Anyone who closely watches Agora or Tally will have noticed a new ‘delegate’ shooting to the top of the delegate list, veto.ensdao.eth, presently holding over 3.8M delegated tokens. Please don’t be alarmed - this isn’t a governance attack, in fact it’s quite the reverse.
@avsa recently disclosed to a small group of delegates the existence and practicality of highly concerning governance attacks that could be used to target DAOs including the ENS DAO. Given the viability of these attacks and the urgency with which they need to be addressed, I’ve devised a simple contract that makes it possible for a small group of trusted DAO participants to exercise a large number of “no” votes to veto proposals that risk the integrity of the ENS DAO. To put some weight behind this, ENS Labs has delegated all of its ENS tokens - most of which are being held on behalf of Labs staff - to this account.
This contract only permits individuals who have been granted permission to use it, it only allows them to vote “no”, and before exercising this power, individuals must agree to a pledge to only use this power to veto proposals that constitute a governance attack on the DAO, or would violate the ENS constitution. The full text of the pledge can be found here: https://ens.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmbCNmTtMgjVXsqirZRy8tZbq3zh92g1g6PE3V4QGpNJ1b
Besides myself, I have extended invitations to @Griff, @lefterisjp, @AvsA and @katherine.eth, these being the 5 accounts with the most delegated tokens who have voted on all 5 of the most recent 5 onchain proposals. I am open to suggestions for other trusted individuals who should have their hand on this critical lever.
This is only the first step in protecting the DAO against governance attacks. Further ideas would require DAO action - in the short term, approving an official ‘vetoer’ role that can veto independent of vote count, and in the long term, improving delegation rates and token distribution to the point where these kinds of attacks are no longer economically viable.
