[6.24.1] [Social] Funding Request: ENS Meta-Governance Working Group Term 6 (Oct. Window)

🗳️ Meta-Governance MetaGov Discussion
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Abstract

The Meta-Governance Working Group is responsible for providing governance oversight and supporting the management and operation of working groups through DAO tooling and governance initiatives as well as treasury management for the DAO.

This social proposal is submitted to satisfy the requirements set out in Rule 10.1.1 of the Working Group Rules (EP 1.8). If this proposal is passed, the funding request will be included in a collective executable proposal put forward by all three Working Groups.

Specification

This specification is the amount requested from the DAO treasury to the Metagov Multisig to fulfill anticipated budgetary needs through the next formal funding window in April 2026.

Amount Requested

USDC ETH $ENS
ENS Meta-Gov Main Multisig 379k 0 0

This amount will cover all expected expenses outlined below while leaving a prudent reserve to ensure continuity if future funding is delayed.

Description

Current Metagov Wallet Balances

USDC ETH $ENS
ENS Meta-Gov Main Multisig 164.85k 58.63 82.47k
*Up to date balance information can be found at https://enswallets.xyz

Also taken into consideration for this funding request are existing balances, their use cases, and the coverage they provide for the next term.

USDC — $164,850. Primary operating currency for Steward/Secretary/Scribe compensation (~$49,000/month) and other Meta-Gov spend (grants, tooling, discretionary). Provides ~3.4 months of compensation runway before other outflows. Additional near-term USDC commitments include Tally front-end services contract funded by Meta-Gov.

ETH — 58.63. Held as an operational buffer/liquidity backstop. Used during the term to smooth obligations (e.g., endowment payments, budget backfills) and converted via TWAP when appropriate. Treated as reserve rather than a source for new initiatives.

$ENS — 82.47k. Originally allocated for governance distributions and other programmatic uses. Given the current balance, no additional $ENS is requested in this proposal.

These balances provide short-term continuity and risk mitigation; they do not replace the need for additional USDC to ensure uninterrupted operations between funding windows.

Expenditures

Meta-Gov sets aside funds to ensure coverage for mission-critical initiatives. While we strive to estimate term expenditures accurately, the final spending depends on pending initiatives in current & future terms.

Expected Expenses through April 2026

(including November)

USDC ETH $ENS
Steward, Secretary, and Scribe Compensation 294k - -
Contract Audits 100k - -
DAO Tooling 100k - -
Discretionary 50k - -
Total Balance 544k - -

Description of Initiatives/Pods

Steward + Secretary + Scribe Compensation: Working Group Steward, Scribe, and Secretary compensation as required by the steward working group rules.

Contract Audits: Meta-governance maintains a balance to be used for contract audits. These audits are performed independently on contracts that are to be included in executable proposals if those contracts impact or affect any ENS protocol or ENS DAO contracts or processes.

DAO Tooling: Funding research and/or develpoment interfaces and dashboards to improve the governance process and increase transparency across the DAO.

Discretionary: Funds distributed at the discretion of stewards towards new initiatives + governance experiments.

Contract audits, DAO tooling, and discretionary funds are maintained for the next term’s use.

Conclusion

With a target budget of $544K and existing USDC of approximately $165K, Meta Governance is requesting the differential for the next term.

+544K Expected
-165K Existing
=379K Requested

This funding request will allow the ENS Meta-Governance Working Group to continue its essential work in providing governance oversight, supporting the management and operation of working groups, and ensuring effective treasury management for the DAO. The requested funds will enable us to maintain our ongoing initiatives and develop new tools to enhance the governance process. We are grateful for the community’s ongoing support and engagement, which is crucial to the success of the ENS DAO. The Meta-Governance Working Group remains committed to serving the ENS community and driving the long-term growth and sustainability of the ecosystem.

Thanks @daostrat.eth for drafting this proposal and @5pence.eth for the review.

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Few questions about spending this term.

  1. MG gave your company (Blockful) 20,000 USDC, (and an additional 20,000 USDC to Lighthouse and Agora) for creating SPP voting websites. How did MG go about this process and come to the conclusion it wasn’t a conflict of interest?

  2. MG gave Lighthouse 60,000 USDC to conduct research on creating a standard for DAOs in August but I haven’t heard an update and I don’t see a forum post about it. Can you point me in the right direction where I can find information?

  3. You gave zkEmail 61,161 USDC in July. I was told it was a loan but where can I see more details about it?

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@limes - thanks for the questions. I’d suggest they’re not directly related to @netto.eth’s funding request above, but happy to answer here regardless.

To avoid @netto.eth’s conflict of interest on this, I never discussed the SPP vote front-end provider grant with Netto until after it was settled.

I discussed with @daostrat.eth and @AvsA in March and April, as the [EP 6.4] discussions began to make it clear that these dev teams were now doing significant pro-bono work with no guarantee of an SPP2 stream after the vote.

(Cam and I already agreed on the retro grant, but we felt a 3rd voice was appropriate for oversight. I chose Avsa because he is an elected foundation member, former elected metagov steward, and long time ENS contributor.)

The 60k to Lighthouse was a grant to enable them to undertake the Onchain DAO Org Identity Metadata project.

There’s a post here from when that kicked-off, and the Lighthouse team had been discussing it openly on Metagov calls. There’s other forum posts on it, some hackMDs / Notion, and a Telegram group and open meetings on it.

The amount was what Lighthouse requested in their petition to Metagov. I was personally very supportive of the grant, in hopes this team could do what other initiatives in this area have failed at, while ensuring the final standard keeps the ENS protocol at its center.

The 61k USDC to zkEmail wasn’t a grant from Metagov - it was Metagov temporarily covering a DAO obligation using our discretionary funds, so it was Metagov providing a loan to the DAO, because the assets in the Stream Management safe weren’t sufficient to pay all the back pay needed when we activated the SPP2 streams.

This forum thread explains the process, but the tl;dr is that the SPP2 streams were late in starting, and we had to pay the recipients a “back pay” payment to cover the gap between when they began accruing on May 26th and when the streams actually began flowing on July 5th. Most of the back pay payments were made using the USDCx that had accrued in the Stream Management pod, but there wasn’t enough to cover all 7 team’s backpay payments.

Metagov paid zKEmail’s backpay payment using our discretionary line item, knowing that the next funding window would replenish the discretionary category on our books.

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Lighthouse admitted in a chat that I can no longer find that their SPP site received only 1 user.

MG decided they liked this, gave them 20k, and then gave them another 60k for something that will receive 0 users?

Many people agree with me privately that you’re just paying your friends.

So much talking, so little execution with these guys.

Voting no — unclear spend is appropriate

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The majority of the work we (Lighthouse) did for SPP included:

  1. Helping design the voting mechanism
  2. Clarifying the rules/algorithm to be used to calculate the result
  3. Getting the Snapshot vote prepared and launched correctly such that the non-standard voting rules could be independently verified, and
  4. Coordinating with the other teams to make sure everyone’s calculations of the results were the same and correct (you can see our public github repo that was used as a reference).

The interface we built was the smallest piece of the work we did. Spence was correct when he said we undertook all of the above for free and with no expectation of being compensated for it (the retro was a surprise to us!).

This seems a bit harsh, given that the goal is to get Uniswap, ENS, Nouns, and other large DAOs to implement the standard, and to see it integrated by Etherscan and other dashboards. Of course the entire thing could collapse and we might fail to get any buy-in, but why are you treating that as the expected outcome that is being funded?

Not sure why you’re suddenly taking swings at us. All of the work we’ve done to date has been focused on making contributions to the community without any benefit to our business, and everything has been discussed in the open on community calls.

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I am not sure why you’ve so quickly arrived at personal attacks on DAO contributors and accusing fellow of financial misconduct, but I’m choosing to not engage. If you have clear questions, I’m happy to help clarify anything needed.

I will take this opportunity to say that we need to strongly reflect on the structure on the ENS DAO. In my opinion, we need to make some changes to be successful custodians of a critical protocol and a treasury worth over 100 million.
We should seek to be an example to other DAOs.

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I love this, but it does seem momentum’s been lost, as there haven’t been any updates since September — aside from a justification for pushing the expected delivery date to 2026, as if the holiday season shouldn’t have been taken into account.

Regarding this:

There’s been talk of evaluating what worked and didn’t over the past three years, improving structures, and rebuilding trust and accountability. But it strikes me as odd for ENS DAO to be evaluated by a group that hasn’t yet delivered the outputs expected from Meta-Gov’s generous 60k grant for the Onchain Org Standard.

The justification for the evaluation itself is somewhat baseless when the evaluators have yet to meet those same standards. If the goal is to model accountability, it should begin by demonstrating it.

That said, I really do appreciate the standard that @PublicGoods_Stewards have set with their Builder Grants site as well as the presentations that grantees deliver on the Public Goods call.

Grants should be delivered in tranches, based on milestones met, and accompanied by clear reporting so that progress, accountability, and impact can be assessed transparently over time.

It doesn’t take a PhD to figure that out.

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All due respect Marcus, they received the grant Aug 28th - or 75 days ago. They’ve been super communicative.
How much more reporting do you expect 2.5 months into a 6 to 9 month project?
They’re also new ENS DAO contributors who’ve offered to work on a very worthy subject. Let’s be supportive and helpful and give them the benefit of doubt, unless or until.

I don’t follow this - I’ve read through the hackMD a bunch and I don’t see anywhere that Fireeyes or James or Arnold imply they would somehow be evaluating anything. They just helped articulate the need.
Regardless, who the evaluators are has nothing to do with the justification for the retrospective, and the justification is nowhere near baseless.

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I’m one of the most supportive people of this initiative — that’s exactly why I’m calling attention to the recent lull in progress.

Building an org metadata standard on ENS is what will help make DAOs a legitimate option for organizations.

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AFAIK, none of the Service Providers have access to this HackMD, nor do I. Typically, a proposal of this order should be communicated to all potential stakeholders, delegates, and affected parties before public announcement.

This was first brought up during last week’s meeting — everyone was surprised.

The flashbang style of communication isn’t helpful and weakens the proposal’s legitimacy.

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Well, maybe an evaluation is warranted. But by whom? It should certainly be conducted by a nonpartisan party. It’s hard to remain neutral when attention is divided between a previous commitment and a new initiative.

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I’m withdrawing from further comment for now to avoid creating any unnecessary confusion or misunderstanding.

I’m looking forward to learning more about the prop and how it will help evolve the ENS DAO. :saluting_face:

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