We have $ENS listed in several exchanges and the price is been defined by the market. A potential owner of $ENS buys $ENS because of its voting power but this gets skewed by the fluctuating price.
You don’t want to put $1000 to contribute to $ENS and after a lot of effort exit with potentially less money. Hoping for more money by getting $ENS means that your intentions are skewed, meaning you’re hoping that a lot of other people will want to vote to change things, your focus will be growing the number of voters not increasing the impact of the service.
To solve this problem I propose converting $ENS into a stable coin. Allowing people that own the token to focus on creating value and helping the governance rather than focus too much on the price of the token.
I’ll be happy to get a better insight into how other things on the value of the token and if this is even feasible.
In order for a coin to be a “stablecoin” It has to have a dollar value backing every single token.
Because of ENS’s decentralized nature, it is simply not possible to back every $ENS token with a dollar amount unless it has a flexible supply.
Having a flexible supply would simply not work with a DAO token as it would enable whales to mint as many tokens as they want, when they want to. Basically creating voting power when they need it.
There are ways to incentivize certain behavior, while disincentivizing other behavior. However, there is not really a way to prevent any specific behavior. Such is the nature of the decentralized world.
I wrote out a bit here on using incentives to encourage voting and participation. While it would not do anything to discourage speculation, nay likely the opposite, it would likely encourage participation - even by speculators, which I view as a win, converting them into participants! Feel free to give it a read and provide feedback:
Just for the record, yes it is technically possible to convert $ENS to a stablecoin (though you would probably have to re-issue the token and adjust lots of the DAO contracts to point to it). But if there is upward demand that exceeds supply the only way to keep a stablecoin stable is to issue more of it (and likewise to buy up the token if sell pressure exceeds demand). That gets reaaaaaallly complicated and I’m by default against anything complicated. But yes, deep changes to how the ENS token works are absolutely possible. They just have to be worthwhile.
It’s a good idea though I think it will be super complicated. There are stablecoins out there without any backing to dollars i.e. algorithmic stablecoins however the model the ensure the price is fixed is very complicated including incentivizing the buy / sell to adjust the supply / demand etc.