Purple DAO: Next Steps

There’s been a lot of chatter in the Purple DAO chat about dissolving the DAO and what could come next. I’ve been following along for a few days, and I finally had time to get my thoughts down.

Some context for anyone landing here cold. Purple is a Nouns Builder DAO on Base, and its treasury today (29-Oct-2026) holds 4.67 ETH, about $11K at current prices. That number shapes every option below.

I’m a small holder (owner of three Purple tokens), so this is one voice among many. But I think there are routes we haven’t talked about yet, so here are four ideas I've been noodling on:

1. Retro & Wrap: finish the job one more time

One last retro round for the remaining treasury, then dissolve. Purple was never sold as an investment. The money was raised to grow the Farcaster protocol and ecosystem, so the DAO’s final act could be doing that job once more: paying the people who built, created, and supported Farcaster. It’s been a year or more since our last retro, which means there’s a backlog of work nobody rewarded.

Prop House is gone, but the code is open source, so we could run our own instance. Or keep it lighter: set a window, publish submission criteria, let holders vote on allocations, take a snapshot when it closes.

2. Rage Quit & Parlay: let people out, keep the rest working

Anyone who wants out burns their token and takes their share, roughly $16 per NFT. What’s left keeps funding Purple, seeds a new NS-centric DAO, goes to node runners doing costly protocol-level work, or becomes something none of us have thought of yet.

To my knowledge, Nouns Builder has no rage quit mechanism, so we’d have to build something to facilitate this.

3. Endowment: keep it alive without settling it

Nobody has to settle whether Purple lives or dies. Park the treasury somewhere it earns yield and fund small grants from the yield only. The principal stays put, the DAO costs almost nothing to keep alive, and anyone can still propose something bigger later.

The catch is size. At about $11K, a few percent in yield is a few hundred dollars a year. That funds a small grant or two, not large programs.

4. Concentrated grants: back a few things hard

Skip the broad retro and bet on a few things instead. Open up for submissions and then pick three to five costly, protocol-level jobs, like hub and node runners or client maintainers, and fund each at a fixed amount.

Fewer winners, bigger checks, and the money goes to work that’s expensive to keep running. The hard part is choosing who, so we’d need clear criteria and a vote.

The question underneath all four

Does the treasury belong to the holders or to the mission? I don’t think that one gets settled with a vote or a spreadsheet. It’s the thing we never actually agreed on, and every option above is a different answer to it. The mechanism is the easy part. Deciding what Purple is for now is the real work.

My own answer: I have 3 votes, which comes to about $48. I’d rather that money go toward the mission than back to me.

Let’s talk it through

I don’t have the right answer. I do know we’ll find it faster in a room together than in a thread, so I’d love to get a call on the calendar. No proposals, no vote, no agenda, just the people who care talking it through and putting all of our ideas on the table.

xx

Genuine Jack