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By Nouns Builder Protocol
We will build a Soroban‑native version of the core Nouns Builder experience on Stellar. The Stellar-native application will consist of a DAO launchpad that issues NFT‑style governance tokens drawing from the SEP-50 standard, run recurring auctions in a classic asset denomination of a DAO’s choice via the Stellar Asset Contract (implementation of SEP-0041 is out of scope for this grant but will be actively evaluated), holds funds in an on‑chain treasury, and governs actions via a token‑weighted governor. We will modularise the smart contract interface between token contracts and treasury contracts to allow future extensions and integrations with other governance models on Stellar, for example, the Neural Quorum Governance (NQG). All features of Nouns Builder on Stellar will be available through a web application that abstracts contract complexity. The architecture follows the Nouns Builder design that is composed of a manager contract that tracks current module implementations and a factory/registry that deploys DAOs as compositions of token, auction, treasury and governor modules, with DAO‑level governance controlling future upgrades.
On top of this core, we will:
Offer an improved “Create DAO” flow for adding artwork, metadata, auction parameters, founder allocation, governance settings
Provide frontend application that includes a DAO directory, DAO page, auction view, proposal list, vote flow, and treasury summary
Add one non‑auction launch mode (capped membership mint) in the testnet phase so communities can choose between Nounish auctions and membership‑style DAOs
Define and implement a modular governance adapter interface, including Soroban trait definitions, configuration schemas, and a working integration of the existing NQG testnet contract, i.e. through an adapter contract, so that DAOs launched via Builder can swap in custom governance mechanisms such as NQG without redeploying core contracts. This is a Stellar-native implementation decision which significantly extends our EVM architecture and positions Nouns Builder as an integration target for NQG once SDF's implementation moves from testnet into production.
We intend to explore use cases that allow users to benefit from a full-service DAO set up flow, which may include the registration of legal wrappers via MIDAO and the management of real-world assets
As one of our team members has direct insight into the use cases deployed in the Marshall Islands and has contact to the MIDAO team, the legal wrapper export is intended as a first unilateral step towards a bilateral partnership that would enable Stellar to become a premier option for new DAOs that seek a legal structure.
In line with the rollout of mature large-scale RWAs issued by the Marshallese government, this partnership direction promises to underpin our DAO framework with real-world projects being implemented beyond established Web3 markets in Europe and North America.
This positions Nouns Builder on Stellar as a home for futureproof governance, user-friendly SocialFi, and the management of real-world money rails.
$140.5K
Nouns Builder is a mature, audited DAO protocol that extends the model pioneered by Nouns DAO: recurring NFT auctions, shared on-chain treasuries, transparent governance, and community-directed funding. Originally built by Zora and incubated by Nouns DAO, the protocol has grown from a no-code way to launch customizable Nouns-style DAOs into a broader platform for on-chain community formation, treasury creation, governance, and social and financial coordination.
The protocol has been live across Ethereum and multiple L2s for several years, with more than 3,000 DAOs deployed, over 600 weekly active users, and more than 150 ETH held across Builder-launched on-chain treasuries. Communities such as Yellow Collective, Gnars, Purple, and SkateHive use Builder to run auctions, grow treasuries, vote on proposals, and fund ongoing community work. Across tracked Builder activity, the protocol has supported more than 1,500 unique voters, more than 460 unique proposal creators, and more than 3,200 unique auction winners. Statistics are available on a Dune dashboard and our About Page.
Builder DAO’s work has been validated by highly respected organizations in the industry, including successful funding through Nouns DAO governance, recognition from Optimism through RetroPGF Rounds 2 and 3, and grant support from Base for open-source DAO infrastructure. The Nounish model has also been discussed by Bankless, Stanford Blockchain Review, Gitcoin, Delphi Digital, Zora, Polygon, Farcaster, and academic researchers as a reference model for SocialFi, public-goods funding, and community-owned governance. This proposal is therefore not introducing an untested DAO concept, but adapting a proven open-source protocol and live governance model to Stellar.
Deliver a Soroban‑native MVP of Nouns Builder on Stellar testnet that proves the core Nounish DAO user journey. Users deploy a DAO that issues auction‑minted governance tokens, controls an on‑chain treasury, allows token‑weighted voting, and provides governance‑controlled modules for contract upgrades.
Soroban contracts:
Manager contract for module version registry and upgrade events
DaoFactory and DaoRegistry with a token contract address (DAO ID), using deterministic deployment
SEP‑0050‑aligned Token with historical vote checkpoints and deterministic art seeds, informed by our experience with ERC‑721 on Nouns Builder and engaging in standards setting, with our explicit commitment to track SEP‑50 standardisation work and contribute to discussions on dynamic traits, soulbound mode, and related extensions
AuctionModule with XLM (via Stellar Asset Contract) bids, push‑refund plus pull‑fallback handling, paused‑by‑default auctions, and a one‑shot launch‑admin pattern
Treasury with typed asset transfers and basic execution delay options
Governor using token‑weighted voting and snapshot‑based vote power, including module‑upgrade proposals
MetadataRegistry with renderer base URL configuration
App and indexing:
“Create DAO” flow for uploading artwork, setting metadata, and configuring auction and governance parameters, as well as setting a founder allocation
DAO page with current auction, proposals, treasury summary, and basic activity
Testnet DAO directory
Indexing and data access through the Stellar‑native Mercury indexer, which is designed specifically for Soroban data, used as the preferred indexing layer for DAO discovery, member lists, auction history, proposals, and votes. For this grant we will rely on Mercury to keep the stack aligned with the core Stellar tooling and avoid additional non‑production‑ready components and forking effort.
Authoritative state reads and execution flows, such as contract invocation, governance actions, treasury operations, will continue to use Stellar RPC directly, whereas the indexer enhances the UX through high availability of event data for, e.g. DAO discovery, member lists, auction history, proposals, and votes.
A user can create a Nounish auction DAO on Soroban testnet via the UI and see it listed in the directory
The DAO can mint a founder allocation, enable the initially paused auction via governance or the one‑shot launch admin, settle auctions to the treasury, create proposals, vote, and execute at least one typed treasury transfer
A governance proposal can upgrade at least one module to a newer manager‑published WASM hash, with events visible via the indexer
Persistent records of ownership, checkpoints, auctions, proposals, treasury actions have documented storage‑TTL and maintenance paths that have been tested on testnet.
This tranche is estimated at USD 30,000 equivalent in XLM at disbursement, funding the development of the Soroban MVP. This includes the core DAO contract architecture, auction-based launch path, governance-controlled module upgrades, minimal frontend surfaces, and indexer integration needed to prove that a Nouns-style DAO can be created and operated on Stellar testnet.
Soroban architecture, threat model, storage, and caching - $5,500
Manager, DAO Factory, DAO Registry, and DAO configuration - $9,000
SEP-0050-aligned Noun Token contract and deterministic metadata - $8,000
App MVP and indexer integration for create and view DAOs - $7,500
Documentation - $1,000
Total - $30,000
We will review the MVP smart contract code and harden it before adding a non‑auction launch mode, and finalise and test the modularised governance wrapper. We will polish the user experience of the frontend.
Protocol extensions
Hardening and bug‑fixing of Tranche‑1 contracts, including optional vote delegation if not completed earlier
Addition of on‑auction launch mode, where membership mints are capped and only a fixed number of tokens can be minted without auctions, after which governance and treasury operate as usual
Governance adapter interface and configuration schema that cleanly separates the Governor from future governance modules, including NQG
App and ecosystem
App and indexer updates to support membership launch mode, governance configuration, and module‑upgrade prompts
Technical set up and launch of two testnet pilot DAOs from the Stellar ecosystem using different launch modes (auction and membership) to exercise the platform end‑to‑end
NQG compatibility
Written compatibility specification and an adapter contract for the available SDF NQG testnet contract that demonstrates how vote‑power attribution and quorum logic would plug into Builder‑launched DAOs
Configuration flows in the UI to show where an advanced governor like NQG would be configured once available; any live integration is explicitly best‑effort and contingent on upstream readiness.
It is worth noting that the official SDF NQG implementation is currently only deployed on testnet and has not yet reached mainnet production; this deliverable therefore focuses on the adapter spec and configuration available on testnet at the time of writing.
We intend to reach compatibility to plug in the moment NQG matures, rather than blocking on infrastructure that is outside our control.
Legal Wrapper Wizard (export‑only)
UI flow that collects the core DAO metadata (purpose, governance links, token addresses, treasury configuration) and exports a structured bundle suitable for forwarding to a DAO registrar for due diligence review
Documentation clarifying that the export assists legal set‑up but does not replace independent legal advice
DAO creators can choose between auction launch and capped membership launch at creation, and both paths function on testnet
Governance adapter interface is documented and exercised with at least one mock governor; DAO‑level configuration for advanced governors is visible in the UI
Experimental demonstration of NQG compatibility via the SDF spec, mock adapter and configuration flow
DAO registrar exports a bundle that is confirmed by MIDAO as useful for their intake process, even if full incorporation is handled outside the grant
Two pilot DAOs from the Stellar ecosystem operate on testnet and complete basic governance, including at least one module upgrade
This tranche is estimated at USD 45,000 equivalent in XLM towards the development of a full testnet deployment of the application and expansion to the full feature set.
Governance adapter interface and configuration schema - $8,500
Testnet end-to-end testing and documentation - $6,500
Technical launch and set up for two Stellar testnet pilot DAOs - $5,500
App and indexer for launch modes, governance configuration, contract manager - $8,000
Technical Exploration Components
NQG compatibility specification, adapter contract, and best-effort integration path - $9,000
Legal wrapper export bundle - $7,500
Total - $45,000
An external audit of the smart contracts is planned in accordance with the processes and its limitations set out by the SCF’s audit bank and the findings are remediated as issues. The contract suite and app are deployed to Stellar mainnet, and launch a small cohort of pilot DAOs using the platform.
Security and deployment
Preparation of an audit/security‑review package (threat model, invariants, test suite) for the core contracts
Remediation of critical/high findings and documented acceptance of any residual risks, with compensating controls where needed
Mainnet deployment scripts, rehearsed dry‑runs, and final contract deployments, with public addresses and documentation
App and operations
Production‑ready app/indexer integration, monitoring and alerts, including documented runbooks for storage‑TTL maintenance, archive‑restore and emergency procedures
Hosting, RPC/indexer configuration
Public launch documentation and case studies positioning Nouns Builder on Stellar as the default path for launching DAOs and SocialFi that want credible governance and an upgrade path towards legal wrappers and real‑world assets
Contracts are deployed and verified on Stellar mainnet; critical/high issues from the audit are resolved or formally accepted with documented mitigations
The production UI supports DAO creation, launch, voting, treasury execution and module upgrades against Manager‑published WASM hashes
At least 2-3 DAOs are active on mainnet using Builder, showing different combinations of auction vs membership models and governance configuration
Estimated at USD 50,500 equivalent in XLM. This tranche funds deployment on mainnet and launch.
Internal security review and preparation for external audit - $9,500
Remediation of critical or high-priority findings - $8,000
Mainnet deployment scripts, contract deployments - $11,500
Production app and indexer - $13,000
Testing and public documentation - $5,500
Finalized documentation - $3,000
Total - $50,500
We are the core team stewarding Nouns Builder, with direct experience maintaining open-source DAO infrastructure used by communities across Ethereum, Base, and Optimism. Our work combines protocol engineering, product development, DAO operations, governance design, smart-contract security, digital identity, and community growth. We have shipped in public, supported real users and treasuries, and delivered work funded by Nouns DAO, Zora, Optimism, Base, and other ecosystem partners.
Alumni and current contributors have gone on to leadership roles at MoonPay, to found media brands like the GM Farcaster podcast, and to lead engineering at protocols such as Hats Protocol. Our core contributors today include one of the administrators of the Nouns DAO DUNA, the co‑founder and operations lead of the agentic trading platform DX Terminal, a founding member and tech lead at Raid Guild, and a product lead affiliated with the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at Cambridge Judge Business School.
On a day‑to‑day basis, the protocol is maintained by a senior two‑person engineering team and a product and operations pod with deep experience in DAO governance, smart‑contract security, and digital identity, supported by community engineers who are founding members of Gnars, a global boardsports media and creator collective across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
Satori is a core contributor and community lead for Nouns Builder, supporting the protocol’s community, governance, and communications. He works closely with contributors and users to turn product updates, governance activity, and community feedback into clear next steps. Within Builder DAO, his work includes community and contributor onboarding, helping users understand Nouns Builder tooling, supporting governance and protocol discussions, and keeping feedback moving between the communities using the platform and the product team.
He also contributes across the broader Nouns ecosystem, including serving as one of the compliance administrators who led Nouns DAO’s transition to become the first Wyoming DUNA. In that role, he helped support a first-of-its-kind governance transition that gave Nouns DAO a clearer legal foundation while maintaining its decentralized structure. Through his work with Builder DAO, Gnars DAO, The Noun Square, and other decentralized communities, Satori has developed hands-on experience in DAO operations, community onboarding, proposal writing, and contributor coordination.
Before working full-time in Web3, Satori worked as a professional civil engineer, which shaped his approach to project management, documentation, communication, and technical problem solving. His role on the team focuses on making governance, product, and legal topics easier for communities to understand while helping ensure user feedback is reflected in the work around Nouns Builder.
benedictvs is a Web3 product leader, digital identity expert, and published researcher driving the product strategy of Nouns Builder. A RaidGuild member and Metagov DAOStar Research Fellow, he brings hands-on protocol work, policy influence, and academic rigour to everything he builds.
Since 2020, Ben has been at the forefront of digital identity standards and large-scale pilots, contributing to one of the first DIDComm v.2 implementations, leading work packages of Germany's inaugural identity wallet pilot, and co-authoring W3C DID Method specifications. He advises EU governments on privacy-enhancing technology, and consults on digital asset initiatives in Dominica and the Marshall Islands.
As an entrepreneur, he founded two Web3 consultancies, procured and spearheaded two EU-funded consortia on digital identity and decentralised infrastructure. This work produced peer-reviewed publications in ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies and IEEEXplore, and yielded the Grant Maturity Index (GMI), a framework used to evaluate grant programme effectiveness across Web3.
Ben reads for a PhD at the University of Malta, and is affiliated with the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at Cambridge Judge Business School, researching digital public infrastructure governance in small jurisdictions that lead him to conduct field research, among others, in the Marshall Islands and Dominica.
Dhanwanthari Ramakrishnan, a.k.a. dan13ram, is a Web3 protocol architect, lead developer, and founder of Smart Invoice, focused on decentralised infrastructure, interoperability, and applied DAO tooling. A RaidGuild member since 2020 and technical lead for this Builder DAO grant team, he brings 8 years of software engineering experience across smart contracts, backend systems, off-chain infrastructure, and open-source Web3 applications.
His work spans bridges, DAO tooling, DeFi protocols, NFT systems, and production application development. He has contributed to cross-chain infrastructure including the xDai/Gnosis ERC-20 bridge and the Wrapped POKT bridge, where he helped build backend systems and validator infrastructure for securely verifying, signing, and coordinating transactions across networks, facilitating over $40M in POKT transfers. This experience shaped the project’s escrow, settlement, authorization, and security features. Dan approaches the Stellar/Soroban implementation from first principles, as a ground-up architecture, rather than an EVM port.
He will lead technical architecture and implementation around SEP-0050, bringing experience with standards-driven EVM development across ERC-20, ERC-721, and governance/checkpoint-based voting patterns. As early ramp-up, he has already built and tested Soroban contracts on testnet, including work with all three Soroban storage types and TTL management, storage lifecycle behavior the technical plan identifies as a core implementation concern.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan13ram
GitHub: https://github.com/dan13ram
Lilac.eth got her start in Web3 at Friends with Benefits in 2021 as Operations Lead, where she oversaw people operations, finance, legal, compliance, and treasury management. She brings decades of prior experience as a music industry executive, having worked across major and independent labels. Most notably, she served as General Manager for three independent labels, including the in-house label at Paradigm Talent Agency. She is currently Operations Lead for Nouns Builder and COO of DX Research Group, an experimental lab building financial systems at the intersection of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
Vlad is a software engineer and product-minded builder focused on Web3 infrastructure, DAO tooling, social protocols, agentic systems, and open-source community software. His experience spans frontend engineering, Farcaster client development, on-chain onboarding flows, governance interfaces, automation systems, and community-owned media infrastructure.
He has contributed to projects, such as in the Nounish, Gnars, SkateHive, ShapeShift, and KeepKey ecosystems, including work around documentation, user flows, community tooling, wallet education, and Web3 user onboarding. He is the creator and maintainer of SkateHive.app, an open-source social and media platform for skateboarding communities, and has contributed to Gnars DAO through product, engineering, documentation, onboarding, and ecosystem coordination.
Vlad also has hands-on experience designing and operating agentic systems, including multi-agent workflows, automation interfaces, and AI-assisted community tooling. He has worked on Farcaster-based development and customizable social clients, and was part of a Coinbase hackathon-winning project, bringing practical experience from Web3 product environments.
GitHub: https://github.com/sktbrd
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xvlad/
Website: https://skatehive.app
r4to is a software engineer working across Web3 infrastructure, DAO tooling, social protocols, and on-chain governance, with a strong focus on full-stack product development. His experience spans frontend and backend engineering, on-chain governance interfaces, Web3 onboarding flows, agentic and AI-assisted tooling, and community-owned software. He has contributed to projects across the Gnars, SkateHive, NounsSpace, KeepKey, Builder DAO, and Cosmos Hub Brasil ecosystems.
r4to’s main focus is Gnars, a global boardsports media and creator DAO where he operates and maintains the Builder Protocol contracts day‑to‑day; running auctions, managing the treasury, and executing governance. Gnars is where he built the bulk of his web3 and Ethereum knowledge, giving him hands-on, day-to-day familiarity with the Nouns Builder architecture this grant proposes to bring to Soroban. Alongside Gnars, he experiments across the Web3 stack, including Solidity auction contracts, a crypto-analysis bot wired into the Gnars ecosystem, agentic developer tooling, and pixel-art generation pipelines.
He was part of a Coinbase hackathon-winning project, and built HTTPay through Cosmos Hub Brasil, a decentralized API marketplace where AI agents discover and pay for APIs autonomously that is built on the Neutron blockchain with CosmWasm smart contracts using a registry-and-escrow design (DoraHacks BUIDL). This escrow and autonomous-settlement work is directly relevant to the project's payment and authorization requirements.
GitHub: https://github.com/r4topunk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gustavokuhl/
While our Rust and Soroban experience appears limited at first glance, both Dan and Ben have prior exposure to Rust-based stacks and have already started preparing the Nouns Builder application for transposing it into a Soroban implementation.
Dan has completed Rust coursework and engaged directly with Soroban, including studying OpenZeppelin’s Soroban contracts and the NQG testnet code, and deploying prototype contracts to Soroban testnet that exercise the storage types and TTL lifecycle behaviour identified as critical in our technical plan. Ben has worked with Rust-based blockchain environments in the context of his EU identity and infrastructure projects, e.g. with a hackathon project on the SUI, contributing to the architecture design and product implementation stack including the SUIBOND (https://github.com/SUIBOND) hackathon implementation on Sui, and brings systems and product experience from EU identity and infrastructure projects.
The team’s prior work on EVM‑based DAO tooling provides familiarity with smart‑contract security that is largely language‑agnostic, including fundamental threat models, access control, upgrade safety, bounded execution surfaces, and state invariants which drive the Soroban design as much as they do our existing protocols. We showcase this in our technical plan and risk register, which cover authorisation model errors, manager compromise, storage TTL maintenance, resource exhaustion, upgrade migration, SEP‑0050 evolution, and indexer lag, each with concrete mitigations such as authorisation‑matrix tests, multisig and timelocks, permissionless maintenance paths, rollback procedures, and reconciliation against direct Soroban RPC state.
Process‑wise, Tranche 1 and 2 are deliberately constrained to testnet, allowing us to harden the Soroban contracts before any mainnet exposure, while the modular architecture lets us isolate and upgrade individual modules. Through our extensive network, we have already taken concrete steps to ensure that we will have access to a Rust specialist as technical advisor throughout the implementation period and post launch. Taken together, we are confident that this should address the known risks to successfully completing the Soroban‑native Nouns Builder implementation.
Dan OneTree
Satori
Ben Biedermann
No other submissions.