In 2001, a church in Halberstadt, Germany began performing John Cage's organ piece ASLSP (As Slow as Possible). The performance will last 639 years—the age of the church when it started.

The most recent note change was September 5, 2020. The next one: February 5, 2022. The final note: September 5, 2640.

On that day in 2640, there will also be a new Noun auctioned.

Key Takeaways

• NounsDAO uses time itself as a distribution and decentralization mechanism—one NFT auctioned per day, forever.
• 100% of auction proceeds go to a treasury controlled by NFT holders, with founder influence mathematically decreasing over time.
• The project became one of the most influential experiments in on-chain governance and CC0 intellectual property.

Time as Medium

Most NFT projects launch with a mint: 10,000 images drop at once, early buyers get in cheap, and value concentrates among those who showed up first. The distribution is instant, and the power dynamics are set from day one.

Nouns inverts this.

One Noun is created and auctioned every 24 hours. That's it. No presale, no whitelist, no rush. The auction settles, 100% of proceeds go to the treasury, and a new Noun appears for the next day's auction.

This changes everything about the power structure.

On day 1, the founders (Nounders) control a significant percentage of supply. On day 100, their percentage has shrunk. On day 1,000, they're a small minority. On day 10,000, they're statistically irrelevant.

The project gets more decentralized with every sunrise. Time does the work.

The Mechanism

Each Noun is a generative 32×32 pixel character—random combinations of heads, bodies, accessories, and backgrounds. A smart contract controls everything: generation, auction, settlement, treasury deposit.

When an auction ends:

• The Noun transfers to the winning bidder
• ETH goes directly to the DAO treasury
• A new Noun is minted
• The next 24-hour auction begins

No human intervention required. The machine runs itself.

Founder Economics

The Nounders receive every 10th Noun for the first five years—their compensation for building the protocol. This is more transparent than most founder allocations: you can calculate exactly how much they'll receive and when their influence will peak.

After five years, the founder rewards stop. The dilution continues. Eventually, the Nounders become just another set of voters in a sea of participants.

Governance

Noun holders control the treasury through on-chain proposals. At the time of writing (three weeks after launch), submitting a proposal requires 5% of Nouns—a threshold that gets harder to meet as supply grows.

Proposals can do anything: fund projects, donate to charities, change governance parameters, commission art. The 24 Nouns in existence controlled over $11 million in ETH. The DAO had already disbursed 30 ETH to six charities, all verifiable on-chain.

It's too bad governments don't have public ledgers for spending our money.

What Made This Matter

This article was written three weeks after launch. What happened next:

NounsDAO became one of the most influential experiments in crypto governance. The treasury grew to tens of thousands of ETH. The CC0 (public domain) licensing spawned an ecosystem of derivative projects. The "one per day forever" mechanism was widely copied.

The pixel art became cultural. The governance became a reference implementation. The time-based distribution model proved that patience could be a design choice.

The Nouns thesis—that slow, steady, transparent distribution creates more robust decentralization than explosive launches—appears validated. Years in, the project still runs. One Noun per day. Forever.

The Cage Connection

John Cage's ASLSP and Nouns share a thesis: time is a medium, not an obstacle.

Most projects optimize for speed. Ship fast, scale fast, exit fast. Cage wrote a piece designed to outlast everyone who would ever hear it. The Halberstadt performance will continue through wars, economic collapses, technological revolutions—whatever the next six centuries bring.

Nouns made the same bet. The contract doesn't care about market conditions, competitor projects, or founder interest. One Noun, every day, until Ethereum stops running.

ASLSP has an ending. Nouns, in theory, doesn't.

Whether that's profound or pointless depends on what you think time is for.