I see the community being greatly divided over the utility of ENS tokens recently. Just my two cents, but here’s an idea that might work for all, no matter what side you’re on:
To get a certain % off of registrations and renewals proportionally to the staked amount, excluding premiums.
I think a discount charge model could be favorable. It seems to have worked out well for the tokens of multiple CEXes so far.
This could be rightfully implemented by offering a choice to either lock [some of] your $ENS in a staking contract for a set period of time, OR use that same amount to vote on proposals.
A quick explanation here:
If the staked tokens can be used for both voting and discounts at the same time, it’s incentivizing squatters (which many of you deem unwelcome I assume).
If the staking isn’t fixed-term, anybody could buy $ENS up just to buy or renew a domain at discount, then dump it right away.
I know it isn’t much of a difference when one only wants to pay a year for a $5 domain, but hey, anything between 10-90% could make a difference in case of many years or 3-4 letter domains.
TL;DR: If somebody is a true believer of ENS and willing to stake hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of $ENS for a predetermined time period, they could be rewarded accordingly.
Actually I do not like ANY idea of $ENS motetization.
It should be officially(!) positioned as voting token only.
The fact that the token has the price should be considered as a fact but not as a target.
This way we will avoid any claim of officials, that $ENS is financial asset and should be registered (or pay fees for it has not be registered and approved by officials)
The argument that $ENS should not be monetized to avoid claims of officials is a bad argument. It is out of the juridiction of any country, and they litterally can’t stop or control this technology: this is why Ethereum was built in the first place.
$ENS is a responsability. Taking on responsabilities must be rewarded somehow, otherwise nobody’s gonna take them on. On the other end, we don’t want $ENS to become a business whose sole goal is to extract the maximum value from domain registrants, which would go against the interest of the Ethereum ecosystem.
So monetization (somehow) is how we incentivize Ethereum’s stake holders to participate in the governance. We need to align the incentives: what’s good for the individual $ENS stakeholder (a) must be good for all domain registrants (b), which must also be good for the whole Ethereum ecosystem (c).
To align (a) and (b), just give a reason for domain registrants to hold $ENS. In that regard, staking $ENS for a discount is the solution. Aligning (ab) and (c) is easy; growing the $ENS ecosystem would grow the Ethereum ecosystem. So now we have (abc) working hands in hands
I am much in favor of the proposition and agree that staked $ENS should not be used for voting !
