The Ethereum Name Service DAO is preparing to give up voting power for more than 5 million of its governance tokens in a move aimed at breaking the ability of a single delegate to determine the outcomes of the DAO.
ENS co-founder Alex van de Sande, who publishes as avsa.eth, The draft proposal was uploaded to the ENS Management Forum on 6 Julycalling on the DAO to delegate approximately $21 million worth of ENS tokens to vetted stakeholders across five categories rather than continuing to leave them unused.
The one-delegate problem the plan was written to fix
On June 30, ENS founder Nick Johnson spoke 3.26 million ENS tokens Against the on-chain renewal of the DAO Security Council, an emergency multisig that can cancel malicious proposals before they are implemented. The final tally was close to 82% against The Block.
Johnson’s share represents only about 3% of ENS’s total supply of 100 million but approx 50% of active delegated voting powerThis is a gap that reflects how few token holders participate in ENS governance.
As Cryptopolitan reported earlierRotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas said Johnson “delegated nearly 50% of the voting population to himself, essentially becoming a DAO.” The Security Council’s veto power expires on July 24, 2026, leaving the NSC with a narrow window to fill a replacement council before it loses its essential emergency support against malicious proposals.
How the delegation plan actually works
The proposal transfers 5 million tokens from a vault containing more than 50 million ENS tokens In the authorization contract. The tokens themselves remain owned by the DAO.
Only the transfer of voting rights. Recipients will be divided into five categories with 1 million tokens each, according to Draft in ENS Forum: Casual users, application and exchange integrations, core developers, legacy domain and DNS providers, and DAO governance representatives.
The top ten nominees in each category will receive an equal share, selected according to category-specific criteria. Delegates will not have the ability to sell tokens or claim their value. If they fail to vote for six months, their mandate expires and the tokens are redistributed.
Verdict from one of the original DAO architects
The proposal arrives while ENS is also grappling A parallel plan from ENS Labs COO Katherine Wu To transfer operational control and treasury management to ENS. Brantley Milligan, one of the authors of the ENS Constitution who resigned from ENS Labs on July 4, called Wu’s plan “the equivalent of a treasury seizure by ENS Labs.” A clearer voice came from completely outside the ENS community.
Christoph Jentzsch, who wrote the code for the original 2016 “The DAO” project It now runs Tokenize.it, published on
Jentzsch’s status as a founding-generation DAO creator makes his call for dissolution the sharpest outside judgment yet on where token-weighted governance ends up when one delegate holds decisive power.
Whichever path ENS chooses now, other DAOs facing the same concentration problem will consider the answer.
