believe a grant investment in the early success of The Yellow Collective is one that will definitely pay goodwill dividends to the protocol in the medium term, as many future DAOists will have a great example of another successful, vibrant Collective launched on, and leveraging Nouns.build.

In addition to these soft benefits of collaboration, we will also commit to giving Builder DAO pride of placement as contest sponsor in all our announcements on Twitter/X, TikTok and elsewhere over the next 3 months. This is the kind of messaging that very routinely will get 20,000+ impressions for us, see an example below:

We will also be continuing to produce educational content for our community about our L2 journey, and will be sure to include Builder DAO as part of that story in upcoming videos, threads, etc. And as mentioned above, will make the Nouns Builder tool the explicit theme for at least one of our upcoming arts contests as well.

It is important to mention that we do intend to launch The Yellow Collective regardless of the results of this grant application, but will just need to proceed with contests and activity at a much slower pace in that case. However, this grant, if approved, it would really allow us to hit the ground running and leverage our substantial network and community momentum to grow faster and make a more substantial and sustained impact over the next 3 months.

We are a proven Nounish team with a vibrant and active community, seeking your help to make our Builder DAO launch as successful as it can possibly be. Thank you very much for your consideration!

NB: After receiving feedback from BDAO members, we have revised our original proposal to reflect a smaller scope with the goal of helping TYC gain traction over the first 3 months after launch (vs 6 months) without causing undue burden to the BDAO treasury.