Based Management is an experiment currently being led by Leighton Cusack and myself. Taking insights from Nouns and Purple, it’s a new type of onchain organization that leverages free NFT drops, memetic remixing, and the latest Nouns Builder tooling available on L2s.

Currently being incubated by a small founding team, Based Management is building toward full decentralization whereby artists, builders, and daily active users of Ethereum have a robust treasury, value structure, and memetic language to contribute to and manage.

Based Management

With the rise of Base, what Optimism calls the superchain starts to contextualize itself. Another way to imagine their thesis is infrastructure for a real world MMORPG.

We have Zora as a ‘territory’ for creators, collectors, and curators to congregate onchain and enjoy multimedia. Now we have Base, with all of its baked-in Coinbase merit, as a home for the daily active user.. potentially.

DAUs

Instead of focusing on the metric as a sign of market maturation, this experiment is focused on finding opportunities for daily active user engagement.

There are three types of users with much to do at present:

1. Dev/Builder

2. Creator

3. Collector

That isn’t the majority of users though. We have:

• Degens

• Shitposters

• Threadooors

• Market Makers

• Designers

• Copywriters

• Entrepreneurs

• Community Managers

• Quants

• etc

Based Management was spun up with an intrigue in providing ‘territory’ for the intermingling of both categories. It’s an experiment in innovating the Nouns dao model; with the belief that reasonable success accelerates all things crypto.

DAOs

Like many new and interesting things, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have gone through their cycle of fascination, replication, and now sit on indifference.

DAOs plug away each day, passing the occasional proposal, auction settlements on hold, daily users still not bought in. The constructive viewpoint here is that a new cycle of innovation is knocking at our door. It begs a recursion of the fundamental question:

what is the point of a decentralized autonomous organization?

In short, large-scale collaboration. A DAO is as good as the people that comprise and collaborate within its range. And after participating in, spinning up individual ones, and failing upwards in both areas, we are trying a couple of new ideas.

Invite-Only

As Andrew Chen puts it in The Cold Start Problem, atomic networks require tons of consideration in the beginning. This is why you see many startups (think Farcaster) using invite-only.

DAOs are atomic networks. While open and permissionless decentralization is an undeniable staple, there is no reason their foundation calls for less care and curation than other collective experiments.

Invite-only is achievable through the Nouns model thanks to founder allocation. The tldr of this section is:

• all dao nfts are allocated to the founding team in the starting weeks

• a manifesto of routes to join BM will be on based.management site

• contributors to based management are airdropped dao nfts

• after initial invite cohort the founder allocation will be reversed

The thinking here is an attempt at forming clear cultural ethos, signal, and creative direction before it welcomes divergent intentions.

Zora Rewards

Already underway, with Ξ4.5 from two drops, Based Management’s the first DAO to use Zora Rewards for treasury seeding. The goal here is two fold:

1. Provide alternative routes to funding the treasury

2. Provide alternative routes to joining the dao

In both instances (auction or rewards) the treasury and collective grow. The tldr is:

• contributors mint on Based Management contract as a free mint

  • art

  • literature

  • video

  • audio

  • generative

  • etc

• all rewards are sent to the treasury

• the NFT creator is airdropped a dao nft

This allows metadata to become a fixture of BM growth, provides context with new contributors, and guarantees affordable entry should the auction floor rise dramatically.

Next Steps

Due to the nature of minting on the BM contract, it becomes clear why we must use invite-only for the formation of this collection. A reasonable next question is

what happens to the collection when founding team revokes allocation?

There are a few routes that come to mind.

• voting on seasonal administrators of the collection

• creating multiple collections with multiple admins

• cutting off the pipeline altogether

• adopting PartyDao type tooling

An answer to this step isn’t needed until we’ve amassed a decent sized collection, treasury, and collective though. It seems reasonable to leave the decision up to the Based Management team in that moment.

Titles

It can’t be guaranteed, but a considerate approach to onboarding should provide BM with the sort of values that embrace, reward, and fund external actors for their work.

This is where Titles factors in. Regardless of the future pipeline decision, we are turning the contributors collection into cc0 material for endless remixing. From a creative standpoint this is where we steal a lot from Nouns.

Instead of generative dao artwork, we are experimenting with a diverse collection of multimedia as the remix source. We have yet to pin down the former for BM, but, with all things considered, we will most likely try to craft something leverage-able there as well.

Based Management

It’s a dao, a headless brand, and an onchain experiment. Based Management has two principles at present:

1. Have courageous fun onchain

2. Help facilitate value emergence from decentralized parties

Here’s relevant subtext so that this essay can maintain a reasonable length.

Next leg up in crypto integration:

A need for onchain experiments:

Why fun is fundamental for growth: