Nouns Builder

Nouns Builder is a no-code kit for launching a DAO on the Nouns DAO model. One transaction to its Manager contract deploys five linked contracts: an ERC-721 token whose holders vote, an auction house that sells one token at a time on a fixed schedule, a governor, a timelocked treasury that receives the auction proceeds, and a metadata renderer that generates the artwork (protocol README). Zora built it in 2022 and handed its development to Builder DAO, an organisation that runs on the same contracts. For a DAO reader it is how the auction-funded, fully on-chain design of Nouns reached other organisations. In 2026 it is moving those DAOs to a new release, which each of them has to vote to accept.

From Zora to Builder DAO

Zora, an NFT platform founded in 2020, launched Nouns Builder on Ethereum in late October 2022 as a free, open-source tool for creating a Nouns-style organisation without writing code (Decrypt). On 1 November 2022 the account zora.eth asked Nouns DAO, in Proposal 167, for 1,000 ETH to seed the treasury of a new Builder DAO that would govern and develop the protocol as a public good. The proposal listed about four months of Zora engineering and design work, and a Code4rena audit Zora had paid for (audit report). Nouns holders passed it 143 votes to 108, and it executed on 10 November 2022. Builder DAO is itself a Nouns Builder DAO: its Ethereum token contract was created on 1 November 2022 and auctioned one BUILDER token a day until the DAO moved to Base (Builder on Ethereum).

The next protocol release, called Bali, was deployed to Optimism, Base and Zora Network under Builder DAO Proposal 87, which passed 97 to 0 and executed on 1 February 2024. Bali added an L2 migration deployer that lets an Ethereum DAO deploy and seed a copy of itself on an OP Stack chain, reserved tokens claimable through Merkle proofs, alternative metadata renderers and protocol rewards; Sherlock audited it (contest 111, Bali spec). Builder DAO used the migration deployer on itself: Proposal 90 (February 2024) moved the DAO to Base, with every member to receive a Base token one for one, and Proposal 98 moved the remaining treasury in April 2024.

Development then left Zora. Zora’s nouns-protocol repository was last pushed on 24 August 2024. The BuilderOSS GitHub organisation was created on 1 October 2024; the front-end monorepo now lives there as BuilderOSS/nouns-builder, and the contracts are developed in a fork, BuilderOSS/nouns-protocol. Builder DAO pays its developers through a Tech Pod residency: Proposal 59 cut the residency to 50% in March 2026, and Proposal 65 renewed it at reduced capacity through October 2026.

How a Builder DAO works

The Manager is a factory and an upgrade registry. Its deploy call creates the Token, MetadataRenderer, Auction, Treasury and Governor for a new DAO, each as a UUPS proxy: a thin contract that holds the DAO’s storage and forwards calls to an implementation contract that can be swapped later (protocol overview). When the founder starts the first auction, ownership of the token and auction contracts passes to the DAO’s treasury (Token.sol).

The auction sells one token per period, usually 24 hours, above a reserve price the founder sets. Each bid must beat the last by a minimum increment, 10% by default, and a bid in the final five minutes extends the auction by five minutes. Settling an auction delivers the token to the winner, mints the next one and opens its auction in the same transaction, and the proceeds go to the treasury. Founders can reserve a share of all tokens for themselves: each founder’s percentage is spread across every hundred token IDs and minted to them instead of auctioned until a vesting date passes, with the total capped below 100% (Token.sol).

Each token carries one vote, which its holder can delegate. The governor takes four settings at deployment: a proposal threshold and a quorum, both expressed in basis points of token supply; a voting delay; and a voting period. A proposal passes when its For votes exceed its Against votes and meet the quorum. It then waits in the treasury for a timelock delay, two days by default, before anyone can execute it. A DAO can name a vetoer, an address that may cancel a proposal before it executes. The protocol has no fork or redemption against the treasury (contract list), so a dissenting holder’s option is to sell the token on a secondary market.

Who governs the protocol

Two things sit above the individual DAOs: control of the Manager, and a protocol-wide reward split. The Manager’s owner can upgrade the Manager itself and register upgrade paths: a list of approved pairs saying that a DAO running implementation A may move to implementation B. Registration only offers an upgrade. Each DAO still has to pass a proposal through its own governor to apply it, so no one can change an existing DAO’s contracts without that DAO’s vote (Manager ownership runbook). On Ethereum that power sat with Builder DAO’s treasury, while the Managers on the L2s were run by a Tech Pod multisig (Proposal 87). In May 2026 the Ethereum DAO executed Proposal 100, 45 votes to 0, which upgraded the Manager and transferred its ownership to a Safe multisig. Read on 2 October 2026, the Managers on Ethereum, Base and Optimism all report the same owner, a 3-of-5 Safe, and the Ethereum Manager reports contract version 3.0.0.

The reward split dates from Bali. Since that release, an auction on a DAO launched after that release, or on an older DAO that opted in, pays 2.5% of the winning bid to Builder DAO and 2.5% to a referral address: the website on which the winning bid was placed, or Builder DAO when no referrer is passed. A founder may add a founder reward of up to 50% of each winning bid to a fixed address, and the rest goes to the treasury (protocol rewards, founder rewards, Auction.sol). Under Bali, Builder DAO’s share was paid to a 3-of-6 multisig on each chain run by its Operations Working Group.

Builder DAO itself now governs from Base, where a quorum on its recent proposals has been 65 votes. In 2026 its proposals funded the Tech Pod, set up a curated Nouns Builder Fund on Artizen with $25,000 committed by Artizen (Proposal 60), and ratified a $140,500 grant, paid in XLM, to port the protocol to Stellar’s Soroban smart-contract platform (Proposal 66, executed 26 September 2026). The port is under way in BuilderOSS/builder-stellar.

Who uses it

Nouns Builder’s own indexer, the subgraphs its app queries (Base endpoint), listed 2,443 DAO deployments when read on 2 October 2026: 2,270 on Base, 148 on Ethereum and 25 on Optimism. Deployments on Zora Network are no longer indexed. Most never started selling: 178 of the 2,443 had ever sold a token at auction. In 2026, 46 DAOs had created at least one on-chain proposal, a few of them test deployments.

BuilderOSS keeps a list of the 20 largest DAOs on each chain by total auction sales, for testing upgrades against real state (top-daos.json, committed 25 September 2026). On Ethereum it is led by Builder DAO’s original deployment, with about 197 ETH of auction sales, and Purple, with about 116 ETH. On Base it is led by Collective Nouns at about 49 ETH, then Gnars and Purple at about 15 ETH each. The Optimism list is mostly DAOs that have sold nothing.

Purple has used Nouns Builder on two chains. It formed around the Farcaster social protocol (Decrypt) and its Ethereum token was the first in the index, created on 25 October 2022. It passed four proposals between March and June 2024 to move to Base with the migration deployer (Proposal 57 onwards), and has kept governing there: Purple on Base funded a Farcaster meetup at Devconnect in Buenos Aires in late 2025 and media and artists at FarCon Rome in April 2026, and its 48th proposal executed in June 2026.

V3 and the 2026 rollout

The release now being rolled out, V3, changes how proposals are made (README). A DAO can set an update window after a proposal is created, from zero to 24 weeks, in which the proposer can revise it before voting opens; up to 16 holders can co-sponsor a proposal with signatures, smart-contract wallets included; and off-chain proposal candidates are recorded as attestations through the Ethereum Attestation Service. A new factory also deploys a DAO at the same addresses on every chain. An upgraded DAO starts with a zero-length update window, so its proposal timing changes only if it votes to set one (governance guide).

V3 has had no independent external audit. Builder DAO’s own upgrade proposal says so and points to internal review and fork testing instead (Proposal 69). That testing ran the upgrade against the 20 largest DAOs on Base, Ethereum and Optimism and found DAOs it could not upgrade safely: mferbuilderDAO, whose governor is not owned by its treasury, and eight unlaunched Optimism DAOs whose contracts are still owned by the deploying wallet (multichain upgrade report). Read on 2 October 2026, the Base Manager had registered an upgrade path from the original governor implementation to V3, and the Ethereum Manager had not. Proposal 69, which would move Builder DAO itself to V3 with a one-day update window, had 59 votes for and none against, short of its quorum of 65, with voting due to close on 4 October.

The app has narrowed its chains while adding features. Builder removed Zora Network from nouns.build on 18 August 2026 (commit), and its docs now describe Zora deployments as legacy (bridging docs). The same months added proposal types for creating Zora and Clanker coins, launching NFT drops and swapping tokens through Uniswap, the last in a production release on 29 September 2026 (PR 1028).

How Caper approaches this

A Builder DAO and a caper both fund a treasury from continuous buying rather than one raise, and they differ in what a member holds and how they leave. A Builder DAO sells one token per auction at whatever the day clears, and each token votes for as long as it is held. In a caper the token trades on a bonding curve that is open in both directions at all times; vote weight comes from having voted as well as from holdings (Voting); and a spending proposal that wins its ballot executes only if the token’s price holds up over a market window that follows (Proposals). A Builder holder who disagrees can only sell the NFT to someone else; a caper member who has voted can leave for a share of the treasury, the exit right Builder omits. Builder founders can reserve tokens up front, where a caper has no upfront founder allocation and the founder share accrues as people trade. Builder has the longer record: contracts in use since 2022, external audits of its first two releases, and upgrades each DAO must vote to accept, while Caper’s proposals page records several changes to its decision procedure during 2026.

References

Part of a series onThe DAO tooling stack

Tool	Nouns Builder (nouns.build) · docs
Category	DAO framework – deploys Nouns-style DAOs: an ERC-721 voting token sold by recurring auction, a governor and a timelocked treasury
Launched	October 2022 on Ethereum, built by Zora (Decrypt, 1 Nov 2022)
Builder/status	Built by Zora; maintained since 2024 by Builder DAO contributors in the BuilderOSS GitHub organisation. ourzora/nouns-protocol last pushed 24 Aug 2024; BuilderOSS/nouns-builder pushed 2 Oct 2026 (read 2 Oct 2026)
Contracts/code	BuilderOSS/nouns-protocol (MIT). Manager factory: `0xd310…7174` on Ethereum; `0x3ac0…371c` on Base and Optimism (address files)
Governance token	None for the protocol. Builder DAO is itself a Nouns Builder DAO, BUILDER on Base; the Manager contracts are owned by a 3-of-5 Safe (read 2 Oct 2026)
Status	Active. Live on Ethereum, Base and Optimism; Zora Network support removed from the app on 18 Aug 2026; V3 contracts in opt-in rollout
Related	Nouns DAO, DAO tooling overview, Governance timelocks, Safe

From Zora to Builder DAO

How a Builder DAO works

Who governs the protocol

Who uses it

V3 and the 2026 rollout

How Caper approaches this

References

Part of a series onThe DAO tooling stack

Tool	Nouns Builder (nouns.build) · docs
Category	DAO framework – deploys Nouns-style DAOs: an ERC-721 voting token sold by recurring auction, a governor and a timelocked treasury
Launched	October 2022 on Ethereum, built by Zora (Decrypt, 1 Nov 2022)
Builder/status	Built by Zora; maintained since 2024 by Builder DAO contributors in the BuilderOSS GitHub organisation. ourzora/nouns-protocol last pushed 24 Aug 2024; BuilderOSS/nouns-builder pushed 2 Oct 2026 (read 2 Oct 2026)
Contracts/code	BuilderOSS/nouns-protocol (MIT). Manager factory: `0xd310…7174` on Ethereum; `0x3ac0…371c` on Base and Optimism (address files)
Governance token	None for the protocol. Builder DAO is itself a Nouns Builder DAO, BUILDER on Base; the Manager contracts are owned by a 3-of-5 Safe (read 2 Oct 2026)
Status	Active. Live on Ethereum, Base and Optimism; Zora Network support removed from the app on 18 Aug 2026; V3 contracts in opt-in rollout
Related	Nouns DAO, DAO tooling overview, Governance timelocks, Safe