Dear ENS community,
Thank you for welcoming me into the community on the February 11th 2025 Metagovernance call.
This proposal puts forward a case for Lighthouse Labs to be considered as a service provider to the ENS DAO and will be presented on the Meta Gov call Tuesday 18th 2025.
We cover the mission of the lab, how ENS and Ethereum aligned and seek consideration for funding under the service provider program or other relevant avenues.
Lighthouse is an applied research lab for coordinating and executing Governance in a decentralised environment. You can read what we write about on our Mirror.
We are excited to share a subset of our ideas with the DAO.
- A) We have built a native mobile interface to streamline the governance processes and surface key information from on-chain data sources. We wish to continue to augment this data and build better workflows to aid participation and transparency in governance.
- B) We wish to accelerate the adoption of ENS as the canonical way to represent an organisation’s identity on Ethereum. — We need to collaborate to enable this.
- C) We have developed novel protocols that are slowly taking root, to aid governance related activities.
- D) We have developed custom software to aid internal DAO communications to streamline governance and internal stakeholder activity.
By the end of this proposal our intent is to have explained:
- How diversity in governance clients, overall enhances ENS Governance efficacy.
- Alternate interfaces provide an entry point (and opportunity) into the ENS ecosystem
- Purpose built tools, unlock nuanced interactions and properties that can aid governance
- Taking a macro perspective and exploring adjective tooling, may promote better participation in a DAO.
Why ENS DAO?
One of the earliest DAOs on Ethereum with an ongoing commitment to decentralisation and transparency.
- Uses Snapshot (https://snapshot.box/#/s:ens.eth)
- 142k followers on Snapshot
- Also, Governor (Tally | ENS)
- Governor, 6052 unique votes cast over 39 proposals (to date).
- 2968 unique voters
- ~65k addresses holding ENS (https://etherscan.io/token/0xc18360217d8f7ab5e7c516566761ea12ce7f9d72)
How many of these users who are interested in ENS are currently reachable? In an ideal world, at least 30%+ of these users should be reachable from a DAO authority.
Scope - Part A
What we can do for ENS.
Currently we are the only native app in the market that has feature parity for both iOS/Android users for governance software. An evolving feature matrix is documented here.
Many users enter the space due to the promise of governance. Our goal is to make a user’s entry and day to day exposure to ENS governance seamless, modern, and making the best of what is currently possible with Ethereum technology.
Use ENS as canonical source of truth for org data
As an DAO aggregator we have spent much of our time searching for official information that relates to an organisation.
eg. Name, Associated Tokens, Project leaders, Officially supported links, Treasury urls.
Research groups such as DAO* have championed ideas such as DAOIP-2 and more recently https://daostar.org/reports/security.pdf
We believe there exists a world where a lot of this key information can be served from ENS.
We believe we can have a middle ground where a vendor like us can write well-known information to ENS per some specification. This strengthens ENS’s position and utility in the market.
As a vendor, I would love to be able to query an ENS org and load up information that was contributed by the leaders themselves not some 3rd party.
Excuse the pseudocode.
- QUERY ens.eth
- BTREE Hats Protocol
- LIST treasuries
Furthermore we could showcase usage of:
- CCIP Reads and how to leverage Text records
Complete ENS voting support in Lighthouse (In Progress)
Ensure ENS holders are able to vote in Snapshot and Governor from their mobile.
- Snapshot is already supported
- Voting with Snapshot <> Safe on ENS
- WIP — Started ENS Governor integration
- Vote with Safe on Governor
We have already started the above work and expect this to be completed in a few weeks regardless of the outcome of this proposal.
Delegation workflows
Delegation is a key feature in modern governance. It is anchored around some key interactions as mentioned here:
Areas of research and development
- Make it “simple” for members to issue their delegate statement
- New experiment interfaces for sorting and selecting delegates
- Track/Notify rising delegates
- Flag delegates who become inactive overtime
- Embed delegate statements on a TEXT record?
We also especially love “ENS Gov - ETH - Delegation Power Changes > 5% (Last 30d)” https://dune.com/karpatkey/ens-dao-governance with Lighthouse we can understand these changes in real-time and create early warning systems to notify key stakeholders. With emerging protocols like https://lobbyfi.xyz/ it makes systems like this all the more important.
Smart Notifications
Having a dedicated mobile channel means we can create more nuanced governance interactions.
Currently, notifications are driven by on-chain events (e.g. a vote has been cast, a new proposal has been submitted, etc). This is informative, but doesn’t necessarily improve voter effectiveness.
We will supplement the current notifications with dynamic “smart” notifications which will provide each user with proactive insights. For example:
- The user is eligible to vote, but hasn’t yet, and voting closes soon
- Voting on a proposal is close, and the user’s vote could have a large impact one way or another
- Voting is coming to a close and quorum is not yet met
Below we have two clear examples from ENS where notification systems and reminder would have contributed positively to governance:
This is by no means something that is unique to ENS and somewhat systematic of the broader systems we have throughout the ecosystem in general.
Dispatch
Given our ability to connect DAO leaders with followers. We have also developed a back of office system that can be leveraged to communicate with Followers over push notifications in the following ways.
- DAO → Holders
- DAO → Holder (Segment)
- DAO → Followers
- DAO → Holders of a known token (ERC20/ERC721)
- DAO → Delegates
- Working Group → Working Group Members
This system is working but locked down as we want to better understand how DAOs want to leverage this powerful feature. We certainly do not want to contribute to more spam!
Furthermore we are actively exploring alternate mediums e.g. being able to reach holders who are reachable on Farcaster, Lens or XMTP.
We strongly believe in shifting away from centralised web2 systems and exploring decentralised messaging alternatives that are EVM aligned.
ENS onramp
In our discussions with various users and delegates, many users’ first entry point into Ethereum is governance.
Given we have a mobile app we have an opportunity to provide users with a best in class entry point into the ENS ecosystem.
This concretely means making ENS our preferred address resolution provider. This means when users use our app, when they edit their profile;
ENS features would receive first class support. I.e
- Allow a user to register a new ENS
- Allow users to extend an ENS
- Notify users when their domains expire
- Manage ENS metadata
- Purchase ENS tokens to participate in governance.
Natively without leaving the application.
While this may seem redundant, not everyone is a power user, or even knows what ENS is. It is important to understand and design experiences for brand new users.
I think back to my own experience assigning 1a35e1.eth to my address. I did not do it on the ENS website. I did it on Rainbow Wallet.
Additionally I see opportunities for vendors like ourselves to positively contribute back through referrals and renewal programs as bona fide partners.
Scope - Part B
Scope - Part A covers what we believe to be the bare minimum for improving Governance participation from a macro perspective.
Our time in DAOs observing, indexing and reading over the years has informed a new Governance product. It has been designed to serve as an ancillary protocol to augment governance activities.
We believe this is relevant as we have clear examples from within the ENS community from comments to programs advocating additional ways of incentivizing participation.
- [temp check] ENS Governance Distribution Program (v2.0)
- “Are there any plans to incentivize the average ENS holder to delegate their position to active delegates?”
- “I would be interested in testing out snapshot incentivized votes.”
Enter Signals
An article covering the design and implementation can be found here: Introducing Signals — Lighthouse Labs
Furthermore this project won the Arbitrum x RNDao Hackathon and we are currently enrolled in the Uniswap Hook Incubator to bring some of the novel properties to life.
What is this?
This is an experiment allocation software similar to Questbook. However unlike quest book; it uses governance tokens and allows the broader DAO to participate in a program’s objectives.
TL;DR?
- ENS can deploy their own set of “Signals board” with custom configurations
- DAO members can Submit, Comment on “Initiatives” by locking Governance tokens
- When Initiatives meet threshold they formally progress
- All Initiatives are dynamically ranked in real time, reflecting the natural sentiment of the DAO.
How does locking work?
Consider a board where:
- 5k ENS tokens are used as a reward for an accepted Initiative.
- Reward is distributed to supporters
- An X quorum is required to consider the Initiative passed
- A larger DAO member commits 40% support for a 1 month lock
- A coalition of smaller DAO members commit 10% and lock up for 4 months (Increasing their collective weight to 40%)
- Threshold is now at 80%
- Initiative eventually collects the remaining 20% and 5k is distributed to supporters.
How does dynamic ranking work?
- Longer locks increase weight
- Support decays (Linear or exponential based on config)
We love this mechanism as smaller DAO members are incentivised (Because of the acceptance reward) to commit their votes. If a member strongly believes in Initiative they lock their tokens to Signal their conviction.If the Initiative fails to gain traction they are able to withdraw their tokens at zero-loss after the lockup.
We believe that deploying new and novel mechanisms are needed to promote healthy participation from members across the DAO’s base. Not everyone is a high context individual however we do believe we are missing broad context though existing schemes that are solely focused on Operations.
Using the correct balance of Governance incentives (Smaller ENS holders are rewarded for making good decisions) we can create on-chain software that stimulates more productive activities.
We would love to work with the ENS DAO explore and conduct small pilot programs with this software.
Summary
As a bootstrapped vendor who has been working in the space for nearly two years now. We would love to the opportunity to work with ENS DAO to bring some or all these features to life.
We hope that this introduction gives you an insight into how the team thinks and works and regardless of what happens we would love to get the DAOs feedback on our ideas!
