A minority bloc is running a patient, legal, and entirely rational trade on the Nouns treasury. Its strategy requires exactly two things: that dormant Nouns stay dormant, and that time stays free. This page exists to end both.
Everything below is analysis of public, onchain voting records. Conclusions about intent are inference — judge the pattern yourself.
Buy Nouns far below the treasury's book value per Noun. Then close the gap — not by building anything, but by freezing everything. Every grant funded is leakage from the position's collateral. Every quarter of inactivity accretes book value through staking yield alone. The position doesn't need to loot the treasury; statutory prohibitions, the veto, and criminal exposure make that a losing move. It just needs to wait. Patience does everything looting would, legally.
That's why we call the Nouns held this way dead Nouns: they exist to not-vote until the final hours, to not-fund, to not-build — to be a silent claim on ETH rather than a working piece of the project.
~320 Nouns bought at 0.5–1.5 ETH while the floor was dead — each a claim on ~2.8 ETH of treasury book value.
Months of not voting. Organic proposals starve at quorum — not defeated, just abandoned. Abstention as a weapon costs nothing and leaves no fingerprints.
Weight appears in the final hours to set the auction reserve price at book value — killing below-book issuance. New money in: dead.
Unsold Nouns redirected to the treasury. Dilution: frozen. The denominator of book-value-per-Noun stops growing.
Spending proposals voted down or quorum-starved. Money out: dead. The treasury compounds on yield with nothing leaving.
Every reversal and governance repair — secret ballots, zero-reserve, the rest — defeated. The freeze protects itself.
A proposal to study nonprofit and entity structure. Read plainly: pricing the DUNA → LLC conversion route before attempting it. This is Plan B's reconnaissance, on the record.
Net effect: money in dead, money out dead, denominator frozen, book value ratcheting up on yield alone.
The treasury buys Nouns below book — framed as "treasury management," legal as an asset purchase. The long tail exits at a decent price, and every below-book purchase accretes value to the remaining holders — which, increasingly, means the bloc. They sell late, or emerge holding a dominant share of the claims.
DUNA → LLC via one more governance vote, after which distributions become ordinary corporate mechanics. The nonprofit prohibition dies with the nonprofit. Watch for the scouting parties: studies, legal reviews, and "modernization" proposals that price this route before attempting it.
Neither exit arrives labeled. Both arrive as reasonable-sounding proposals with reassuring names. So label them now, before they exist — that's what this page is for.
Per Article II: a proposal is structural if its calldata is structural, whatever the title says. These phrasings get flagged for human review automatically, regardless of the agent's verdict:
| It will be called | What it is |
|---|---|
| "Treasury efficiency" / "treasury management" | Below-book buybacks — Plan A |
| "Entity modernization" / "legal structure review" | DUNA → LLC conversion — Plan B |
| "Sustainability" / "runway protection" | Grant freeze made permanent |
| "Governance streamlining" | Fewer, shorter, quieter votes |
| Weight arriving in the final hours | The ambush — see Prop 955 |
The freeze has two dependencies, and only two:
A standing vote breaks this. Pre-committed weight can't be ambushed, and proposals that clear quorum force every kill to happen in public, on the record, forever. That's what this project is: attention made cheap enough that dormancy stops being the default.
Every funded grant leaks collateral toward the mission. Every public verdict, every flagged euphemism, every recorded kill makes the next quarter cost attention and reputation. Against a time-arbitrage trade, friction is the weapon.
Winning doesn't mean expelling anyone. It means repricing: making delay expensive and exits loud, until the rational move is to fund the mission, settle on terms everyone can exit through — or hold a pile of ETH attached to a brand whose people and CC0 soul moved on.