According to CoinDesk, NounsDAO is set to experience a treasury split in a week after a significant number of the digital collectibles' owners decided to conduct a 'rage quit.' Holders with 25% of all Nouns NFTs are expressing their dissatisfaction with the project. Instead of selling their NFTs on the open market, they are seeking a better price directly from its ether tokens reserve.

Under the newly enacted rage quit rules, if 20% of Nouns NFTs call for a 'fork,' they can split from the main group and take their share of the project's 30,620 ether tokens (worth about $50 million at press time) with them. Each Nouns NFT is worth about 36.5 ETH ($59,600) in book value, giving the current fork a treasury of 7,598 ETH (about $12.4 million).

Nouns are now trading near that level for the first time since last December, with their price pushed up by traders looking to make easy money on the arbitrage. Some of these traders are well-known figures in the cryptomarket's 'risk-free value' trading subculture, including the pseudonymous DCFGod, who owns 28 Nouns. This situation is the latest in a series of 'rage quits' that demonstrate how decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) deal with factions of investors who lose faith in their vision and demand their money back. Projects with assets priced below their book value are particularly appealing to activist traders who want to unlock those assets' value.

In the case of NounsDAO, the mechanism for unlocking that value is relatively new. Last month, the DAO approved a broad upgrade called v3 that enabled forking to give disaffected investors a way to peacefully rage quit. DAO contributor Elad said in a recent YouTube video describing the process, 'Every DAO needs a minority protection mechanism.'