Update: Sharing our gratitude with each of the ENS community members who have reached out to us over the past weeks with helpful feedback on our initial SPP2 proposal. This feedback was most helpful! We’ve listened carefully and taken each of your comments to heart.
We heard a consensus that highly valued the work we’re delivering for Critical ENS Infrastructure. Feedback was also very positive on the need for stabilizing ENS DAO revenues, but advice was split on what strategies were best to solve the DAO’s revenue challenges. ENSv2 Referral Programs were popular, but common feedback was for us to reduce focus on NameGraph, NameAI, NameGuard, and NameKit. We continue to see the value in those projects, but consensus was for us to put more focus at this time on Critical ENS Infrastructure such as ENSNode.
Taking all the feedback and other factors into consideration, earlier this evening we updated our proposal to reflect the following key changes:
- We removed the proposed “extended” budget of $1.3m to proactively narrow our focus on the highest value projects and provide more funding opportunities for other teams whose proposals would be great for ENS!
- Updated NameGraph, NameAI, NameGuard, and NameKit to “Standby Mode”, reallocating their next deliverables out of the SPP2 proposal scope.
- We transferred all deliverables that were previously in our “extended” scope into “basic”:
$50,000 in guaranteed funding for ENSv2 Referral Programs.
ENS TokenScope (the urgency for this skyrocketed on April 15 due to Reservoir’s announcement to shutdown their NFT API on October 15. Without ENS TokenScope providing a ready replacement, most ENS aftermarkets will have to shut down which will ultimately cause significant further collapse of ENS DAO revenue. For additional background and details, please see section 0.4.9 of our proposal above.)
added 8 key new deliverables for ENSNode to make this vital infrastructure for ENSv2 even better!
ENSAwards added as an exciting new project to our “basic” scope. This project will teach and promote standards of excellence in ENS integrations. Apps providing the best support for ENS protocol standards and edge cases will receive public awards and recognition. We believe this project can deliver big results for improving the UX and capabilities of ENS integrations in the wild! For additional details, please see section 0.4.10 of our proposal above.
Outside the scope of this SPP2 proposal, we’re also happy to report that this past week our team completed another important step in preparations for bidding in the upcoming ICANN TLD auctions. We are exploring bids on attractive new DNS TLDs that could be tokenized on Namechain to expand new channels for ENS DAO revenues beyond exclusive dependence on .eth names. ENS is more than .eth, it’s a superset of DNS. We believe stronger DNS integrations into ENS can be a fantastic opportunity for ENS’s future growth! 
Our team is honored by the endorsements received in this thread! A huge thanks to everyone for your support. Your support means the world to our team!