ENS has a real opportunity to become the anchor for on-chain identity and organizational data. With the Node Metadata standard, delegate statements, conflict of interest declarations, and official lists of DAO treasuries, contracts, and apps can be published on-chain with ENS as the single source of truth.
This is the vision we have been working towards, and Tally shutting down is one more example of how this vision is a powerful one.
Tally was relied upon by 500+ DAOs, and now users are scrambling to find new voting interfaces and migrate their delegate profile data. To help solve this problem, Lighthouse Labs are launching a voting interface which you can use to review proposals, view delegate profiles, and vote on both Snapshot and Governor.
With our background in building governance systems, we were able to move quickly and the platform is already live for early-access. Check it out here.
However, simply providing another way for users to vote isn’t enough.
The industry needs to evolve. Therefore, we’re proposing to build the first ENS-native governance client that uses on-chain metadata instead of proprietary databases. Based on our work developing the ENS node metadata standard, we will couple the interface deeply with ENS so that in the future, a provider like Tally going down would not be a big disruption.
In addition to viewing and voting on proposals, ENS metadata will allow us to:
- Populate delegate profile information, including DAO-specific delegate statements and conflicts of interest
- Display detailed information on DAO treasuries, working groups, and official smart contracts
- Enable DAOs to dictate how they are presented, based on the records they have set
As a bootstrapped team with no venture backing, we’re requesting $50,000 USDC to continue this development work, either from the DAO or from working group grants. (For reference, in the last SPP program, Tally requested $300,000 and Agora requested $400,000.)
We know SPP3 and future funding strategies are still being worked out, and we were hesitant to make this ask at this time. However, timing is important, and right now we have an extremely rare opportunity where DAOs are reconsidering how to facilitate their governance operations. If we want these emerging ENS standards to be part of the conversation, we need to respond to the situation now.
This short-term funding would allow us to make the current system production ready and offer ongoing development and support. We can guarantee hosting for one year.
Here’s what we envision rolling out in the short term (3-4 weeks):
Key milestones:
- Ability to view and vote on Snapshot and Governor proposals
- View delegate profiles and history
- Delegate profiles derived from ENS metadata (using context-specific entries if found)
- Delegate statement
- Conflict of interest declaration
- Forum handles
Note: This data can already be written to the blockchain using our early access metadata interface
- Display DAO details derived from ENS metadata
- Social links and websites
- Contract addresses with human-readable metadata
- Official app URLs
- Display treasury addresses and balances
- Edit on-chain data directly from voting interface
Once complete, the Ethereum ecosystem will have a governance surface deeply integrated with ENS as a first class citizen. Delegate profiles, DAO details, and treasury data are all powered by on-chain ENS records and accessible to any platform that wants to build on them.
Our core motivation is not to increase voting, but to bring more users, registrations, and on-chain data to ENS.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on how this vision can best be achieved, and what you think of our early-access voting interface and funding request.