Frequently asked questions

Federation is a smart contract and web app that enables DAOs in the Nouns ecosystem to vote on each other's proposals.

Today, cross-DAO voting is usually done off-chain through Snapshot or Discord polls and then executed by a centralized party through a multi-sig.

Federation removes this centralization risk by operating as an on-chain delegated voter. A Federation contract can be deployed and external voting rights can be delegated to it.

Members of a community can then vote on the outcome they would like to see for an external proposal using Federation's voting interface. The Federation contract will then cast its vote on the proposal based on the outcome that the majority of the DAO members voted for.

The most common use case is for DAOs in the Nouns ecosystem (Lil Nouns, Gnars, etc.) who hold Nouns NFTs to vote on Nouns DAO governance.

Cross-DAO voting allows DAOs in the ecosystem to have a stake in each other’s success while aligning incentives and resources for mutual benefit.

As the ecosystem grows, you can imagine a world where subDAOs vote on each other’s proposals (e.g. Lil Nouns voting on SharkDAO proposals), or even the development of ecosystem-wide political parties.

We are currently onboarding DAOs in the Nouns ecosystem. If you are part of one and are interested in using Federation to enable on-chain governance between your DAO and others, reach out to wiz on Twitter.

Federation public infrastructure and free to use. The codebase is entirely open-source and available on GitHub.

Nouns is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization where one NFT (representing one vote over the allocation of the treasury) is auctioned off each day.

Nouns DAO exists to proliferate the Nouns meme, and many “forks” of the organization have popped up given its success in developing economically sustainable communities. You can learn more at nouns.wtf