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ENS DAO forum proposal would delegate 5 million ENS to five stakeholder groups

ENS DAO forum proposal would delegate 5 million ENS to five stakeholder groups

Draft plan would reassign voting rights from idle treasury tokens after a single delegate’s 3.26 million ENS vote exposed concentrated governance power and pressure over the Security Council’s future.

ENS

Fact Check
The primary ENS DAO Governance Forum draft confirms the core claim: a proposal to delegate 5M ENS tokens from the DAO treasury to five stakeholder groups, reassigning only voting rights while capital remains DAO property. The Block independently confirms the trigger — a single delegate (Nick Johnson) holding ~3.26M ENS (~50% of delegated supply) blocking the Security Council renewal on June 30, 2026 — matching the claim's '3.26 million ENS vote' and 'concentrated governance power over the Security Council's future' details. Cryptopolitan corroborates the specifics. All material elements are verified against authoritative primary sources with no conflicting evidence.
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Summary

ENS DAO’s governance forum is weighing a proposal to delegate voting rights tied to 5 million ENS from the DAO treasury to vetted participants across five stakeholder groups, while keeping the tokens under DAO ownership. ENS co-founder Alex Van de Sande posted the draft on July 6 as a way to reduce the influence of a single delegate after ENS founder Nick Johnson used about 3.26 million ENS on June 30 to vote against renewing the DAO’s Security Council, helping drive the final result to about 82% against. Johnson’s holdings represent roughly 3% of ENS’s 100 million token supply but about half of active delegated voting power, underscoring low participation in the protocol’s governance. Under the proposal, 1 million ENS in voting rights would go to each of five categories: everyday users, app and exchange integrations, core developers, legacy domain and DNS providers, and DAO governance representatives. The top 10 candidates in each category would receive equal shares based on category-specific metrics, with delegations revoked after six months of inactivity. The plan also lands amid a separate debate over ENS Labs COO Katherine Wu’s proposal to move operational control and treasury management to the ENS Foundation, and as outside critics including Tokenize.it’s Christoph Jentzsch argue the governance model itself may be broken.

Terms & Concepts
  • Security Council: Emergency multisig within ENS governance that can stop malicious proposals before they are executed.
  • delegated voting power: Voting influence assigned by tokenholders to a delegate without transferring ownership of the tokens.
  • multisig: A wallet or control system that requires multiple parties to approve an action.