Gnars x Nouns Athletes

Background: Nouns Athletes received 3 ETH in funding from Small Grants for a proof of concept. We secured our first signing, Joe Atkinson, who is currently working on his first Nounish production.

This proposal aims to facilitate a co-op between Nouns Athletes and Gnars, a community of action sports enthusiasts ready to expand beyond skateboarding, to all extreme sports.

Gnars DAO is a natural progression for a project that’s well positioned to help extreme athletes reach the people, places and things that bring out their best – ultimately proliferating Nouns.

TL;DR

Extreme sports DAO tasked with…

1. Managing a Nouns DAO funded and decentralised treasury
2. Sponsoring athletes with grants for travel and content creation
3. Making production, merch, event and protocol decisions

Requesting 69 ETH for Gnars DAO to steward an expansion of Nouns Athletes with travel sponsorships across various target disciplines.

ie. Gnars DAO (enthusiasts) proliferating Nouns DAO (professionals)...

Sub-DAOs

Nouns DAO inherently faces a number of challenges around ideation and capital deployment, due to the broadness of application that comes with such an ambitious project.

As of 22 March 2022, Nouns DAO has:

• Received 23,421 ETH
• Sent 4,784 ETH
  • Staked 3,000 in Lido
  • Spent 458 on Foundation setup and ops

Only 1,326 ETH has been spent on directly proliferating Nouns, which represents just 5.66% of total funding raised, most of which is not visible on the chart above.

Sub-DAOs may address the deal flow problems faced by a generalist organisation such as Nouns, by operating as an intermediary for impactful and domain specific capital deployment.

Gnars began as a simple experiment to see how people value team contributions versus allocation of funds toward meaningful and well aligned charitable causes. As expected, collectors want to see what the future holds and therefore tend toward adequately funding a team – tested using a Humble Bundle inspired contribution slider.

But perhaps more abstractly, the project was intended to serve as a dip of the toe, to understand whether I personally, should “Skate or DAO?” Having quickly attracted a community of talented and passionate individuals, I’ve discovered that the answer is unequivocally “DAO.”

Connecting with the community has helped me to understand that we are uniquely positioned for experimentation. As a laser focused sub-DAO we can recruit and grow an extreme sports team through fan engagement.

I’m proposing a domain specific sub-DAO structure – a SHRED.

Gnars DAO

Skate or DAO -> Shred the Nouns 🤘

Gnars aims to operate as a Streamlined Hierarchical Really Excellent DAO (SHRED) and while the name is a stretch, the concept of ‘shredding the nouns’ can be hyper-focused and impactful.

The structure allows for off-chain voting with on-chain execution, without dependence on a single centralised entity. This hybrid model is more accessible since individual voters won’t need to pay gas. But it’s also an adequately secure means of sub-DAO treasury stewardship.

Zodiac Reality Module (I've deployed here) enables on-chain execution based on the outcome of events reported by the reality.eth oracle. Gnosis Safe and Snapshot are primary interfaces.

A 3 of 5 multisig has been established at gnars.eth, granting Nouners with veto power over the treasury. The signers appointed as safe owners are as follows:

• 0xigami.eth
• blockbird.eth
• apenoun.eth
• undeadnoun22.eth
• 0x530...3Fe4

Funding

• Source 1: Nouns DAO funded

  • Funding received to Gnosis Safe (2 Gnars and 3 Nouns signers)

    • If proposal passed, execute transactions
    • If proposal failed, mark as invalid
    • Safe owners veto power (incl. Nouners)

  • Funding sent to signed athletes (through SHRED governance)

    • One from each discipline competing in FISE World Series late May including, BMX, climbing, mountain biking, parkour, inline skating (Joe), scootering, skateboarding and wakeboarding (subject to change)

    • Approximate budget of $25k USD per athlete per year for contest and film production travel expenses, equating to $200k or majority of 69 ETH grant (approx $225k current price)

      • Travala account (ETH deposit, USD credit)
      • Bitrefill account (ETH deposit, USD credit)

• Source 2: Gnars NFT sales funded

  • Nouns merch design and manufacturing (pro team and community gear)
  • Events IRL and URL, conference sponsorships and promotional activities
  • Artist commissions, community design contests and brand development

Benefits

• First ever extreme sports DAO

  • High impact and focused sub-DAO of Nouns
  • Launch with current world champ Joe Atkinson
  • Extreme athletes from seven other disciplines

• Gnars (and Nouns) NFT utility

  • Governance rights (protocol, merch, content decisions)
  • Social benefits (action sports enthusiasts and pro team)
  • Product benefits (games, merch, early access content)

• Governance rights and activities

  • Contribute to athlete travel, styling, contest and conceptual decisions
  • Influence Noun merchandise design, artist collab and branding decisions
  • Protocol decisions for auction length, reserve price, bid increment and the on-chain encoding of new Gnartwork assets in collaboration with artists, athletes and brands

0xigami and co.

My team will continue full-time delivery of new and existing ecosystem projects, as funded by bidders setting what portion of their winning bids go to team vs DAO.

Funding provided by team for maintenance and development expenses is also in our best interest, while acquiring Gnars and Nouns and proliferating the Nouniverse.

While having a sizeable vested interest in Nouns and a strong alignment with CC0 principles, it’s also in my best interest to ensure Gnars is net-additive above all.

Noun 189

Gnars DAO community will have the ability to participate in Nouns governance as their Gnar NFTs will each represent a vote toward execution of Noun 189's submissions.

Merchandise

Community members will contribute to design decisions influencing Nounish gear and apparel for our athletes that's also available for purchase by members at a discount.

Collaborations

Artist and athlete collaborations will be earmarked for inclusion in the Gnars protocol and on merchandise. The community will decide what's gnartwork and what isn't.

Here's a still of animatic from upcoming NFTNYC billboard collab with mrSEAKs (watch it here) that will be screened over 700 times across various assets in Times Square.

Gnarketplace

Gnarket.place is our dedicated marketplace running on ZORA's auction house contracts, various features for filtering and inspecting traits will continue rolling out as normal.

Games

Grinderz will continue operating as an addictive way to climb a global leaderboard and win ETH at regular intervals.

Gnarnia, our MMO will also continue development, eventually expanding to other extreme sports outside of skateboarding (à la California Games...sneak peek here).

Nouns Athletes

We are well positioned to (with Joe's help) rally behind an expanding pro team of extreme athletes with a propensity for diversity and inclusion.

Those who explore their creativity and self-expression are favoured over those who are mostly known for winning contests.

Joe's Travala account was funded with this transaction for the sponsorship proof of concept. Facilitating sponsorships is as simple as depositing ETH to platforms such as Travala and Bitrefill that allow for USD credits.

These can be used to purchase flights, accommodation and even gear from Amazon etc, as required.

Shred the Nouns

Despite the original experiment for Nouns Athletes still being in progress, the current challenges facing Nouns DAO present an opportunity to scale sooner.

Ideally, an experiment such as this one could evolve into a sub-DAO playbook, that encourages Nounish builders to be bold.

The essence of this proposal is taking a risk on extending the permissionless collaboration model to the allocation of capital.

If you’re operating a Nouns extension, you should be applying for Nouns DAO grants funding – you’re a startup, so define your mission and pursue it.

Fund the Gnars

Reminder: an Extreme Sports DAO tasked with...

1. Managing a Nouns DAO funded and decentralised treasury
2. Sponsoring athletes with grants for travel and content creation
3. Making production, merch, event and protocol decisions

Requesting 69 ETH to establish a Gnars DAO fund, stewarding an expansion of Nouns Athletes with travel sponsorships for action sports professionals, across eight (or more) target disciplines.

FISE World Series late May, where Nouns Athlete, Joe Atkinson, will be competing for his 4th inline skating title, presents potential to sponsor (subject to change) a:

• BMX rider
• Climber
• Mountain bike rider
• Parkour free-runner
• Scooter rider
• Skateboarder
• Wakeboarder

Approximate budget of...

• Annual $25k USD per athlete (contest/filming travels)
• Equating to $200k or the majority of 69 ETH grant
• Approx $225k at current ETH price

Finally, there is also the option to sponsor fewer athletes at a higher amount, for example five athletes at $40k each (lots of demand for supporting winter sports).

Thank you everynoun for taking the time to peruse this proposal and if I have your support I look forward to receiving your vote.

Shred the Nouns 🤘

Gami ⌐◨-◨

See you at NFT.NYC where I’ll be Noun and Proud handing out Noun 189 fingerboards with Gnar griptape. Assemble it with me at the demo table and let’s hang.