What’s In a Name: Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Nouns NFT

Every artist has their signature style. For Salvador Dali, it was melting clocks. For Roy Lichtenstein, it’s dots. And for Nouns, it’s pixelized glasses.

And like many other Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), the Nouns DAO founders are hoping to leave their mark on web3 by creating a decentralized finance center that's less Wall Street and more Fun Town.

So what makes Nouns so different from all the other NFT collections? Dust off your dictionaries and refresh your grammar skills as we step into the Nouns ecosystem.

Nouns is a collection of generative NFTs created daily on the Ethereum blockchain. Generative art is a form of art created by a computer code, using a combination of rules and randomness, and has become popular in the NFT space.

Nouns is an open source project, and the code created to generate them is also open source. The program is in the public domain, so anyone can build on it.

Nouns NFTs are 32x32 pixel avatars and are based on people, places, and things (which is the definition of a noun, in case you were sleeping in high school English class). Nouns gained popularity after beverage brand Bud Light was given a Nouns NFT in exchange for having Noun glasses in their 2022 Super Bowl commercial and changing their avatar picture to Noun 179.

While most NFT projects launch with a finite number (usually around 10,000), new Nouns NFTs are auctioned off every 24 hours, so the Nouns supply is constantly growing. The founders claim they will do this forever, although that seems like a long time to promise something. You can also play around with Nouns that aren’t on the blockchain at the Nouns Playground.

After a Noun NFT is sold, it's sent to the winning bidder and the auction proceeds are deposited into the Nouns DAO treasury. Then it resets, and a new Noun goes up for auction. The Nouns DAO treasury currently holds over 28K ETH.

Noun holders can vote and create proposals for the Nouns DAO treasury, like the proposal to give a Noun to Bud Light, a proposal to support Ukrainian war victims, create a Nouns coffee brand, and more. As of this writing, 140 proposals have been made, but not all have been executed.

The Nouns DAO was launched on August 17, 2021, after a Twitter prompt from one of the founders, @punk4156, asking if there were a team of devs interested in creating "an all-star DAO."

The Nouns DAO founders, or "Nounders" as they're called by the Noun community, are ten people. Some of them are well-known in the NFT space, including the founder of CrypToadz @gremplin and Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann (@dhof). The other founders include:

• @cryptoseneca
• @punk4156
• @eboyarts
• @punk4464
• solimander
• @devcarrot
• @TimpersHD
• @lastpunk9999

The Nouns founders don’t make money off the auction proceeds. Instead, every tenth Noun over the next five years is sent to a multisig wallet shared by all ten founders. They also have veto rights over the Nouns DAO to overturn malicious proposals. 

The Nouns ecosystem

One thing that makes Nouns DAO unique is the Nouns community. The mix of decentralized finance and NFTs has led to several proposals, some fun, some useful, and some for branding purposes. Similar to other NFT collections, like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, Nouns hopes to create its mark in the web3 space.

Nounder @punk4156 outlined his vision for the Nouns DAO ecosystem, calling it a "historic opportunity" to "mimic Ethereum to create a Nouns virtuous cycle."

In other words, Nounders want to attract developers who can build on the Nouns protocol, make consumer apps, and increase demand for more Nouns.

"If we can do this, the DAO will attract more capital and higher quality participants, and the virtuous cycle will be complete," wrote @punk4156.

In a way, they may have already started to accomplish this feat. Nouns DAO has inspired its own fork, called Lil Nouns or Nouns as kids, as the founders call it. These are identical to the regular Nouns DAO project, but the only difference is that they're smaller and minted every 15 minutes instead of every 24 hours. Everything else—the website, noun traits, and DAO structure, are the same.

And the Nouns Run game featuring Noun 12 recently launched on iOS and Android, where players can play as Noun 12 running through a desert landscape.

The Noun founders think Nouns NFTs will stay around for a long time, but NFTs are a relatively new investing space, so we can’t know how they will perform in the long run. That said, here are some numbers around the Nouns NFTs:

While the current floor price of Nouns is lower than it was on July 4, 2022, when it hit 200 ETH, it’s still relatively high. Nouns listed on OpenSea can sell for as much as 222 ETH. And while they might not have as many followers as the most successful NFT collection to date, CryptoPunks, individual Nouns do sell for more than CryptoPunks at the moment.

There’s potential for the Nouns DAO to expand as well, as we’ve seen with Lil Nouns. The Nouns Foundation intends to be around for as long as computers and electricity still exist (which could be long after humans are extinct if we're going by sci-fi). So we could still see our fair share of pixelized glasses in both the real and metaverse worlds.

If you've got a bag of Ethereum to spare, you can try buying a Noun on the auction every day at www.nouns.wtf. You can also buy Nouns from NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible.

Since Nouns cost so much to buy individually, you can also buy fractionalized NFT shares from investing platforms like Rally and Fractional. For example, Rally has acquired Noun 160, initially a founders Noun, and is currently offering the Noun on its platform for $15 a share.

Nouns are equally rare, and at the moment, there are five Noun traits:

So far, there have been several different Nouns, such as clowns, cats, crabs, sharks, unicorns, balloons, and more. All Nouns come with signature glasses, a cool or warm gray background, and an accessory. You can check out the playground to see what types of Nouns can be generated.

For NFT collectors, Nouns could be a great NFT to expand a collection. And with Nouns DAO promising to be around for many years, we will likely see a few more Noun projects in the works. If you like the world of NFTs and think they'll grow in value over the long term, then the Nouns project is worth looking into.