Introducing the Wave Protocol

After a year of work and one pivot later, the PropLot team is proud to introduce the Wave Protocol. The wave protocol works by matching ideas with delegated voting power so the best ideas can get onchain, and latent voting power can be monetized rather than ignored.

The wave protocol works like this:

1. Latent voting power is delegated to the wave protocol. This could come from the treasury, or could come from token holders who are not as active in governance and are wanting to put their tokens to better use.

2. Builders propose ideas to the wave protocol. Ideas are put onchain.

3. Community members vote by contributing eth to the ideas they like the most. At the end of each wave, the idea with the most capital gets to use the delegated voting power of the wave to be put onchain. The capital from the winning idea is split between all of the token holders who delegated their voting power to the wave.

The wave protocol helps to solve three different problems for three different stakeholders.

1. Getting an idea on-chain is challenging (proposer value prop)

In order to get an idea to the voting stage you either need to own two Nouns, you need to know a nouner who will delegate their noun to you, or you need to put up a candidate proposal and hope that a nouner sees it. Nouns lacks a contributor highway. If you have an idea and want to get funding from nouns, it’s not clear what steps you need to take. There is no playbook. If we can improve the clarity around getting an idea on-chain, we will see more ideas and more people excited about, not exhausted from, interacting with nouns.

2. Nouns is capital constrained and need to invent new ways to fund itself aside from the daily auction (delegate value prop)

Reports show that at current spend, Nouns has anywhere from 8-14 months of runway before the treasury is completely dry. Like it or not, nouns needs it’s treasury to succeed, and we need more ways of funding the treasury that are independent of auction off a noun every day. Nouns has 560 treasury nouns sitting around doing nothing. We believe allocating a few nouns to the wave protocol could be an effective way to monetize the voting power of those nouns and fund the treasury in a new way.

3. Newcomers to nouns do not have clear contributor highways (supporter value prop)

Many people are interested in nouns, but have no track record to show for themselves. This makes it challenging to secure a delegate or even to be taken seriously in things like the nouns channel on Warpcast. Currently, those with no voting power can participate by “supporting” a proposal and leaving a VWR, but it can sometimes feel futile to do so since there is no guarantee that your efforts are seen, there is no refund for support actions, and you likely need to be consistent with your support on many proposals to be recognized. We believe the wave protocol offers a new avenue for those interested in participating in nouns — the scout model. In the traditional VC world scouts help VCs with deal flow by sourcing startups and sending them to partners at the firm. In a similar vein, “nouns scouts” could mint ideas that they think have potential and should make it to the voting stage. Since you get an NFT for supporting ideas, over time scouts build up reputation that show they have done an effective job sourcing deals. This is a new way of building social capital in the nouns ecosystem.

At the very least, we hope the Wave protocol can serve as an experiment in new governance initiatives and are proud to be building alongside Nouns which has long been a leader in pushing forward the governance space.

Helpful links

• Wave protocol docs If you are technical, check out our docs!

• Protocol repo Check out the contracts.

• Frontend repo Check out the frontend + indexer.