Making ENS the standard for organizational identity

DAO-Wide Temp Check
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Workshop Notes (Workshops + Community Call)

We had our first community call on Thursday, Jul 17th. There were 10 attendees, and we did a brainstorming workshop to better explore the project. Below is a summary of our discussions.

What is the purpose of the group?

Building an open, canonical registry for DAOs (and other on‑chain organisations) on ENS. The goal is to make organisational metadata—contracts, roles, treasuries, delegates, compliance info—cheap to publish, easy to crawl, and standardised across chains.

Motivations:

  • Governance tooling currently relies on scattered, proprietary data silos.
  • Delegates, analysts, and regulators lack a single, trusted source of truth.
  • ENS already anchors personal identity; extending it to organisational identity is the logical next step.

Pain Points We’ve Observed

  • Multiple delegate profiles: delegates end up recreating their bios in two or three different dashboards.
  • High gas to update: editing an ENS text record on L1 can be expensive.
  • Opaque term limits & roles: for example, committee members are tucked away in Notion, and council/steward tenures are hard to uncover.
  • Treasury address sprawl: multisig wallets spread across chains are difficult to organise and verify.
  • Cross-chain discovery gap: “there’s no way to find and verify DAOs across chains.”
  • Custom records ≠ standard: text records can hold anything, but without a schema, tooling can’t reliably use them.
  • Transparency ≠ Accessibility: the data is on-chain, yet it isn’t machine-readable or well-indexed.

Why Now?

  • Namechain could make frequent ENS writes affordable.
  • DAOs are maturing beyond the foundation model and need legitimacy.
  • Regulatory clarity drives demand (DRC advocacy, CoinCenter, StandWithCrypto).
  • Competing data vendors are emerging—establish a public‑good standard before walled gardens form.

Example Use Cases

  • Cross-chain Dashboards: DeepDAO/L2Beat-style explorer with unified view.
  • Governance Tooling: On-chain verification of roles (council, stewards) for contract-level permissions.
  • Delegation Insights: Rich delegate directories and voting histories.
  • Treasury Management: Canonical list of multisigs and escrow contracts.
  • Research & BI: Queryable dataset for governance effectiveness studies.
  • Compliance & Reporting: Machine-readable filings for regulators.
  • Anti-capture Frameworks: Monitor concentration of control & term limits.

“This standard exposes an organisation’s structure in a trustless, canonical, and crawlable way via ENS.” — m @estmcmxci

Target Audiences

  • Developers & Product Teams (wallets, dashboards, indexers).
  • DAO Contributors & Delegates (identity & reputation).
  • Researchers & Academics (open governance dataset).
  • Regulators / Policy Groups (Company‑House‑style registry).
  • Data Platforms (Dune, The Graph, Messari, Space‑and‑TimeDB).

Suggestions for Technical Approach

  • Eventual EIP‑style spec
  • Develop Proof of Concept on testnet to validate write/read flows.
  • Parallel spec writing + implementation dog‑fooding.
  • Leverage ENS text records with agreed JSON schema.
    • CCIP‑Read optional for bulky off‑chain blobs.
    • Reference ABI registry (“ENScribe”) to map contract addresses ⇄ ABIs.
  • Deep focus on DX/UX Experience with respect to target audiences

Success Metrics

  • Adoption: X flagship DAOs publish the schema; ENS recognised as org‑ID standard.
  • Integration: Major dashboards & infra (Infura, Alchemy, Viem) support read/write.
  • Defrag: Fewer duplicate delegate profiles; smoother DX.
  • Credibility Signals: Grants/funding from ENS DAO & ecosystem.
  • Standard Cohesion: No rival specs gaining material traction.

Ecosystem Engagement Strategy

  1. Secure ENS support to anchor legitimacy.
  2. Dog‑food internally; present POC for more concrete feedback.
  3. Leverage delegates to champion adoption.
  4. Outreach to infra (Infura, Alchemy), data platforms (Dune, The Graph, Messari), and tool builders (Tally, Agora, Aragon).
  5. Maintain transparent forum thread + open spec drafts.
  6. Look to DRC/CoinCenter for regulatory alignment.

Risks & Challenges

  • Private/Proprietary Competitors may attempt closed registries.
  • Data Aggregator Moats (protecting business models) could resist.
  • Standard Fragmentation if spec isn’t authoritative enough.
  • Public‑Good vs Sustainability – funding & maintenance.

Some actions to take:

  1. SWOT & Risk Assessment (lessons from DAOstar; anti‑capture considerations).
  2. Competitor Landscape Report (Space‑and‑TimeDB, proprietary dashboards, etc.).

Quotes

  • “We believe in ENS as an identity standard for individuals, and it’s not much of a leap to make ENS an identity standard for organizations.”
  • “Promoting organizational transparency could bring legitimacy to DAOs and make them more trustworthy.”
  • “We need to strike a balance between being authoritative enough to avoid fragmentation, and being inclusive to foster adoption.”
  • “This registry could help regulators and end-users understand what stage a DAO is at and how it operates.”

Resources

All resources can be found on our public Notion page.

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