ENS DAO Opens Temp Check on Handing Treasury and Day-to-Day Authority to ENS Foundation

The ENS DAO opened a temp-check proposal Friday that would shift treasury control, grants administration and long-term capital strategy to an expanded ENS Foundation. Tokenholders would keep protocol-layer authority and the power to remove directors.

Katherine Wu, an ENS Foundation board member posting as katherine.eth, published the Temp Check: Next Era of ENS DAO on the ENS governance forum on Friday. The motion proposes a five-seat Foundation board, including a full-time Executive Director, and would delegate management of the DAO's operational wallet, its ENS-token holdings and the Endowment to Foundation governance.

The Foundation would also absorb the Service Provider Program once SPP3 winds down, the Grants program, and ICANN, IETF and W3C engagement. Protocol upgrades, ENS pricing, root-key control and director appointment and removal would remain on-chain with tokenholders.

Proposed Foundation Board

The proposed five-seat Foundation board pairs ENS founder Nick Johnson with the Foundation's Executive Director and three independent directors compensated at 40,000 USDC per year. The inaugural slate names Alexander Urbelis, ENS Labs' general counsel and chief information security officer, as Executive Director. Independent seats go to A.Capital Ventures partner Kartik Talwar, Prelude co-founder Brett Sun and Aragon CEO Anthony Leutenegger.

Material funding decisions would require four of five director votes, giving the three independent directors a structural veto. The Foundation would be barred from voting with any ENS tokens it holds on governance matters, and from delegating, lending or pledging those tokens in ways that transfer voting influence.

Initial Support

Wu chairs the existing ENS Foundation board. Her draft is a temp check, the first stage of ENS DAO's governance flow, which routes proposals through forum discussion before a Snapshot signal vote and, for binding action, a constitutional vote on-chain. Friday's post explicitly continues an earlier reform proposal Wu shelved, this time scrapping the board-overlay design in favor of a substantive Foundation buildout.

The temp check has drawn 18 forum likes and 20 replies in its first three days. Nick Johnson said he intends to self-delegate in favor of the proposal, calling it "an essential transition for the ENS DAO's long-term sustainability." Urbelis posted a supportive note describing the existing Foundation work he already does on ICANN engagement, threat-intelligence partnerships and law-enforcement triage.

Millegan’s Sharp Dissent

Brantly Millegan, who wrote the original DAO constitution documents in 2021, filed a sharp dissent hours after the post. Millegan disputed the framing that the DAO was never meant to manage the treasury, arguing the founding documents specified exactly two DAO functions: protocol control and treasury stewardship.

"Essentially Labs is saying they just want to control the treasury directly," he wrote, attributing the push to falling protocol revenue and Labs' reluctance to share a shrinking budget pool.

James of Fire Eyes, the firm that helped design the original ENS DAO and token launch, pegged the assets in play at roughly $100 million in ETH and stablecoins plus $250 million in ENS tokens. He warned that decoupling the onchain treasury from the ENS token would weaken the protocol's cost-to-attack and the token's link to ETH.

ENS Token

ENS trades at $4.72, with a $191 million market cap and $473 million fully diluted valuation, according to CoinGecko. The token is down 10.4% on the week and 21.8% on the month, sitting 94% below its November 2021 peak. Circulating supply is 40.4 million of a 100 million cap.

The proposal cites ENS Labs' funding model as a structural advantage: an initial Ethereum Foundation grant plus .eth registration revenue, with no venture backing. Wu argues the closer analogs are nonprofit open-source foundations like Mozilla, Signal, the Linux Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation and Let's Encrypt's Internet Security Research Group rather than other crypto DAOs.

DAO-to-Foundation Comparables Are Mixed

The crypto track record on similar transitions is short and uneven. MakerDAO rebranded to Sky and folded much of its decision-making into a streamlined endgame structure under Rune Christensen, with the DAO retaining token-vote authority over upgrades but delegating treasury operations and yield strategy to professional teams.

The Arbitrum Foundation faced delegate pushback last year when it sought a $45 million top-up above protocol revenue. The Cardano Foundation recast itself as an active adoption driver as founder Charles Hoskinson pulled back from the entity that controls the trademarks.

The Uniswap Foundation and Optimism Foundation both run grants and policy work in parallel to on-chain governance, without controlling treasury operations the way the ENS proposal envisions. Wu cites the Mozilla parent-subsidiary structure as the closest analog to what ENS would build, with one departure: ENS would keep tokenholder removal authority over directors that the web2 foundations lack.

What Happens Next

The temp check is not a binding vote. Forum discussion typically runs one to two weeks before a Snapshot signal vote, and constitutional changes of this scope require a separate on-chain vote with higher quorum and approval thresholds. Wu has not posted a target Snapshot date.

If the proposal advances unchanged, the Foundation's first 90 days would produce a Conflict of Interest Policy, standard operating procedures and a first-year strategic plan, all subject to board approval. Annual audited financials and quarterly grant reporting would follow. Tokenholders would retain protocol-control levers and removal authority over directors. Day-to-day treasury operation and long-term capital strategy would move to the Foundation.