Author: Eric, Foresight News

On August 11, Beijing time, the ENS DAO officially voted and implemented the "Next Era of ENS DAO" proposal. This most important domain name protocol on Ethereum has finally completed a long-missing piece of its puzzle after nearly a decade of operation: a legal entity that can represent it in the real world.

The story began in June this year. On June 19, Katherine Wu, a director of the ENS Foundation, published a proposal on the governance forum. The core idea was to hand over the daily operations, grant management, and long-term funding strategy of the DAO to a physically operating ENS Foundation.

This idea immediately sparked heated discussions in the community. Lefteris Karapetsas, the founder of Rotki, stated on X that this proposal was essentially equivalent to the self-dissolution of the DAO, handing over its nearly $500 million treasury to the foundation. He even criticized founder Nick Johnson for delegating half of the voting rights to himself. In a moment of anger, a researcher at L2BEAT quickly built an alternative domain solution without an owner and impossible to rug. During the peak of the debate, proposal author Katherine Wu published a lengthy clarification but closed the comment section, which instead drew more doubts.

The community's concerns were not unfounded. When the batch of DAOs was established in 2021, they all believed that token-weighted governance could solve everything, but after a few years, issues such as voting fatigue, lack of accountability for grants, and high coordination costs also plagued the ENS. Nick Johnson's response was candid; he stated that the DAO was primarily focused on how to spend the treasury funds, and the low delegation rate indicated just how difficult it was to maintain the security of the DAO through token voting. In other words, this is not a question of whether to decentralize but rather what the DAO format is best suited for.

The version ultimately passed made significant concessions compared to the June draft, which is also a notable aspect of this proposal.

Firstly, the DAO will hold approximately 54.6% of the total supply of approximately 54.6 million ENS tokens, which will remain untouched and continue to be controlled by token holders under the on-chain mechanism. The only exception is a one-time transfer of 1 million ENS tokens for future employee salaries at the foundation, which cannot participate in voting, delegate, or be lent out for staking before being granted.

Secondly, the operational wallet containing approximately $16 million in Ethereum and stablecoins will not move and will continue to be managed by the DAO. The initial draft's idea to delegate the operational wallet to the foundation was eliminated.

Thirdly, although the donation fund of approximately $65 million will be managed by the foundation's board, every transaction must undergo a 9-day time lock, during which the security council can directly veto any overreaching transactions. Before the foundation announces its first annual budget, it can withdraw a maximum of $500,000 from the donation fund for setup expenses. Subsequent annual expenditures will be capped by the publicly disclosed budget and will also be subject to annual audits and quarterly funding reports.

It can be said that the final plan divided the "money bag" keys into several parts: the foundation holds one, the time lock holds one, the security council holds one, and DAO token holders always have the master key, including the appointment and dismissal rights over the directors. The impeachment process is clearly stated, requiring submission of evidence with the petition, a response window from the board, a 30-day period between the petition and voting, and the impeached directors can also publicly present a written defense.

So what exactly will the foundation do? The answer is those tasks that the DAO can't handle and ENS Labs shouldn't handle.

ENS operates on-chain, but the world rules for domain names are established in the conference rooms of traditional institutions such as ICANN, IETF, and W3C. DAOs lack legal entity status, cannot sign agreements, cannot employ full-time staff, cannot push for the formal recognition of the ".ens" top-level domain in ICANN, and cannot initiate trademark protection against phishing websites that mimic ENS. Over the past years, these tasks were either neglected or handled by ENS Labs, which is essentially an engineering company in Singapore and has never been the institutional representative of the protocol.

The new foundation's board will consist of five seats. Executive director Alexander Urbelis, who is also the general counsel and chief information security officer of ENS Labs and has previously served as the CISO of the NFL. The founder's seat belongs to Nick Johnson. The other three independent directors are Kartik Talwar, partner at A.Capital and co-founder of ETHGlobal, Brett Sun, co-founder of Prelude, and Anthony Leutenegger, CEO of Aragon. Independent directors will receive an annual salary of 40,000 USDC, and if they refuse it, it will be donated to a public welfare project they designate. The conflict of interest clauses are detailed, requiring decisions involving grants to ENS Labs to gain the consent of the majority of independent directors, and the founder’s seat will automatically abstain in such votes.

For ENS Labs, this is also a form of loosening. It can refocus its efforts back on products and engineering, concentrating on advancing ENSv2. In February this year, Labs made a rather decisive decision to abandon the self-built L2 network Namechain and deploy ENSv2 directly on the Ethereum mainnet, citing that Ethereum's own scaling had reduced the registration gas cost by about 99%.

After streamlining the governance structure, the roles of the protocol, foundation, and development company can finally be defined.

This proposal's impact clearly extends beyond ENS. In recent years, the Web3 industry has witnessed too many failures in DAO governance, either indecisive or controlled by large stakeholders and professional governance players. ENS gives the answer of acknowledging the limits of token voting, returning to what it does best—safeguarding the neutrality of the protocol—while entrusting operations to a professional entity with budget constraints, audits, and impeachment mechanisms. The number of votes may decrease, but the weight of each vote will increase.

Of course, skepticism will not simply vanish. Handing over the administrative control of $65 million to a five-member board essentially substitutes institutional design for execution efficiency; the time lock and security council act as technical fuses, and the real test lies in the first budget, the first batch of grants, and the first appearance in an ICANN meeting after the inaugural team takes office. What ENS wants to prove is that critical internet infrastructure can be both trustworthily neutral and have someone to negotiate at the real-world negotiating table on its behalf. The results of this experiment will become a reference for the entire DAO industry in the coming years.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。