ENS DAO Into 2026

[James]

ENS DAO Into 2026

ENS is a core piece of Ethereum’s infrastructure. Building a universal namespace for Ethereum is integral to its growth and success. Being managed as a DAO has led to immeasurable impact from a wide group of contributors, however DAOs clearly aren’t without their shortcomings. This has been commented on recently by Vitalik “We need more DAOs - but different and better DAOs” and become increasingly clear with Aave’s recent DAO misalignment. DAO coordination can lead to outsized impact and permissionless contribution, but can also lead to breakdowns in communication and negative outcomes for the DAO, Protocol and Community.

Additionally, ENS currently holds the 15th largest ETH treasury. ENS is uniquely positioned to grow exponentially alongside Ethereum in years and decades to come. Ensuring ENS has a functional path to contribution, robust governance practices and a well-defined road to success is incredibly important, for ENS, for Ethereum and for the world!

With the ENS DAO Retrospective currently underway, now is a key time to create space for discussing any and all ideas related to the Retrospective, The SPP, Working Groups and operational structures, from not only ENS DAO core contributors but also the wider industry. If ENS is to continue to thrive we need improved rails for contribution and incentivisation, clear accountability standards and a pathway for new high quality contributors to join the mission of driving ENS’ growth and adoption.

Recent forum conversations (CC Brantly’s SPP Committee post and previously Limes’ Working Groups post) have shown drive and willingness from DAO contributors to engage in this process. Encouraging as much feedback as possible should be the current north star of the DAO during this Retrospective process. After discussing this with Metagov.org, there was agreement that creating a ‘third space’ on the forum as a repository of feedback made sense. As such, the retro will deliver its own results independently. The aim of this thread is to create neutral space for contributors to share their feedback and ideas as we move through this broader transition within ENS DAO.

Topics discussed and/or linked in this “ENS DAO Into 2026” thread could include:

• Feedback on current DAO initiatives;

  • SPP program

  • Working groups

  • DAO processes and practices

• Feedback on your experience of (or observing);

  • Delegation

  • SPP program

  • Working Groups

  • Wider DAO contribution

• How changes could be implemented to these initiatives into the future

• Structural or procedural ideas for SPP3

• Structural or procedural ideas for the Working Group model going forward

• Useful resources for the DAO and Metagov.org (e.g. dashboards, frameworks, data, etc)

• Anything else you think is worth discussing!

Timeline:

• The Retrospective is ongoing;

  • MetaGov.org are planning to share the first milestone post from the retro in the next few days.

  • These phase one results will be shared and discussed on the the delegate all hands on the 10th of March.

  • Retro research and reporting will continue through March and into April.

• We propose that this forum post would collect feedback, ideas and recommendations during the next ~6 weeks as the retro concludes:

  • Allowing opportunity for the widest set of contributors to deliver feedback around the DAO and its initiatives.

  • During this time we would propose setting up fortnightly open calls where feedback, ideas and recommendations can be discussed live with three initial topics being: The SPP program, Working Group model and General DAO operations (likely just after the weekly MetaGov calls; 10am ET, with the first call being slated for 17th of April).

• Following this open contribution space and the final results/findings of the retro, ENS DAO contributors will synthesise this feedback into a series of proposals / potential paths forward, which can then be voted on by the DAO.

  • FireEyes is committing to taking a leadership role in this process and is excited to collaborate with everyone interested in contributing to shaping the future of ENS DAO.

    • Fire Eyes is currently preparing our own independent feedback on each of the aspects of DAO operations described as well as ideas and recommendations.

• We expect these forward-looking proposals to be presented by the end of April.

Thinking about the importance of these topics to ENS’ future success and the potential impact these decisions could make to ENS’ treasury and sustainability; incentivising strong contribution is in the DAO’s best interest. Taking an example like Optimism’s Retroactive Funding and applying it to contributions in (and outside of) this thread is an idea we think could be interesting to explore in the future.

Conclusion

ENS is one of the most important pieces of Ethereum-aligned infrastructure, one of the largest ETH treasuries and has developed some of the worlds most open DAO contribution structures.

At the same time, DAO based coordination has led to inefficiencies, political tension, and a lack of accountability. Creating this space for open discussion on DAO initiatives while metagov.org continue to drive the DAO Retrospective is a great opportunity to take stock and realign the DAO.

We’re excited for wide ranging feedback and contribution to building ENS DAO into 2026!

[estmcmxci]

Thanks for creating this space, James and nice seeing you earlier on the Contract Naming Season call. I’m contributing a framework I’ve been developing: ENS/ACC — a proposal for how the DAO decides what to fund and why, grounded in Articles III and IV of the ENS DAO Constitution.

The core argument: some ENS work would never get funded without the DAO — and some of it would. The Service Provider Program should treat those two categories differently.

ENS/ACC argues that a spectrum exists — from pure public goods (protocol infrastructure no private actor will fund) to market-sustainable work (developer tooling, consumer apps, adoption layers that attract commercial incentives once the foundation is solid). The SPP should reflect where work sits on that spectrum, not treat all proposals equally.

The framework also argues selection before allocation: before voting on amounts, the DAO should ask what ENS needs that the market and ENS Labs won’t cover. Service providers should fill those gaps — not duplicate what’s already funded, and not subsidize what the market will build anyway.

Full article → ENS/ACC: A Governance Framework for Strategic Allocation

Happy to discuss further.

[Arnold]

Thanks as always for the push, this direction makes a lot of sense to me.

Having a sink to capture the broad intent of the DAO feels useful and we’ll be submitting a few of the ideas we’ve been exploring that we’d originally had planned to carry alongside the retro.

A lot builds on our discussions at Edge City. Upon reflection, many of those conversations seemed to orient around what I’ve recently been referring to as an Institutional memory. i.e how can we (the DAO) meaningfully iterate on past work and avoid repeating the same mistakes?

Our first contribution to this dicussion.

AI for screening

As mentioned in several threads and Telegram groups: the composition of the SPP program with respect to efforts and budgets and selection is draining. We think, and are reasonably confident that frontier AI models are more than capable in helping alleviate this workload in a near-fair and unambiguous way.

Please see the accompanying thread where we present if: AI can be used as a tool to aid and streamline applications?

–

To be clear, we don’t believe there’s one catch-all god-solution that just “works”. We’re leaning towards advocating for a general policy composed of several methodologies.

[conor]

One other reflection from our experience over the past year relates to how new teams enter the ENS ecosystem.

Web3 Labs first appeared in the ENS ecosystem around the end of March last year, just as SPP2 was kicking off. At that point we were effectively an unknown quantity, so the likelihood of being selected as a service provider straight away was understandably quite low.

At the same time, we didn’t yet know whether there would be viable paths for new teams to receive support while proving themselves by building directly for ENS.

We decided to start building anyway. We had some funds saved from previous work that allowed us to support development for a period of time, even though it wasn’t enough to sustain us for long, we felt our mission was important enough to keep pushing forward.

We’ve been fortunate that the ENS ecosystem supported this effort through two mechanisms:

• a grant from the ENS Ecosystem group supporting our early contributions
• the Contract Naming Season initiative pioneered by James, which allowed us to continue pushing the work forward

Contract Naming Season in particular has already produced some encouraging outcomes for the ecosystem (many are highlighted here). A number of protocols and people have begun naming their smart contracts, developers across the ecosystem are actively using the tooling to name contracts themselves, and the first ENS token disbursements to participants have happened.

Beyond the immediate activity, these disbursements help keep ENS visible as core infrastructure for Ethereum, while also introducing more developers and teams to the role ENS can play in managing onchain identity.

One of the most interesting learnings from this work has been the connection between smart contract identity and security practices.

Some of the teams we’ve spoken with described contract naming not just as a usability improvement, but as a component of their security practices.

When teams are managing large collections of contracts across different environments, clear identity and metadata become important for avoiding operational mistakes, reducing the risk of interacting with incorrect contracts, and helping developers and users reason about contract deployments.

In that sense, ENS has a significant opportunity to serve not just as a naming system, but as identity infrastructure for smart contracts and onchain systems more broadly. Especially when you start thinking of ENS-based identity being used in a hierarchical context.

Without the ecosystem support it would have been very difficult for us to continue building, and we’re grateful the ecosystem and DAO took a chance on the work.

Our experience does raise a broader question that may be relevant as ENS looks toward 2026: how do we create clearer pathways for new teams to enter the ecosystem and demonstrate value, while also ensuring that teams receiving ongoing support continue delivering meaningful contributions to ENS?

There are many excellent teams currently working as service providers, and the work they are doing is clearly valuable to the ecosystem. At the same time, it may be worth exploring slightly more structured ways for new teams to prove themselves and begin contributing to ENS.

The Contract Naming Season experiment has been an interesting example of what that kind of pathway might look like in practice.

[bcvfinance.eth]

One structural lesson that appears across DAOs is the overlap between execution and governance power.

In many cases, the largest service providers or contributors also hold significant governance influence. While this may be unavoidable in early stages (because founders and core teams hold large token allocations), it creates an inherent tension: the same actors can end up both executing and supervising major spending decisions.

But if founders had zero governance power, many protocols would never have shipped. So the real issue is when governance remains dominated by executors for too long and independent oversight fails to emerge.

We have seen examples of this dynamic across the industry. For instance, in Aave, a recent proposal granting substantial funding to Aave Labs passed with strong voting support aligned with the funding recipient itself, despite notable criticism. Situations like this highlight the governance tension when execution and oversight are not clearly separated.

As ENS DAO matures, strengthening independent delegate oversight and maintaining a competitive service provider ecosystem may become increasingly important for ensuring fiscal discipline and accountability. When execution and governance authority are concentrated in the same actors, incentive structures can also become skewed. Developer incentives may end up rewarding the creation of new initiatives rather than measurable adoption or ecosystem growth. This can lead treasury resources to be directed toward experimentation instead of initiatives focused on user education, integrations, and real-world usage.

Another emerging dynamic across DAOs is the increasing role of AI tools in delegate operations. Many delegates are beginning to rely on AI systems for research, analysis, and drafting governance contributions. This trend is likely to accelerate and may significantly affect how governance participation scales. As this evolves, it may be worth considering how AI-supported delegate operations influence expectations around delegate capability, transparency, and accountability.