Meeting time/day: Moved from Tuesdays 9am ET to Thursdays 4pm UTC (the former Public Goods WG slot), to reduce scheduling conflicts and fit stewards’ availability.
Recording: Calls will now be recorded on video and captured by an AI note-taker. A standardized summary will be posted to the forum after each call. There is no Scribe this term, so the stewards will maintain the meeting record. This makes the calls verifiable for future reference and easier to participate in asynchronously.
Cadence: Remains bi-weekly, for a higher density of updates and less time spent in meetings.
Delegate All-Hands
The first MetaGov call of each month is a delegate all-hands. Attendance is highly encouraged: the aim is for every delegate to join at least one call per month, so we can coordinate faster and move the important discussions forward together.
Overview
The ENS MetaGov Working Group holds public bi-weekly calls. The calls are open to community members and the general public.
The ENS MetaGov Working Group calls are facilitated by the appointed ENS Stewards and led by the lead MetaGov steward. If you need to get in touch with any member of the working group, please message them on the forum, TG, or on X.
How to Add to the Agenda
If you have items that you would like to add to the agenda please message any of the ENS MetaGov stewards.
How to Use this Thread Agenda will be posted along with call summaries. Please do not post in this thread unless requested by one of the Stewards.
Full recording of the call can be referenced at this link.
Discussion Topics and Notes:
Endowment Updates and Conversations Around Options
Kpk provided their customary endowment updates (see call for specifics).
Introduction of Options: A public forum discussion is active regarding the introduction of structured products and onchain options to the IPS. The main goals are to broaden the investment universe, hedge the endowment’s massive ETH position, and gain yield rewards on stablecoins (such as by selling cash-secured puts).
Noted Concerns Around Options:
Market Regimes & Volatility: A speaker noted that recent ETH volatility has been extremely high (around 35% to 40%), meaning it may not be the optimal time to underwrite cash-secured puts compared to simply deploying funds into lending protocols.
Complexity vs. RWAs: The strategy introduces notable complexity; it was suggested that a tokenized RWAs money market strategy might offer attractive-enough yields with far less structural complexity.
Capping the Upside: Another voiced strong skepticism about using a highly volatile asset class like crypto for options, explaining that selling options limits the endowment’s long-term upside for minimal immediate profit, frequently causing it to miss out on much larger market spikes when assets are inevitably assigned.
Settlement and Fees: Some prominent options platforms use cash settlement rather than physical settlement (meaning the endowment wouldn’t physically receive ETH), and platform fees could create an unfavorable yield gap compared to centralized venues.
Addressing the Concerns:
Volatility Bands: To address the risk of market downturns leading to increased directional exposure (via selling puts), the team agreed that establishing explicit volatility bands and predefined regimes is non-negotiable. Every position would have to be strictly assessed under the assumption that an assignment will occur, abiding by pre-determined ETH-Stable allocation ratios.
RWA Progress: Kpk confirmed that RWAs are a core part of the upcoming updates, which will add five to six new venues to supply funds into yield vaults. They noted, however, that the endowment faces strict KYC constraints on certain products.
SPP3 Updates and New Marketplace RFP
Applications for the marketplace RFP are officially live on the forum. They will remain open for two weeks, closing at midnight UTC on August 5th.
A public call regarding the RFP is scheduled for next Wednesday, July 29th, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time.
Concerns Raised:
Participants expressed concern over the phrasing of the new RFP, fearing it implied a team could win the contract simply by promising to vibe code a requested list of features without actually proving they have the ability to execute, brand reach, or underlying capability to generate revenue.
Addressing the Concerns:
The committee determined that a formalized RFP was the only objective way to address the ecosystem’s marketplace needs fairly while thoroughly vetting applicant considerations. The RFP language was left intentionally broad to allow for both existing marketplaces and new, well-known teams (outside of ENS) to apply.
Prioritizing Brand Reach: The committee agreed that user reach and brand recognition are disproportionately valuable when judging applicants. Even if a team like OpenSea came in to simply code an ENS add-on to their existing site, their sheer reach and name recognition would warrant strong consideration. Such an application would have a lot more weight than a team without clear track record and distribution channels, despite lofty promises within their application. However, the committee noted they must balance this against the potential downside of undermining the grass-roots, ENS community-facilitated purchasing driven by platforms like Vision or Grails. Judging the pool will become more clear as applications flow in.
Grant Programs and MetaGov Goals
The Funding Gap: A member pointed out a gap where experimental, unproven, but innovative ideas from developers are entirely ignored due to a lack of structured grant support, causing developers to abandon their projects, especially since there’s now only one working group to facilitate such programs.
MetaGov team indicated that they’re exploring the right model for keeping these contributors around—and assessing how MetaGov can collaborate with Labs/Foundation to help with this process. It’s on the roadmap.
Public Goods vs. Ecosystem Grants: The group established that public goods and ecosystem experimentation grants are completely separate challenges. True public goods are shared responsibilities that should be broadly funded as a united effort of capitalized Ethereum ecosystem players. Conversely, ecosystem grants operate like a venture capital firm, where the DAO should expect a 90% project failure rate in exchange for one massive breakthrough that elevates the entire ecosystem. MetaGov will have to assess how to frame upcoming grants given many of these public goods projects are harder to attach to clear ROI.
Retroactive Funding Pitfalls: The group analyzed optimism-style retroactive funding. While idealized in concept, it frequently devolves into a subjective popularity contest or becomes so programmatic that critical web-based applications get entirely shut out due to rigid criteria. Furthermore, it leaves teams slighted when funding isn’t received despite all the work that they put in. The consensus was that such funding models are suboptimal.
Growth and Business Development (BD): The SPP3 team wishes they saw stronger growth and BD proposals. The growth submissions had heavy external dependencies—requiring Labs to implement actual code or requesting extra funds for incentives. To combat this, the group agreed that the word “growth” be distilled into specific, quantifiable terms: integrations, grown revenue, or name sales. Additionally, it was stated that BD/sales teams must have variable compensation tied strictly to performance quotas rather than merely asking the DAO for a flat salary to “hopefully” drive growth. BD/growth/sales-based grant programs are difficult to implement—and yet, with anyone able to create MVPs and launch vibe-coded products, MetaGov agreed that such a program is needed more than ever.
Goals and Leadership Duties of MetaGov: Because past working groups have dissolved, MetaGov stands as the only funded body directly representing the DAO. Acknowledging critics who claim DAOs are highly inefficient and stagnant, the stewards were encouraged to step up, own their leadership roles, make hard decisions, and actively pitch concrete ideas to the community. The consensus concluded that making a wrong choice and letting the group course-correct is far healthier than doing nothing and allowing the DAO to stagnate.
Full recording of the call can be referenced at this link.
Discussion Topics and Notes
Delegation Incentives Updates
Zeugh provided updates on the delegation incentives program.
Round One Performance: Month one officially closed in July. A total of 24,000 ENS tokens were increased in delegations to active voters across 28 total delegations.
The team is organizing the data for the MetaGov stewards to transparently distribute the 5,000 ENS reward pool on the forum.
Impact of Broader Narratives: The program suffered from low engagement and visibility, pulling roughly 15,000 impressions. Zeugh noted that ongoing discussions regarding the foundation proposal and security council gave governance a smaller perception of importance, hindering outreach to token holders who are not yet active in governance.
Round Two Strategy: Round two is live with 25 days remaining in the month under tier one parameters (a 5,000 ENS pool). Strategy adjustments include expanding outreach via portals and newsletters, seeking introductions to platforms with distribution to ENS holders, and hosting Twitter live streams starting this week to drive up participation.
SPP3 Application Phase Closure
SPP Committee shared brief status updates regarding the program and marketplace RFP.
Review Timeline: The marketplace RFP application period officially closed, bringing in nine total submissions (eight of which are currently qualified). The committee started a two-week review period running through August 19th.
Next Steps for Applicants: The committee is reviewing submissions immediately and will reach out to applicants via Telegram to initiate group chats and schedule formal interviews.
Flow Rate Management: Active streams under SPP3 officially began on August 1st. Streams for providers legacy to SPP2 who did not transition have concluded, and certain stream flow rates have been adjusted alongside active committee streams.
Grant Architecture and Foundation Flux
The group extensively debated how MetaGov should approach grants and ecosystem support given the passage of the foundation proposal.
Narrow Scope vs. Active Support: Participants raised concerns about MetaGov overstepping its boundary, arguing that MetaGov’s core mandate is strictly “governing governance” rather than taking over the entire scope of the now-dissolved ecosystem and public goods working groups. Other stewards countered that narrowing the scope too heavily or prematurely conceding territory puts the working group at risk of being completely phased out or minimized by the foundation.
Spending and Budget Uncertainty: Stewards agreed that spinning up entirely new, large ad hoc small/medium grant programs or allocating fresh budgets right now is counterproductive while the foundation prepares its own overarching spending mandates. Existing operational activities, such as Marcus’s newsletter and community social support, will continue to receive funding.
There’s Still Stuff Happening: The presence of SPP3 and the new Marketplace RFP indicates that ecosystem initiatives are still occurring. Activity has not dissipated entirely, and so, the forceful addition of new grant programs may not be wise at the present time.
Endowment Status
Karpatkey presented the weekly financial and operational metrics for the ENS endowment.
Portfolio Health: The current NAV stands at $78.2 million, yielding a blended APY of 3%. The July strategy generated $191,000 gross for the DAO, while August month-to-date earnings have reached $28,000.
RWAs: An update will move forward soon to add four new RWA yield vault venues.
Execution Conflict: The team noted that deploying the pending onchain parameter update proposal (P10) might conflict with the foundation’s timeline. Since ownership of the endowment safe is transferred to the foundation’s multisig, launching the proposal onchain beforehand could render the payload null. No rush.
P-256 Migration Impact Report
Marcus presented a retrospective impact report detailing the efficiency results of the P-256 migration executable that went live on March 9th.
Efficiency Metrics: Since the March 9 implementation, the migration reduced the cost of a single DNS signature verification from 1.34M gas to 10.5K gas, a 99.2% reduction. Across the measured period, this saved a total of 1.12 billion gas.
Economic Realities: The speaker clarified that due to low total import volume, the total abstract gas savings equate to roughly $2,000 in real economic value.
Ecosystem & Future-Proofing: Platforms like doma xyz and Cloudflare drive a large share of current imports, and with gTLD adoption sitting at 11.5%, the infrastructure successfully future-proofs ENS against gas spikes while smoothing the technical path for broader namespaces.
This call will primarily follow an open dialogue format, as a chance for the community to continue discussing topical items from previous calls or start any new lines of discourse. To start off, we will have Blockful cover their Governor Nexus Implementation Report & Fluidkey introduce the idea of an ENSIP for Stealth Address Resolution as part of their SPP3 work.
Full recording of the call can be referenced at this link.
Discussion Topics and Notes
Governor Nexus Implementation Report
The Blockful team presented the implementation report for the Governor Nexus framework, aimed at mitigating governance risks.
The framework was built based on mapped risks within ENS governance, covering critical, high, and medium vulnerabilities.
The core architecture allows for composability with specific rule sets, keeping the existing token and time lock contracts unchanged. Three rule sets have been implemented: standard, optimistic, and bond rule sets.
Anti-Spam Design: Instead of a global limit, the system implements a per-address proposal limit paired with a permissionless threshold-based cancellation mechanism to prevent a single attacker from locking the DAO with spam.
Feedback Period: The project enters a two-week community feedback phase on the forum and GitHub before moving to an onchain proposal to fund an official audit.
ENSIP: Stealth Addresses Proposal
The Fluid Key team shared details regarding a forthcoming ENS IP focused on integrating stealth addresses for enhanced user privacy as part of their SPP3 work.
Privacy-Preserving Mechanics: The team’s wallet generates dynamic stealth addresses that refresh to a new address upon resolution, preventing external observers from tracking user balances or transaction histories.
The ENSIP aims to establish formal norms around stealth meta address text records and offchain resolution rules. This ensures that resolved stealth addresses are securely tied to the user’s primary meta address, preventing the diversion of funds.
Integration and Developer Kits: Following the submission of the ENSIP draft, the team plans to build a resolver kit to allow other wallets and applications across the ecosystem to easily support stealth addresses.
Endowment Status and Rebalancing
The kpk team provided financial updates, operational performance metrics, and asset rebalancing strategies for the ENS endowment.
Financial Overview: Driven largely by ETH price appreciation, the NAV rose to $89.2 million. The current spot blended APY sits above the benchmark, with August month-to-date earnings reaching $126,000.
Asset Rebalancing Strategy: Due to market movements, the portfolio’s ETH allocation is currently overweight. Kpk is waiting to execute a withdrawal queue request from Stader to conduct a TWAP conversion of ETH into USDC to restore target balance ratios.
Transition and Blockers: The custody of the endowment Safe has officially transferred to the foundation. Further deployment steps are pending the foundation’s onboarding process, and the team remains blocked by proposal parameter update P10.
Grant Architecture and Foundation Flux
The working group continued discussions regarding its mandate, long-term scope, and collaborative structure alongside the transitioning foundation.
Boundary Debates: Stewards noted ongoing ambiguity regarding how much operational scope MetaGov should absorb from the dissolved ecosystem and public goods working groups. Key points of focus include funding programs, capital allocation, and maintaining general community engagement.
MetaGov has requested the foundation team attend a public alignment session; however, the earliest comfortable timeframe provided by the foundation for general planning and vision disclosure is at least a month out.
Operational and Rule Updates: MetaGov has begun reviewing and updating documentation, runbooks, and pulling in PRs to adjust to a one-working-group model.
SafeNotes is shutting down, announced 2026-09-01. It carried WG multisig transaction annotations back to 2024-01-01. Due to WG consolidation, for Term 7, we are simply using the forum.
Full recording of the call can be referenced at this link.
Discussion Topics and Notes
SPP3 Marketplace RFP and Nomentum Labs Update
The committee presented updates regarding the SPP3 marketplace RFP award and introduced the team managing the Grails.
The SPP committee officially selected the Grails team. As of the meeting, the onchain vote was approximately 3,500 votes shy of reaching quorum. Once passed, an award letter will be issued to initiate KYC protocols.
The Grails product will now be independently managed under a new company named Nomentum. The team is composed of a core group of three members (Throw and Encrypted presented on the call). This team brings a steeped understanding of ENS subject matter, specifically a unique comprehension of marketplace users, their behavioral patterns, and how to best deliver a product fitting their needs, as they’ve demonstrated historically, contributing significant revenue to ENS.
Future Roadmap and Milestones: Nomentum’s strategy for the RFP award includes executing a UI/UX redesign, implementing a registry agent to reduce technical hurdles for new users, and building a native mobile application to better engage their mobile-heavy user base.
October Funding Request and Scope Debates
The MetaGov working group outlined early frameworks for the upcoming October funding request and hosted a temperature check regarding its operational boundaries.
Funding Buckets: The proposed budget brief features core allocations for continuity funding (newsletter and social management), unplanned obligations buffers, team compensation, growth programs, grants, and community management. The brief has been shared with Labs and Foundation teams ahead of a formal alignment meeting.
Hackathon Support: Stewards debated whether MetaGov should fund hackathon developer outreach, a function previously managed by the Ecosystem working group. The general consensus leaned toward supporting it as a shared initiative alongside Labs, with an emphasis on establishing clear growth-mindset strategies and outcomes rather than untargeted capital deployment.
Steward Travel and Presence: A baseline approval was voiced for maintaining discretionary travel funding for events like DevCon. However, folks emphasized rigorous self-policing to ensure travel is strictly tied to explicit objectives, such as panel speaking or operating local event booths, rather than unstructured networking.
Txn Transparency Updates
Updates were provided on MetaGov txn transparency.
To maintain public visibility following the shutdown of the Safe Notes tool, a Term 7 index is being introduced to log all multisig transactions directly onto the forum.
The forum setup was concluded as sufficient due to the presence of less working group wallets.
A more sophisticated setup can be introduced if new multisigs are spun up.
Delegation Incentives
The incentive program is entering its third round for September, with rewards for round two currently being prepared for distribution.
Program Data Metrics: Blockful is preparing a multi-month breakdown report mapping voting power shifts. Recent metrics revealed a 70% decrease in active delegation voting power because a major participant (Nick) missed votes and became inactive; discounting this anomaly, the active delegator base actually saw a net 6% increase over the month.
Endowment Updates
Financial performance metrics were reviewed alongside ongoing structural shifts involving the custody of the endowment.
Driven by market movements, the endowment’s NAV rose to $93 million. August concluded with strategy earnings reaching $223,000, while the first three days of September brought in an additional $23,000. The current spot blended APY rests at 3.08%, placing performance above the established benchmark.
The portfolio remains overweight on ETH. The team has been executing a series of small tranches to convert ETH to stablecoins—primarily utilizing Fluid USDC due to its high relative returns—in an effort to restore the asset allocation back to its mandated 60/40 ratio.
Custody of the endowment Safe has officially transferred to the Foundation. Moving forward, the Foundation effectively replaces MetaGov as the official counterparty for reviewing and approving strategy additions and permission upgrades (such as the pending parameter deployments PUR10 and PUR11).
Open Discussion (ENSIP-28 Name Owned Accounts)
The group discussed a proposal seeking to expand the structural capabilities of profile architectures.
An overview was provided for an ENSIP focused on allowing a single ENS name profile to securely bundle and display multiple public accounts per blockchain network. The standard directly aims to resolve profile fragmentation issues, such as users manually cutting and pasting long lists of trading addresses onto social media platform profiles.
The proposal, which leverages existing ENSIP-24 resolver standards, was recently updated through a pull request by ENS Labs. This latest iteration introduces formal verification rules for multi-account indexing that were absent in the original draft. The authors intend to publish a detailed concept breakdown on the forum to track community feedback and monitor early developer adoption.
Full recording of the call can be referenced at this link.
Discussion Topics and Notes
SPP3 Updates and Goldsky Introduction
The team introduced Goldsky as part of the SPP3 process and provided an overview of their technical roadmap and infrastructure plans.
Goldsky is building an open-source indexing core using Rust, featuring a plug-in system for extracting blockchain data and transforming ENS v1 and v2 into unified data structures.
The deliverables include a pre-made schema, an easily deployable Postgres database, and a Rust-based API server to field queries.
Goldsky will host a cloud version with generous request limits for front-end applications, alongside offering full database access for backend integrations.
Record Attestations Discussion
An overview was presented regarding a new open standard proposal aimed at verifiable metadata for ENS names.
The system enables trusted third-party authorities or cryptographic proofs to issue compact attestations for text records (such as verifying social media handles or KYC/identity status) directly onchain.
The proposed technical architecture focuses on storing minimal proof footprints inside existing storage slots to eliminate reliance on IPFS hosted URLs.
These attestations function as immutable snapshots in time without built-in revocation mechanisms, making them ideal for static identities rather than dynamic memberships.
Blockful SPP2 Year 2 Roadmap Update
Blockful shared updates and revisions to their service provider roadmap for year two.
Blockful outlined plans to strengthen existing governance indexing on AntiCapture, provide operational support for the Security Council, review proposal call data, and finish their delegation incentive analysis.
They are moving forward with auditing and deploying Governor Nexus (a modular upgrade to ENS governance contracts) while navigating external integration dependencies for ENSIP-20 with ENS Labs.
New initiatives introduced for Year 2 include developing frameworks for an ENS referral program and analyzing potential mechanisms for 1-character and 2-character name releases.
Endowment Performance and Strategy
Financial metrics were reviewed alongside a technical proposal to introduce options strategy execution for the endowment.
The endowment NAV reached $93.27 million with an asset split of 58.24% ETH and 41.76% stablecoins, yielding a spot blended APY of 3.18%.
Strategy earnings generated over $200k USD in August and $122k month-to-date in September, while securing monthly fee rebates in wstETH from LST providers.
KPK presented the “Option Hub” tool to analyze implied versus realized volatility and price onchain option quotes (such as covered calls or cash-secured puts) to boost returns during portfolio rebalancing.
The upcoming PUR10 revision introduces automation sub-roles to the Safe, while PUR11 is set to formally introduce option venue whitelisting.
Foundation and Governance Transition Updates
Updates were provided regarding organizational structure shifts and upcoming budget timelines.
Colton announced his transition from KPK to a full-time role at the ENS Foundation, managing governance and special projects to serve as an interface between the DAO and Foundation.
The October budget request for MetaGov is currently being finalized and will focus primarily on core operational needs, with grant funding moving under separate Foundation alignment.
All four providers have quarterly report threads open. First reports are due in October
Marketplace award to Nomentum Labs: KYB completed and initial $30k tranche released
Unruggable SPP3 Updates
The team will present their progress from the first quarter of the engagement
Overview of ENSIP-31 activity on the forum
ETHBelgrade Winner (Digraphia)
Cross-script identity linking for ENS:
People whose languages use more than one script (Serbian Cyrillic/Latin, Kazakh, Chinese and others) may end up with separate ENS names for each spelling and no way to link them as one identity. The project defines an alt-script text record, where names list each other and clients treat them as one identity only when the links are mutual and the addresses match.
Governance Research
Academic research on DAO governance:
Talha Karadayi, a PhD researcher at Istanbul University working from Henley Business School, will speak about his study on how DAO governance works in practice.
Endowment Updates
Standing update from kpk, following the August community update posted September 17.
Update #10: Permissions module ownership was transferred to the Endowment Safe on September 24.
October funding request
The October funding window is open.
Expected forum post within a couple of days detailing line item requests for Term 7.
Full recording of the call can be referenced at this link.
Discussion Topics and Notes
SPP3 Updates and Unruggable Presentation
Updates were provided regarding SPP3 operations and Unruggable’s work on agent identity and DNS integrations.
Finalized KYB and award notice for Nomentum, released their first $30,000 funding tranche.
Unruggable highlighted work on AI agent identity standards, introducing ENSIP-28 for owned accounts (allowing multiple addresses per ENS name profile) and ERC-721T compatibility.
Introduced “Adapter 8004” and “Adapterscan” to bind ERC-8004 identities to existing collection NFTs using Universal Binding Identities (UBIDs) and counterfactuals to drastically lower onchain data storage costs.
Discussed alignment with DNS developments, including ICANN’s technical working group for new gTLD rounds and integrating Web2 agent standards into ENS adapter contracts.
Cross-Script Identity (Digraphia)
Leon, winner of the ETH Belgrade hackathon, presented Digraphia, a protocol for managing cross-script identity on ENS.
Digraphia addresses languages using dual official scripts (such as Serbian using Cyrillic and Latin) where phonetic conversion cannot always be reliably computed programmatically.
The application allows users to check for script “twins” and cross-link names using bidirectional text records that normalize under ENSIP-15 and map back to the same address.
Proposed potential applications for ENS, such as upsell suggestions during registration for alternate script labels and brand protection.
Future plans include drafting an ENSIP, investigating a V2 architecture utilizing dedicated resolvers, and submitting a small grant request when appropriate.
DAO Governance Academic Research
Talha, a PhD researcher, presented an overview of his qualitative academic research studying DAO governance dynamics.
The research investigates the practical and philosophical gaps between theoretical decentralization claims and the operational reality of power distribution within DAOs.
The methodology utilizes ethnographic and phenomenologic approaches, analyzing forum discussions, documentation, and conducting interviews with members across multiple DAOs.
Endowment Performance Updates
Financial metrics and research updates were reviewed for the endowment.
Portfolio net asset value reached $98 million with a target asset split near 60% ETH and 40% stablecoins, yielding a blended APY of 3.28% (outperforming the 2.86% benchmark).
September month-to-date yield generated over $231k USD.
Executed rebalancing transactions by swapping ETH to stablecoins to maintain asset splits and adhere to the runway floor required by the IPS.
Adjusted protocol exposure caps by removing funds from Fluid to stay below the 32% protocol limit.
Options research to be posted on the forum for community discussion soon.
October Funding Request and Governance Discussion
MetaGov reviewed line items for the upcoming October funding request and debated contract audit procedures.
Budget items include steward compensation, DAO communications, a $50,000 discretionary bucket for grassroots and travel initiatives, and a conditional $100,000 bucket for smart contract audits.
Discussed ordering risks around paying for Governor Nexus audits before securing full DAO authorization, agreeing that a social proposal or approval vote should precede committing audit funds.
A proposal for the budget request should be published in the coming days.
MetaGov WG Calls, Term 7