VDP-64 Vita NFT project

Summary

  • Create Nouns-style NFT project to fundraise donations for funding longevity research via VitaDAO
  • Our goal is to fund longevity research, this project might help fundraise additional donations towards this goal

Team:

Vincent, Schmackofant, Alex Dobrin, open to others applying to help support

Implementation

Specification

  • Fork https://nouns.wtf, use https://nouns.build/ or similar mechanism
  • Get custom UI developed at sub-domain like nft.vitadao.com
  • Generate artworks via Dall-e2 or similar ai tool to save cost and have more resources for funding longevity → https://twitter.com/vita_dao/status/1589981839749705731
  • Style will be yellow, longevity-themed, fun, and different styles, from pixel to other more classical styles.
  • use all proceeds purely to fund research (approx. 70% for this, and 30% towards micro grant fellowship, prize etc). Store all proceeds in separate multisig nft.vitadao.eth.
  • Once a year check total revenue generated (incl from trading fees), and give the team that initiated the project 20% of these proceeds in 4yr vested $vita as a reward split by the effort they put in

First explorations

Success Metrics

  • Base expectation would be fundraising decently more than it cost
  • Success would be creating a fun and engaging project that also fundraised decent amount of donations for our cause of funding longevity research

Timeline

  • Ideally finalize design, development and generation of artworks til EOY, and launch January 1st 2023

Budget:

  • up to 10k VITA total (for contributions of designers, developers etc.) as direct incentives
  • up to $3k USDC for the design and development
  • Agree
  • Agree with revisions (please comment)
  • Disagree

0 voters

6 Likes

Love this @vincent. Another great community building initiative! :yellow_heart:

4 Likes

Is there a US 501(c)(3) entity that would make these donations tax-deductible?

Advancement of science is a legit reason for a non-profit. Just need by-laws and a few other forms that explain planned activities, who does the activity, where, %time allocated to the activity, how funded, % total funds allocated, and how the activity furthers the exempt purpose.

Would have to provide a receipt to the purchaser, but that can be coded into the smart contract.

I don’t see any violations, but if the SEC is foolish enough to invent some in order to go after a non-profit promoting the social good of longevity research, that would strengthen crypto’s chances in the court of public opinion and Congress.

By the time the non-profit status is acquired, it might even be a good time to launch an NFT project. I think a launch in the next few months will flop because the FTX debacle will take some time to unwind.

I’m not clear on who the target audience for the raise would be, or what the plan for the hype train would be.

2 Likes

Great fundraising initiative! I would love to contribute! Are the NFTs going to be just art? Perhaps we could combine them with some community perks – for instance, guest access to select Discord channels. Or a guild role.

1 Like

Would love to contribute to the Nouns idea. A good reference for this fork would be https://publicnouns.wtf/

1 Like

Yeah great idea, will reach out to https://endaoment.org/, they might have ideas about how to do it best.

Agree that this year seems too early also in terms of executing it nicely. Intersecting with this project, we have a fairly meme-worthy nft project collaboration (" :dog2: :dna:") upcoming that could help kickstart the awareness for this one as well. Given it would only auction 1 per day its kind of continuous and thus wouldnt try too hard to time the sentiment or markets.

Yes this was one idea, exploring the potentials perks of holding a VitaDAO NFT:

  • invite to special events?
  • like https://nouns.wtf/ it could have some governance / temp check just for the holders
  • perks to health tech and other partners?
  • access to discord chat just for holders

other ideas

  • highlighting a leaderboard of the top nft buyers with their ens/0x (gamifying similar to mirror.xyz)
  • showcasing the specific research projects that the nft proceeds are flowing towards
2 Likes

Fundraising via NFT is the best idea for a DAO, meanwhile, the event will absorb extra eyes on VitaDAO.
Would like to understand more about the NFT project such as:
1)How many NFTs will be issued? Usually, a PFP(pay for performance, e. #BAYC #cryptopunk) NFT project will publish 3k-5k NFTs, although some will publish 10k, but they can’t sell all in a short time.
2)To fundraise, NFT must not be the freemint style, so the question is what the initiative price is. Is there a private sale stage or just only public sale stage?
3)Does the NFT have a utility feature?And what’s the benefit to the NFT holders.

1 Like
  1. Would be noun-style daily auction of one nft per day… we’d start out with 1000+ generated nft designs as shown above
  2. auction, fair discovery of price, and we try to explore that if I say bid 0,1eth that i could make the bid recurring until i win one
  3. we are exploring perks, goal would be to start with a few like nft-gated chat, invites to events and increase them over time, giving vitadao nft holders some special benefits :slight_smile:
4 Likes

Hey, Vita frens. Just went through the Vita NFT project, here are some questions about the proposal.

  1. Why a Nouns mechanism for the NFT issurance?

  2. Who can decide on the use of raised fund by NFT project, NFT holders or Vita token holders?

  3. Will the NFTs auctioned in ETH or stablecoins? If ETH, will they be sold for stablecoins considering the market is still in a down way?

2 Likes

Excellent questions

  1. Imo the most effective mechanism to fundraise over a long-time without throwing too many on the market in a day, although there is probably a balance in that we want to “capture interest to buy one” by people having the ability to make a recurring bid of say 0.1 eth until they get one
  2. imo it should be main vita token holders, we could explore a gov proposal to airdrop small amount of vita to nft holders or to make the nft used in governance… would prob need a separate proposal → initial idea is to pick a research project via vitadao governance that the nft project will flow towards, ofc we can also discuss that the nft holders govern the research they end up funding although i’d prefer if its “all vitadao” vs splitting it unnecessarily through this
  3. would be auctioned in eth, and imo as you said should be flowing quiet directly into research and thus be converted to usdc.
1 Like

Very excited about this project :muscle:

My suggestion would be to use the AI tools like DALL-E and StableDiffusion for the ideation phase, rather than for the end product. The end product would then be a generated PFP, similar to Nouns.

Why do I think that makes sense?

  • AI generated NFTs are probably getting pumped out right now in inflationary numbers, so I think that makes it hard for us to stand out.
  • The quality and look of AI generated images is not very consistent. Makes it hard to create a collection that looks like it’s made “from the same mold”.
  • When we create a Nouns-like project it might be easier to also get some love from the Nouns ecosystem
  • Generating Nouns-like PFPs with 5 different traits makes it much easier to generate unique PFPs for years to come
  • It’s still a very frugal way to do it and maximizes the money that goes directly into research funding

How would that look like?

  • We use AI tools to come up with cool traits and ideas (rats & dogs in the lab, safety glasses, DNA helix, flasks, lab coats, etc.)
  • We give those ideas and sketches to a few artists and ask them to create some samples in the Nouns style and use the Nouns layout for them (The Nouns templates are open source)
  • We go with the artist that does it best and let them create the rest of the trait graphics
  • We could even reuse and adapt some of the existing Nouns traits since they are public domain

Let’s say we use 5 layers like Nouns and produce the following different traits: 4 backgrounds, 10 heads, 10 bodies, 5 accessories, 5 (safety/lab)glasses.

This allows us to create 10.000 unique PFPs so we can auction one off every day for more than 27 years.

We could also reduce this to 4 backgrounds, 5 heads, 5 bodies, 5 accessories, 5 (safety/lab)glasses. This would still yield 2.500 different combinations and selling one per day for almost 7 years.

@vincent @alexdobrin Wdyt?

3 Likes

love the idea, although my intuition would be to start the ideation phase public, and simple with the current selection of amazing and fun ones we got, that are visually also a bit more diverse than nouns with same perspective etc., but to explore this definitely as well… would be happy to lead the first phase exploration and have someone led the proper nouns style one.

to do pure nouns might push our timeline a bit further out to get it started… wouldnt want to put too much time into this if we dont know if it might land with the community.

most crucial in any case will probably be the awareness and community building around this,

Yap, sounds great! Look forward to Vita NFTs :yellow_heart:

1 Like

I feel like the wider web3 community let alone DeSci and VitaDAO would be more receptive to a nouns version tbh.

How much longer? I think it’d be worth the sacrifice.

1 Like

I like the overall drive to innovate and adopt the best fund raising mechanisms. What are your thoughts on
Instead of offering pfps to folks, the NFT in question could be a potential grant application and the NFT itself could be partially owned between VITADAO and the NFT minter. The minter co-owns with IP(if generated) with VITADAO

This is basically the case with core IP-NFTs that VitaDAO funds, holds and develops: vitadao.eth

Update from the design front and team

Excited to get it started with the dev team


Update from the design team and front:

Artistically we are exploring the path of adopting the https://nouns.wtf style and forking it to build our own Vita- and longevity-themed images etc.

2 Likes

Hey there! This is my first comment on the forum :slight_smile:

I have to say that I love what is being created. Not only because of the fantastic idea of funding longevity research projects through donations from a DAO with a structure inspired by Nouns. But also because of the social club that could be generated as a result of this :yellow_heart:

I can’t wait to be a Vitalian!

One idea I’d really like to see implemented is to include the noun lenses (⌐◨-◨) in the AI generated pfps (or make a collection with standardized traits as @schmackofant proposed a few days ago)

2 Likes

agreed @schmackofant is exploring how do it properly as a derivative nouns-projects that is vita and longevity themed :slight_smile:

2 Likes