DAO governance is DOOMED! NPC is the solution.
Find out more at npc.community
If their short existence has proven us anything it’s that DAOs current organizational structure is inefficient; little voting participation from members, banal proposals on how to use treasury funds and all too often, the rise of a “benevolent” dictator ultimately taking over (looking at you Wonderland).
You know it’s not going as planned when Nouns DAO (the code of which has been forked in part for NPC), is being threatened to be taken over by bad actors attempting to drain the treasury by exploiting the governance function. The following article explains the takeover in great detail but the TLDR; if another DAO, with a large treasury, were to buy up more than 50% of the Nouns in existence they could vote to dissolve the treasury and redistribute all the funds to themselves. Big arb opp. NPC solves all these issues by simply foregoing the governance “feature”.
Don’t get us wrong, we admire all the aforementioned projects for one reason or another but we simply found a gigantic flaw in them when it comes to the treasury and are simply trying to pave a new way forward for NFTs by encouraging all to fork us.
We can’t predict what the future holds for DAOs but what we can predict is that a redistribution of funds to investors, regardless of when they joined a project, is ultimately the most equitable way forward.
Without the art and the owners redistribution clause, the project is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, rewarding the first in, and leaving the late comers holding the bag.
Conversely, the project without the Ponzinomics of the protocol, would be an ephemeral badland, consisting of screencapped geists of randomized GAN functions and XML shaders.
NPC works best when we combine these features. The game theory and the scarcity of not only the NFTs themselves, but also the limited time (epoch) and potential of large returns creates the culture, which benefits the treasury as a whole, and in-turn the NPC owners, on an individual level.
NPC’s mechanics feed the treasury back into the community via redistribution. It is this important mechanism that takes NPC fromjaded Ponzi scheme experiment, to a brilliant asset generation tool that will impact and criticize the legitimacy of crypto-governance forever.
NPC solves this by being a proto-anarchistic, anti-DAO protocol for providing incentivized liquidity for multiphasic, cross-media NFT projects.
How it works:
Every 24h a new NPC is trustlessly put up for auction. The floor price for each NPC is set by the average of the previous 10 NPC auctions + 3.33%. This facilitates a gradual increase in price, rewarding early investors but also not leaving late adopters holding bags. If an auction has no bids, that NPC will be burned and the price of the auction will be registered at floor price. This ensures that the minimum bidding amount is always correlated with what buyers are willing to pay.
100% of the NPC auction proceeds are trustlessly sent to the NPC treasury with the settlement of one auction kicking off the next. At the end of the epoch, in this case until 333 NPCs are minted/burned, which translates to 266 days, the entire treasury is re-distributed to all NPC NFT holders at a ratio of 1:Total NPCs minted.
The ‘Founders’ receive their rewards in the form of 20% of the NPC NFTs total supply. Each 5th day, including day 0, an NPC NFT is automatically sent to a multisig wallet, receiving the same compensation ratio as all other NPCs from the treasury (1:Total NPCs minted). The NPC public auctions therefore still happen daily, however the total time of the epoch is decreased by 1 day every 5 days (from day 0) resulting in a total of 266 days for bidding.
Beyond the bidding:
As well as the capital redistribution at the end of the epoch, each NPC will hold its intrinsic store of value as an artwork, tradable on any secondary market place.
Arbitrage:
NPCs can also be traded during the ongoing epoch. For those who bought below the current average price, they can perform arbitrage by selling their NPC at a profit to a speculator on the secondary market. No one can predict if the price of NPC will continue to rise over the remainder of the epoch so it is a speculative risk for the buyer but also a missed opportunity for the seller if the treasury grows larger and the treasury redistribution will be greater than the secondary market sale price during epoch.
Liquidity:
NFTs are illiquid by nature. You need a seller and a buyer that simultaneously agree to exchange the NFT for ETH. By listing their NPC at a lower listing price than the current treasury average redistribution during the epoch, the seller is more likely to attract speculative buyers, making the NPC as close to being liquid as an NFT can be.
Liquidity bootstrapping:
Our code is meant to be forked by artists to bootstrap liquidity for their own NFT projects. Think of it as crowdfunding the NFT artist’s body of work.While NPC’s ‘Founders’ take rate is 20%, any NFT artist out there can set that figure to be whatever they choose.The code can even be altered to include royalties on secondary sales only, meaning 100% of the treasury goes back to the community and the artist only makes money when their NFTs are sold any time after the initial mint.Same applies for the duration of the epochs; while we chose to end on a total of 333 NPCs minted/burned, your epoch could be any number that suits your NFT series.
NPC artwork:
The artwork used for the initial NPC experiment is created by an Automated Art Maker (AAM) AI. The AI uses the open source Flickr-Faces-HQ (FFHQ) which consists of 70,000 high-quality PNG images of human faces. This dataset has been trained against a custom closed WEBGL script and licensed to NPC by a human Artist who has chosen to remain anonymous.
The artist also chose the metadata which due to the nature of the images has to be done manually. Resembling a Rorschach test the artists interpretation is very subjective and might differ from the buyers.
The rarity of the pieces will be determined by the NPC metadata consisting of background color, face shape, eye visibility and face color with certain trait combinations being more rare than others (see Opensea for Metadata statistics).
By now you would have realized that NPC is more than just another NFT project; we have built a platform that allows anyone who has created an NFT series to crowdfund their own project. All they need to do is build a front end and modify the take rate and duration of epoch in the code. Instead of asking their friends and family to take yet another gamble on one of their many side projects, NPC’s code ensures every investor, early or late, ends with some, or even more of their initial ETH investment, while also maintaining ownership of the NFT and it’s underlying value.If this is not the best idea you’ve heard in a while, you clearly don’t follow the same NFT Twitter accounts we do.Happy bidding and let the game{(s)theory} begin.
-NPC Anons