The problem Nouns Esports solves

The Nouns Nexus focuses on onboarding users as contributors learning about onchain governance, providing opportunities for users to build within the esports industry, and reduce the friction of funds deployment which traditionally can take up to 12 months.

Nouns Nexus

Nexus allows for a straightforward way for organizers and players to apply for sponsorship and are judged by their peers in a competition for best ideas. The most active community members are rewarded for their participation and our Rounds voting system represents a more accurate voting weight than alternative methods.

Rounds

Rounds is a bootstrapping mechanism that helps Nouns Esports fund new talent to complete initiatives that the organization has. Rounds allows us to explore initiatives such as art creation for our rosters, creating new event IPs, and even supporting young aspiring competitors to attend their first event.

Our goal with Rounds is to provide governance incentives for fans that are interested in empowering other members of the community through proposals.

Reducing Friction

Nexus allows for account creation through a multitude of ways that our existing users are already engaged with Nouns Esports. Through the use of Privy, users are able to log in through email, Discord, Farcaster, or X, and are prompted to create a Coinbase Smart Wallet to reduce the friction of signing transactions onchain as a new user.

Onchain Incentives

As we continue to develop the Nexus platform, we plan to add additional support for partners on Base to target campaigns with our users. Additional features are being built to support commerce from the Nouns Esports shop, ability to distribute assets from third party partners, and support features to distribute rewards for active governance members.

Nexus Traction
Week 1 Signups: 1,000+
Week 1 Average DAUs: 500
Peak Voters (Single proposal): 601 Voters

Challenges we ran into

Onboarding

The Nouns Esports audience is primarily web2-native with blockchain interest and one of the focuses of our buildout was to alleviate common problems that users have when trying blockchain technologies for the first time.

Wallet Usage

We noticed that many potential users had issues with installing and using a wallet without pre-existing interest in blockchain. To solve for this, we integrated Coinbase Smart Wallet as a solution for users who did not have access to a wallet already. This was built as an option for users in profile settings so if a user won a proposal, they would have a wallet to be able to claim their rewards.

Rewards / Digital Asset Redemptions

As with most forms of governance, we are currently exploring ways for first-time users who may have registered to vote on a specific player they are a fan to have strong incentives for coming back to the Nouns Nexus platform.