ENS DAO Reform Next Steps
As has been discussed in a number of forum posts, working group calls and temp checks; ENS DAO needs to evolve alongside its contributors and the wider Ethereum ecosystem. Initially we had hoped that more of this feedback and next steps would have culminated in the ENS DAO into 2026 post. Today’s post hopes to outline what FireEyes sees as a clear path forward based on proposals and feedback gather to date across the ENS forum, community calls and DAO retrospective.
Core Topics Covered In This Post:
- Retro references, learnings, and considerations
- ENS Contributor Structures;
- ENS Foundation (CC Katherines temp check)
- Working Groups
- Service Providers Program (CC Brantly & Coltron’s temp check)
- ENS Governance Structures
- ENS Governor Contract
- Token based governance
Retro references, learnings and considerations
Given the results of the retro and subsequent discussion, it’s prudent for us as ENS DAO contributors to come together and develop a wide-reaching path forward which addresses the key concerns that we currently face.
As recently highlighted by Mike from metagov.org and formalised in Estmcmxci’s recent Advisory body post, there’s an argument here that spending more time and energy on forming an advisory board to come up with clear next steps and proposals for the DAO is in our best interest - This is something we would be generally supportive of.
However we’re also conscious that this process has been ongoing since December and that many WG leads, Service Providers and ENS Labs team members are keen to see specific proposals progress rather than further ideation. This pre-proposal post chooses not to be opinionated about a post-retro advisory body and instead aims to prepare proposals/outcomes that could be considered with or without a advisory board as the next step.
Regardless, the Retro has produced a set of clear considerations about ENS DAO;
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The breakdown in communication and accountability between contributors. We see this in the explicit call outs around the lack of comms between working groups, Labs and delegates. Accountability is often placed second behind political or funding-based agendas, which leads to sub-optimal outcomes for the DAO and its contributors.
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The concentration in voting power, decision making and influence within the DAO. This is clearly exemplified in the retro research with the top 10 delegates holding >70% of active voting power, and >50% of those having been delegates since the inception of the DAO. The retro also found that a significant proportion of the ‘decision makers’ around funding are also the recipients of that same funding - contributing to an inherently biased process.
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Contributor fatigue caused by the lack of ongoing improvements to our structural governance processes. This is a major factor in why the above issues haven’t been addressed or resolved. Especially clear when we realise that our organisational structures have remained largely unchanged since the launch of the DAO 3+ years ago.
This proposal aims to address these issues in a pragmatic and open manner by:
- Creating more streamlined communication and accountability within different DAO structures. Proposing an empowered ENS Foundation, a clear SPP committee structure and a public facing working group with hopes of creating new contribution and accountability mechanisms within the DAO.
- Starting research and ideation on what a new governor contract for ENS DAO would look like, with aims of reducing/changing the concentration of voting power and influence over the DAO. By introducing new governance weights, metrics and systems outside of strictly token voting (our stance is not that token voting is universally bad, just that other metrics should also be considered by a governor contract).
By introducing these new structures to ENS DAO our hope is we breed a new wave of contribution and empower the current contributors with a series of clear paths forward. Obviously this post isn’t all encompassing and we welcome any and all references to the DAOs past structures, successes, failures and retro research.
ENS Contributor Structures
ENS Foundation
As outlined in Katherine’s temp check, creating more structure and accountability mechanisms within the DAO makes sense. Empowering the ENS Foundation with financial and human capital to make key decisions around spending, direction and protocol growth is a net positive for the DAO. This foundation would be responsible for logistics including proposal structures, continuity and timing, high level funding allocation and accountability, and other operational action currently managed by working groups. All of these functions would be carried out in public, with accountability to the DAO, and subject to veto by the DAO if delegates feel a significant wrongful direction has been taken.
This post supports the empowerment of the ENS Foundation, as long as it remains a neutral and capture-resistant organisation. Cc our reply in the thread and subsequent discussion, the primary adjustment we would propose is that the foundation board be expanded to 7 people, made up as follows:
- Two truly independent parties with minimal political or financial connection to ENS, we’re imagining someone like a traditional management consultant or academic, who’s livelihood isn’t tied whatsoever to ENS’ success.
- One ENS-aligned independent party, someone from the Ethereum Foundation or similar, that understands ENS, it’s impact and wants ENS to succeed at an industry level.
- Two DAO-voted directors, where delegates are able to vote in directors they that they believe will have the DAOs best interests in mind.
- Two ENS Labs team members to be the through line between Foundation and Labs.
This board structure would have a majority of ENS focused directors to ensure operational expertise with a 50/50 breakdown between DAO and Labs, as well as a minority of external directors to maintain accountability to the DAO as a whole.
This would give the foundation the ability to move quickly and take a lot of operational strain off delegates, stewards, and other contributors. Whilst ensuring that the Foundation remains credibly neutral and representative of the wider ENS community.
Working Groups
There is broad agreement that the current WG structure needs adjustment. As outlined at the end of 2025 with Limes’ proposal to move away from the Working Group model, and further reinforced by Katherines recent temp check which aims to roll Working Groups into an ENS Foundation, there is support for dissolving working groups entirely. However, there is also support for the idea that some kind of public facing ENS working group / ecosystem support should be offered by the DAO (CC comments from Arnold, Estmcmxci and others in this post).
We would propose winding down of the current structure, handing over the majority of operational work to the foundation, while establishing one public facing Working Group, in order to provide an approachable entry point for people and orgs outside of ENS to interact with.
This working group would be responsible for activities including:
- Hosting ~weekly community calls where new contributors and community members can interface with the DAO.
- Contribute to the public awareness of ENS, the organisation and logistics of events, community engagement, and other public-facing ENS DAO activities.
- Have the ability to distribute small grants (sub $10k) to fund community contributions, experimentation, events, etc without needing explicit approval from either delegates or the foundation.
The working group would be made up of 3 self-nominated and elected stewards (following existing WG rules for steward selection), and they would be compensated at a reduced rate from the current WG compensation at a rate of ~$2,500 USD / month plus ~$1,000 in ENS tokens vested using the same structure outlined in the latest steward compensation proposal.
Service Provider Program
There has been clear agreement within delegates, ENS Labs team members and service providers that the SPP program needs to change - As has been recently addressed by Brantly & Coltron’s proposal outlining a committee model for the SPP. Although we would ideally like to see further experimentation around how teams receive funding in an ongoing way, we also realise the time crunch here with service providers needing clarity in order to move forward.
We propose taking the existing proposal and only making edits to the structure of the committee. The majority of the proposal would remain unchanged and we support the splitting of the Program authorisation and the committee model in order to:
- Give the SPP program further scope
- Define and vote on the committee
The existing proposal defines the selection process as a ranked-choice vote of self selecting ENS community members, that are then voted on by delegates. In our view, this selection process would likely lead to nearly as many political tradeoffs as the current structure of delegates voting on SPP providers.
Instead we propose a committee structure where not ALL of the committee members are voted on by delegates.
Instead - a committee structure as follows:
- 5 committee members total with one chairperson.
- Two DAO voted committee members
- Self elected, voted on in ranked-choice structure by delegates.
- One AI agent/reviewer
- This would be managed by the chair of the committee with strong accountability and controls in place.
- The model, prompts, context windows and chat logs would all be made public.
- One ENS Labs team member
- ENS Labs are the largest single contributor to ENS and ensuring there is visibility and considerations from ENS Labs within the Service provider program is important.
- Although some service providers may view this as competitive (in the sense that SPP recipients and ENS Labs both receive funding from the DAO), we believe that the inclusion of Labs is important to develop a maximumly impactful SPP program.
- On independent reviewer
- An independent review from either:
- A fully disconnected reviewer from a traditional management organisation like EY, PWC, Deloitte, or similar.
- A less disconnected but still independent reviewer from an org like the Ethereum Foundation, Metagov.org or similar.
- This part of the committee will certainly require tradeoffs, however making sure there is some level of unbiased review of service providers and their outputs is something we think is worth prioritising.
- An independent review from either:
- Two DAO voted committee members
These roles would be compensated as described in the original proposal.
ENS Governance Structures
ENS Governor Contract
ENS DAO has operated using same governor contract since the DAO launched in 2021, while it has been a dependable and secure approach, we believe that this is now overdue for re-examination.
This section is not a proposed path forward, and instead, aims to open discussion up in parallel with the wider restructure. We think exploring potential paths forward for the ENS governor contract to be upgraded to allow more flexibility in voting, delegation, badges and other features is a clear need for the DAO.
Over the past 6 years since the Governor contract was introduced, the token and DAO landscape has shifted dramatically. FireEyes has been a defender of this industry standard contract for ENS DAO to not introduce unnecessary risk to the DAO, however we believe now is the right time to begin research into alternative governor contracts, delegation structures, badges/multipliers, alternative weighting, endorsements, etc.
Issues that we’re looking to address via research into alternative governor contract implementations:
Strict token voting structures
- With the current governor contract only strict token voting can be enforced, we view token voting as an important part of ‘skin in the game governance’. However we also think evolving this governance structure into one where other characteristics and metrics could be used to impact vote outcomes is an important evolution of onchain governance.
- Exploring novel voting mechanism like:
- Token based endorsement structure
- Badgeholder systems
- Liquid democracy experimentation / split delegation for different proposal types.
- etc
- Exploring novel voting mechanism like:
Large amounts of ENS tokens delegated to inactive addresses.
- Millions of ENS tokens are currently delegated to addresses which have very low / no governance participation:
- Coinbase.eth
- imtoken.eth
- rainbowwallet.eth
- and others
- Updating the governor will allow us to unlock that voting power, and close potential attack vectors.
Delegates unable to update their address
- Several delegates over the years (ourselves included) have expressed the want to update their delegate address.
- This could be for a number of reasons:
- Compromised keys
- General opsec / cleanliness
- Old safe versions
- etc
Broader governor based experimentation
- ENS is one of the largest functional DAOs and tokens in the Ethereum ecosystem. Thinking about how we can experiment with governor contract changes that empower both ENS and the wider Ethereum ecosystem.
Conclusion
This post breaks down a number of key ideas and next steps for ENS DAO without being formally structured as a proposal in itself. This post aims to cumulate discussion on a number of different fronts and lead to the development of three key executable proposals.
- Firstly, the empowerment of the ENS Foundation; Katherine’s existing proposal with key amendments to the directorship structure and increased separation between ENS Labs and the Foundation.
- Secondly, changes to the existing working group model, reducing from 3 working groups to 1 and implementing a WG scope to be one of the most public facing structures of ENS DAO. Distributing small grants, running public calls and generally being an open and accessible part of ENS DAO.
- Thirdly, a moving from a strictly delegate-voted SPP program to a committee based program where service providers will have a clearer understanding of why their proposal was accepted/rejected and more clear accountability structures can exist.
- Finally, starting research and investigation around what we as a DAO would like to see done with the current governor contract - Exploring what re-delegation, novel voting mechanics, and other changes may look like.
We imagine each of the proposals detailed above will be developed into an executable-ready state, either:
- Independently by the original authors, incorporating feedback.
- By FireEyes with the proposed edits to each proposal.
- Together as one defined set of changes from an advisory board (cc Estmcmcxi and Metagov posts).
The goal here is to drive outcomes that delegates, service providers and ENS DAO contributors want to see happen. If each proposal author is happy with the discussion and edits both here and in their respective threads, we encourage them to formalise their proposal into a publishable state and progress towards ratification, otherwise FireEyes is also happy to develop each one of these temp checks into a fully fledged proposal.
ENS DAO has the broadest set of contribution and potential impact to the Ethereum ecosystem, we view ALL discussion happening across the forum and community calls as an important and necessary step in our journey towards a more effective DAO.
