Nouns DAO is the most successful NFT collection to date when it comes to building a sustainable, self-funded treasury. Inspired by their success, we have built a protocol - in parallel to Zora's Nouns Builder platform - for any existing NFT collection to "Nounsify" themselves in order to create a similar path of perpetual funding as Nouns. This is done by minting one new NFT per day - same as Nouns - but with 3 new added features:

1) The DAO treasury can be co-governed by the new NFTs plus an existing collection
2) The traits of the new NFTs can be made to match to a rarity distribution
3) No duplicates NFTs can ever be created

To demonstrate the power of this protocol, we used these three features to create a brand new collection we're calling "DAO Punks."

DAO Punks use the same traits and rarity structure as CryptoPunks, but have been programed to never generate a duplicate NFT as an existing CryptoPunk. One new DAO Punk is auctioned per day in the style of Nouns DAO, and 100% of the auction proceeds go to a treasury which is co-governed by the owners of DAO Punks and CryptoPunks alike. One NFT from either collection = one vote. The higher in value these DAO Punks are priced at, the faster the treasury grows.

Now all CryptoPunk holders have access to a perpetually growing treasury of ETH to fund all their community initiatives. This solves a major problem for CryptoPunks. Namely, that they are the largest NFT by market cap, but they are completely cash poor. There is no open community treasury of funds to pay for community grants, meetups, events, startups, or other initiatives. A retro-fitted Nouns model fixes all of this.

We are launching this project the Saturday of ETHChicago and it is phase 1 of 2 for the project. The second phase of the project will be to generalize the protocol in partnership with Zora so any NFT collection can "Nounsify" themselves, the same as we have done with DAO Punks.

Please note: this project is not part of Yuga Labs, nor is it an official CryptoPunks project. We have, however, spoken at length with Yuga Labs Chief Legal Officer, Cameron Kates, and their former head of CryptoPunks, Noah Davis, to ensure the project is compliant and complimentary with their terms of service.