Nouns DAO Fork Mechanism

The Nouns Fork feature, introduced in the V3 governance upgrade, provides a formal mechanism for groups of token holders to exit and form a new DAO. It is designed as a minority protection tool, allowing token holders to fork the DAO and take a proportional share of assets.

IMPORTANT

As of proposal 662 the fork was disabled by setting the threshold to 100% of the total supply as a compliance requirement for the establishment of the Nouns DUNA. A new Stream-based minority protection mechanism was proposed but has not been implemented

🔍 What Is a Fork?

Forking allows a subset of holders to exit the current DAO together.
When the fork threshold is reached, a new DAO is created.
Assets including treasury funds, ETH, ERC-20 tokens, and forking Nouns are transferred proportionally to participants.

How Forking Works

Escrow Period

Any holder may deposit Nouns into a fork escrow contract.
Escrowing holders may include a proposal ID and a short reason for forking.
Withdrawals are permitted during the escrow period, up until finalization.
Tokens in escrow cannot be used to vote or propose.
If the forking threadshold is met (% of total supply of Nouns holders escrow their Nouns to fork), the fork can be initiated

Forking Period

This period lasts several days
During this time, no original DAO proposals may be executed, preventing race conditions.
Additional holders may still deposit to join the fork.
Once initiated, the fork cannot be canceled.

New DAO Creation

The fork is executed and a new Nouns DAO instance is deployed.
Participating holders receive new tokens with the same IDs and art as their original Nouns.
Treasury assets are transferred proportionally.
Governance in the new DAO defaults to V1 style: no dynamic quorum, no voting gas refunds, and no vetoer is set.
Simple ragequit is enabled, allowing individual token holders to leave at any time.