ENS Scales Back Plan to Move DAO Treasury Control to New Foundation

Katherine Wu, chief operating officer of ENS Labs, posted an executable draft Thursday of the proposal to establish an ENS Foundation, dropping a plan to shift the DAO's operational wallet to the new entity after weeks of delegate opposition to an earlier version of the plan.

The draft, "[Draft] [Executable] Next Era of ENS DAO: Empowering the ENS Foundation," keeps the DAO's roughly 54.6 million ENS tokens and its operational wallet, holding an estimated $16 million in ETH and stablecoins, under tokenholder control. The only ENS token transaction in the proposal is a one-time transfer of 1 million ENS, restricted to Foundation employee compensation with multi-year vesting. The Foundation Board would gain administrative control of the roughly $65 million Endowment Safe, with every Endowment transaction now subject to a timelock and a Security Council cancellation right.

The draft follows a temp check Wu published June 19 that proposed a broader transfer of authority. ENS co-founder Nick Johnson, who holds one of the Foundation's five board seats under the proposal, wrote on X that the changes responded to "difficult questions" and community feedback since that original post. The ENS DAO account summarized the revision as authorizing the Foundation "to administer the Endowment" while tokenholders "retain control over the protocol, remaining DAO-held ENS, the operational wallet, and the appointment and removal of Foundation directors."

ENS traded at $4.34, up 4.2% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. The protocol generated $216,369 in fees over the past 30 days, according to DefiLlama.

Narrower Scope

The June 19 temp check, as The Defiant reported, proposed delegating management of the DAO's operational wallet, its ENS token holdings and the Karpatkey-managed Endowment to Foundation governance. Thursday's draft narrows that scope on two of those three fronts. The operational wallet, wallet.ensdao.eth, stays with the DAO, with existing funding streams continuing to draw from it. DAO-held ENS tokens stay under the same onchain mechanism and tokenholder control, apart from the 1 million ENS carve-out; any further use of the DAO's token holdings would require a separate proposal through ordinary governance.

Only the Endowment Safe moves to Foundation-administered control, and the draft adds a new safeguard there: transactions pass through a timelock by default, and the Security Council can cancel any of them before execution, a check the current structure doesn't have.

The scaled-back scope follows weeks of delegate opposition to the original temp check. Johnson said in June he would self-delegate his ENS holdings to support the measure, a move Rotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas said left Johnson "essentially becoming the DAO," and Security Council member Brantly Millegan called the plan "the equivalent of treasury capture by ENS Labs," The Defiant reported.

Board and Budget Guardrails Unchanged

The proposed five-seat board is unchanged from the temp check: Johnson holds a permanent seat with succession to an ENS Labs representative if he departs, ENS Labs general counsel Alexander Urbelis is nominated as full-time executive director, and independent seats go to A.Capital Ventures partner Kartik Talwar, Prelude co-founder Brett Sun and Aragon CEO Anthony Leutenegger.

Independent directors are compensated 40,000 USDC per year, and any decision on ENS Labs funding requires a majority of independent directors' approval in addition to a board majority, under the interim conflict-of-interest policy attached to the draft.

The Foundation would receive no operating budget under the proposal until its executive director publishes a budget to the DAO forum, and transfers from the Endowment are capped at $500,000 for standup costs until then.

Part of a Wider Fight

Thursday's draft is the latest turn in a monthslong dispute over control of ENS DAO's treasury and governance. After Johnson said he would self-delegate to back the original Foundation plan, he used that same voting power to block an onchain vote renewing the DAO's Security Council, a multisig empowered to cancel malicious proposals already in the timelock queue, The Defiant reported.

Christoph Jentzsch, who wrote code for the original 2016 "The DAO," responded by proposing on X that ENS DAO dissolve itself outright. Separately, ENS co-founder Alex Van de Sande has proposed delegating 5 million ENS from the DAO's dormant community treasury to outside stakeholders, an unrelated reform effort aimed at the same underlying concentration of voting power in the DAO.

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