[Temp Check] Next Era of ENS DAO: Empowering the ENS Foundation
This proposal is brought forth after many conversations, researching how comparable nonprofit open source infrastructure projects govern themselves, and reflecting honestly on the state of DAOs today. It continues the earlier proposal and revises it heavily. The earlier proposal stayed inside the boundaries of the existing DAO structure and tried to solve the problem by adding a new layer (a budget-allocating board) on top of the existing DAO structure rather than addressing the underlying structural mismatch itself. Every reform proposal put forth so far, including the aforementioned earlier proposal, has tried to fix the DAO inside that gap rather than close it. The earlier proposal gave the Foundation Board authority to allocate budgets across Labs, the Service Provider Program, and public goods. That helps with some of the problem, but it leaves the underlying structure in place and still broken.
To note: there is a lot of shared DNA between the two proposals. The critical difference is that the previous limits the expansion to the board, and this proposal argues for a substantive formation of the Foundation itself and resourcing towards the Foundation.
The root of the current dysfunction within the ENS DAO comes from the gap between what the DAO was meant to do (steward credibly neutral infrastructure) and what it actually does day to day (act as a budget committee for an organization). Decentralized voting is structurally good at the first set of jobs, and structurally bad at the second. The reason is simple: token votes are slow, they carry little context, and they force a yes or no choice. Running an organization needs the opposite. It needs repeated adjustment, judgment, and a specific person who can be held accountable.
The good news is, the web2 nonprofit foundation model is already the proven architecture for mission-driven open-source infrastructure, and ENS can build something stronger than both pure DAO governance and the closed-loop foundation model by adding the one thing the web2 model lacks, which is structural accountability to the community it serves. This proposal is not a retreat from the DAO experiment. It is an attempt to keep what the experiment proved valuable (tokenholder control of the protocol and a formal community backstop on leadership) and replace what the operating evidence has shown does not work (token weight based operational management).
ENS DAO’s coordination structures aren’t keeping pace with the importance of ENS, which remains one of Ethereum’s greatest success stories. Even so, the layer of governance between tokenholders and the people doing the work is slow and poorly defined. It now creates friction more than accountability. Over time, this dynamic tends to reward those with the most time to spend on governance politics, while overlooking the contributors who are doing the serious building work.
Here problems that were mentioned in the previous proposal will be repeated, since they are important to reiterate, and add a fifth problem that the earlier proposal underweighted:
1. Delegate fatigue is real and getting worse. Delegates are asked to vote on an expanding range of decisions, many of which they don’t have enough context to evaluate well. The cognitive load of governance participation is high, and the signal-to-noise ratio is low. Good delegates are disengaging because the cost is too high relative to the impact.
2. The DAO makes too many small decisions and too few big ones. Token holder votes are a scarce and expensive resource. We routinely spend that resource on operational questions that don’t require it, and then lack the bandwidth for the strategic decisions that do. The result is a DAO that is simultaneously over-governed and under-governed.
3. There is no accountability layer between the DAO and the entities it funds. When a grant recipient (be it a service provider, a vendor, or Labs itself) underdelivers, there is no formal mechanism to respond. There are contributors who work hard to ship in the background, but the spotlight and funding goes to those who are willing to make the most amount of noise. The absence of a middle layer means every tension surfaces as a political fight, and the lack of nuanced understanding of differing perspectives often exacerbates tensions.
4. Coordination across working groups and the SPP is slow and inconsistent. There is no body with the standing and mandate to coordinate across these structures. Decisions that should take days take months, and contributors are repeatedly blocked waiting for clarity that never formally arrives.
5. The DAO lacks a vehicle for long-term, multi-year capital strategy. The treasury, the Endowment, and the ENS supply are among the most consequential assets in the ecosystem, and token voting can ratify decisions about them but cannot operate a strategy for them. Multi-year capital planning requires continuity between decisions, professional execution, and the ability to act as a credible counterparty to institutional managers and endowment vendors. The current process provides none of these. The result is a capital base that is large and mission-critical but structurally under-stewarded.
We have learned a great deal in the nine years since the protocol launched, and especially in the four-plus years the DAO has operated, and this proposal is about the next decade. One of the core realizations is that we need to stay nimble in a rapidly changing environment: if ENS does not address these problems now, we risk being unable to move quickly enough to remain relevant.
Zooming Out: The Trajectory of DAOs and what it means for ENS DAO
We are seeing DAOs evolve in real time across the industry. Many teams building protocols that launched a DAO around the same time as ENS Labs did are currently or have already gone through structural reform. This has ranged anywhere from shifting a DAO back into a private company (trading tokens for equity), to collapsing and folding the legal entity for the DAO into the Labs team, to massively reducing the surface area of what a DAO was thought to do at inception. What this shows is that the structures we set up four years ago are evolving.
Most of those restructurings are venture-backed teams reclaiming control from DAO structures their capital model was never compatible with. ENS is not in that position, and those cases are not cited as a playbook for next steps for ENS. What the trend does establish is narrower but still important: the structures the industry set up in 2021 were experiments, not commitments, and revisiting them in light of operating evidence is normal and healthy.
With the backdrop of an evolving DAO landscape, it should be noted that what critically differentiates ENS Labs from most other Labs teams is its funding model: the standard structure across the industry is a venture-backed Labs entity (a notable exception being Ethereum itself), where entities took on external capital in order to operate. ENS Labs, on the other hand, is largely bootstrapped and self-sustaining. This was made possible by two elements: an initial $1M grant from the Ethereum Foundation, and the revenue from .eth registrations has allowed ENS Labs to operate sustainably without ongoing external funding. This is a rarity in the industry, and also means we cannot simply copy a governance playbook from elsewhere in the industry, but it does give us an opportunity to do something different in implementation.
So, in considering what makes sense for the ENS DAO: the most important factor is to be realistic about what we actually need ENS governance to do. The DAO was designed to steward credibly neutral infrastructure: own the contracts, ratify protocol changes, and prevent capture. It has ended up doing something much bigger, and not better. A DAO was never supposed to run like an operating company. Decentralized voting is structurally good at the first set of jobs (stewarding the protocol) and structurally incredibly bad at the second (making operational decisions).
Additionally, the evidence for the specific direction proposed here does not come from crypto at all. It comes from an older lineage of nonprofit organizations that run critical open-source internet infrastructure, covered in the next section.
The fact that ENS Labs, as a non-profit entity, never took on external venture funding uniquely differentiates us from other Lab Cos within the web3 industry. But looked at through the lens of an open-source non-profit in web2, it is less of a wild card. Non-profits that run critical open-source internet infrastructure following this model of initial grants + revenue, or grant + donation are extremely common: Mozilla, Linux, Signal, and many others. It made sense then that we look to those structures for learning for our own structure.
Take the Mozilla model for example. The Mozilla Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation as a wholly controlled subsidiary. The Corporation employs the developers who build Firefox. The Foundation owns the trademarks and other IP and licenses them to the Corporation. The Foundation governs the source code repository. The Mozilla Corporation is responsible to the Mozilla Foundation board. At Mozilla, the Foundation board is self-perpetuating: the existing board selects its own members and fills its own vacancies. Mitchell Baker, who co-founded the Mozilla project and led the creation of the Foundation, was on that founding board and has shaped its composition for two decades.
Signal works the same way. The Signal Technology Foundation board was assembled by Brian Acton and Moxie Marlinspike at founding, and the existing board appoints its successors. In both cases the founders and the operating leadership did the original board formation, and the structure has held up across two decades at Mozilla and seven years at Signal. In fact, founder-led or operator leadership-led initial board formation is the standard pattern across mission-driven nonprofit foundations, from the Linux Foundation to the Wikimedia Foundation to the Internet Security Research Group that runs Let’s Encrypt.
New Proposed Path: Expand the Foundation
In the examples above, the operating team and the foundation collaborate around a shared mission, with different structural choices about ownership and overlap. For ENS, we are not proposing a parent-subsidiary structure between the Foundation and ENS Labs. The two will continue as independent, mission-aligned entities, with the Foundation holding the trademarks and licensing the brand to Labs, funding Labs through the existing grant relationship, and the Foundation Board allocating the broader DAO operating envelope of which Labs funding is one component.
The ENS Foundation becomes a real foundation, led by a full-time Executive Director and staff, holding the ENS mission, values, vision, trademarks, and brand assets. ENS Labs continues to operate independently under its own leadership and its own board. The Foundation funds Labs through the existing grant relationship and licenses the ENS trademarks to Labs. The new Foundation Board sits at the Foundation level and is responsible for Foundation operations, the public-goods grants program, treasury and Endowment stewardship, and allocation of the broader DAO operating envelope.
The Foundation and Labs will work closely together to advance the ENS mission, the Foundation from a strategy, advocacy, and stewardship perspective, and Labs from a product and engineering perspective. The Foundation holds the ENS trademarks and brand assets and licenses them to Labs, and funds Labs through its existing grant relationship. Labs preserves full operational independence on engineering, product, and corporate governance decisions and is governed by its own board. Like comparable models in the web2 open-source nonprofit space, these two entities collaborate closely on the overall mission, one from a technology and product perspective, and one from a strategic and priority-setting perspective.
There should also be areas where the Foundation pursues the furthering of the ENS mission that is not directly related to the protocol and apps - namely, in the namespace and identity standards field. That is and will always remain work that is critical to ENS but is separate (though deeply related) from a pure technological perspective. The Foundation’s authority is rooted in its mission, and is most effective at the strategy, mission, values alignment and accountability level.
Protocol Control will always stay with tokenholders
Protocol control such as smart contract upgrades, ENS pricing and fee structures, root key and registry control, and constitutional amendments remain exclusively with tokenholders. The Foundation has no role in protocol governance decisions. Director appointment, term renewal, and removal also remain with tokenholders, under the Foundation’s Articles of Association, unchanged by this proposal. The DAO’s protocol-level authority is unchanged.
To reiterate: protocol control and full appointment and removal authority over directors stay entirely with tokenholders; what changes is that day-to-day treasury operation and long-term capital strategy are delegated to Foundation governance under bylaws adopted on the basis of this proposal, 100% of application revenue continues to flow to the ecosystem, and the Foundation is barred from voting the ENS tokens it holds.
Foundation Leadership and Board
With this in mind, here is the proposed new board composition for the Foundation board. As is the norm for non-profit Foundations, the initial slate of directors is assembled through a search led by the existing ENS Foundation Board, with input from ENS Labs leadership, and ratified by the DAO. It will be five voting seats:
- One voting seat for the Founder of ENS, Nick Johnson, with succession to a designated ENS Labs representative in the event of the Founder’s resignation or departure from the Board.
- One voting seat for the Foundation’s Executive Director.
- Three voting seats for independent directors.
The Foundation’s Executive Director (ED) leads day-to-day Foundation operations, manages the public goods grant program, and works alongside Labs leadership and the Board to advance the mission. The ED is a voting member of the Board and a full-time employment position at the ENS Foundation. The Foundation Board holds exclusive authority over the ED’s employment, including hiring, termination, and compensation, exercised via board resolution. The ED’s base compensation will be set by Board resolution at the time of hiring and adjusted annually by a vote of the three independent directors with the ED recused from their own compensation decision. ED compensation will be disclosed in the Foundation’s annual budget and audited financials. The ED’s seat on the Board remains subject to tokenholder removal authority under the Articles, like every other seat; removal from the Board does not itself terminate the ED’s employment, which remains a Board decision.
Independent directors serve two-year terms, renewable by the DAO at the end of each term. Independent directors are compensated at 40,000 USDC per year, in line with standard expectations for board service of this scope. Should an independent director elect to not receive compensation, the compensation will instead be donated to a non-profit or public good of their choosing.
Following a search process led by the existing ENS Foundation Board with input from ENS Labs leadership, the proposed inaugural slate is:
Executive Director: Alex Urbelis
- Alexander Urbelis is General Counsel and Chief Information Security Officer of the Ethereum Name Service. Previously, he was Chief Information Security Officer of the National Football League and Chief Compliance Officer of Richemont. Alex is the architect of a DNS-based threat intelligence platform that detected a state-sponsored intrusion targeting the World Health Organization at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, work for which he was named a Financial Times Innovative Lawyers finalist in 2020. He is a Visiting Professor of Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, where he teaches cybersecurity law. Alex holds a Bachelor of Civil Law from New College, University of Oxford; a JD, magna cum laude, from Vermont Law School; and a BA in Philosophy from Stony Brook University, where he graduated summa cum laude.
Director: Nick Johnson
- Nick Johnson is the founder and CEO of ENS Labs, the team behind the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), the decentralised protocol for human-readable names on Ethereum. He previously worked at the Ethereum Foundation and spent several years as a software and site reliability engineer at Google.
Independent Director: Kartik Talwar
- Kartik Talwar is a General Partner at A.Capital Ventures and a Co-Founder of ETHGlobal. Previously, he was a Software Developer and served as an Investor at SV Angel, where he played a key role in leading crypto and technical investments. He has been instrumental in originating and promoting early stage investments in over 100 successful companies including Coinbase, Aztec, Etherscan, Farcaster, Anchorage, Uniswap, OpenSea, and Optimism. Kartik holds a degree in Astrophysics and Mathematics from the University of Waterloo.
Independent Director: Brett Sun
- Brett is a cofounder of Prelude, an early stage venture fund supporting entrepreneurs in crypto from the earliest stages. He has over a decade of professional experience in the industry and comes from an engineering background. In 2015 he joined Ascribe to build one of the earliest NFT platforms on Bitcoin and from 2017-2020 led Aragon’s technical efforts, where he deployed AragonID as one of ENS’ earliest protocol integrations, servicing over 1k subdomains.
Independent Director: Anthony Leutenegger
- Anthony Leutenegger is the CEO of Aragon. Anthony built the new generation of Aragon from the ground-up, giving Aragon new life. Aragon is one of the largest integrators of ENS utilising DAO.eth and Aragon.eth for business and personal accounts on Aragon. Anthony previously co-founded Generic Protocol and worked at Vocdoni, a voting protocol. Anthony is one of the largest delegates at Lido and Morpho. In another life Anthony was a National Geographic photographer and graduated from the University of Waterloo, he’s based in Switzerland but hails from Canada.
Each director’s bio above includes a baseline disclosure of material affiliations that will require recusal under the Foundation’s conflict-of-interest framework
All appointments are subject to DAO ratification.
This proposal asks the DAO to stand up an accountability layer whose initial slate is assembled by the existing Foundation Board with input from Labs leadership, and on which the Founder of ENS, who is also a member of the Labs team, holds a designated voting seat. In other words, one of the entities to be held accountable participates in constructing its overseer. Two things are true about this at once.
First, founder-led and operator-led initial board formation is the standard pattern across every comparable organization cited in this proposal. Mozilla, Signal, and ISRG were all formed this way, and those structures have held for decades. Second, and more importantly, those organizations gave their communities no recourse if the founding generation chose badly. ENS does not have to accept that tradeoff: every appointment in this proposal is subject to DAO ratification, the three independent directors are the deciding votes on all matters of Labs funding, scope, and oversight, and tokenholders retain full removal authority as described below. Not only is there precedent for structures like this in the examples we are modelling, but this arguably takes accountability one step even further.
Addressing Conflicts of Interest
To best serve the ENS ecosystem, the Foundation Board must act for the ecosystem, not for the personal, financial, or professional interests of the people appointed to govern it.
Conflicts of interest are not a signal of bad governance, rather they are an inevitable feature of any structure that draws on the people with experience and dedication to the ENS ecosystem. The question isn’t whether or not conflict will exist in the Board structure, but if we have the architecture to manage and surface conflicts transparently.
That said, the commitment to transparency and accountability will be codified in the Foundation Board’s governing documents. Directors with an actual or potential conflict of interest must disclose the interest in writing in the Board minutes. For Labs funding decisions, the Founder and Executive Director seats disclose any applicable Labs affiliation and vote. Any allocation to ENS Labs above a threshold to be set in the bylaws (initially the current ENS Labs annual budget) requires the affirmative vote of four of the five directors, ensuring that the three independent directors have a structural veto over material Labs funding decisions. All disclosures and votes will be publicly recorded and reported.
Other examples of potential conflicts of interest:
- Reviews of Director performance, compensation or removal - Directors may not participate in any board vote concerning their own performance evaluation, compensation adjustment or removal. The other four members will constitute the vote.
- Approvals on Public Goods grants - A Director with material relationships with a grant applicant in any capacity (e.g. employer, investor, advisor) must disclose the relationship immediately. Where the conflict is ambiguous, the remaining directors will determine if recusal is required.
- Financial investments - A Director with personal, professional, or venture investments that would result in a direct personal financial benefit of a board decision must recuse from that decision.
Within the first 90 days, the Executive Director will develop a detailed Conflict of Interest Policy for Board approval and public publication. Additionally, the ED’s role will include developing and getting Board approval on developing standard operating procedures (SOPs), setting a first 90 days plan and metrics for success, and other governing policies to be shared with the Board for approval.
Mission-grounded Tokenholder Removal Authority
In the traditional nonprofit model, the board holds itself accountable and nothing outside it does. The board appoints its own successors, and the community served by the Foundation has no formal recourse if the board drifts from its stated mission. That works as long as the founding generation of directors holds the line, and reputation and culture do most of the protective work, but it is structurally fragile across long time horizons.
ENS already has the building blocks needed to do better: tokenholders hold formal appointment and removal authority over Foundation directors under the Foundation’s existing Articles of Association. This proposal does not change, condition, or narrow that authority in any way. Tokenholders can appoint and remove directors under the Articles, and a removal vote that passes is valid and binding.
What this proposal adds is a documented process for exercising that authority so that removal is legible rather than chaotic. The Foundation’s bylaws will codify the following procedural prerequisites for any tokenholder removal petition: (i) the petition must allege a specific mission violation supported by documentary evidence; (ii) the petition must be filed with the Foundation Board, which has a defined window to respond, before a tokenholder vote is called; (iii) a 30-day cooling-off period applies between petition and vote; (iv) the director under petition has the right to publish a written defense alongside the petition.
These procedural requirements do not override the Articles’ grant of removal authority to tokenholders; the authority itself remains exactly as the Articles provide. They give directors, institutional partners, and counterparties confidence that removal is reserved for mission violation rather than strategic disagreement, and that the Board cannot be churned over routine differences of opinion.
ENS Foundation’s Roles and Responsibilities
Mission Driven Advocacy
The Foundation should be explicitly focused on the work that is strategically important to the proliferation of ENS. This means that work that could advance ENS in meaningful ways in the rooms where policy and standards are made.
In practice, this includes: active participation in ICANN, IETF, W3C, and adjacent forums, pursuing recognition and stewardship of the .ens TLD at ICANN on behalf of the protocol, regulatory participation like comment letters, engagement with regulators on policy questions that affect ENS or decentralized naming more broadly, and serving as the institutional point of contact for jurisdictions that need a counterparty.
The Foundation also is better suited to represent ENS as critical infrastructure in policy convenings, internet governance forums, and standards conferences where the mission-level voice carries weight that a product-company voice does not.
More concretely, the Foundation’s mission-driven advocacy mandate may include examples such as:
- Serving as the legal-process counterparty for the protocol layer, receiving and triaging subpoenas, MLAT requests, sanctions correspondence, and court orders, and pushing back on overbroad legal demands as a matter of institutional posture.
- Trademark and brand-abuse enforcement, including UDRP-style action, sunrise frameworks, and anti-impersonation work.
- Filing amicus briefs and supporting impact litigation in cases touching decentralized identity, censorship, encryption, and key control.
- Publishing annual transparency reporting on legal demands, takedowns, sanctions interactions, and major governance decisions.
- Managing name-collision and special-use-name posture at IANA/IETF (including RFC 6761 framing for .eth and .ens), and the ongoing technical liaison on the registry-of-record relationship.
- Standards leadership rather than mere participation: editing specs, chairing working groups, and hosting interop events.
- Cross-foundation diplomacy, including formal MOUs with the Ethereum Foundation, Mozilla, Signal, the Linux Foundation, ISRG, and Wikimedia.
- Threat-intelligence and protocol-security coordination across the wallet, registrar, and exchange ecosystem, plus coordinated incident response for protocol-level abuse such as phishing, drainer infrastructure, and malicious registrations.
- Comment letters and rulemaking participation across multiple regulators (not only in the US), and a defined sanctions and export-control posture (OFAC, BIS) at the protocol level, including pushback on regimes that conflict with permissionless design.
- Coordinated representation in the EU AI Act, MiCA, and adjacent regimes that increasingly touch identity primitives.
- Public-goods convening, including fellowships, academic partnerships, and research grants on identity and namespace.
- Issuing joint statements and policy positions in the Foundation’s name where Labs cannot credibly sign, and maintaining a privacy and human-rights posture (consistent with the values stack) on censorship, surveillance, and key control.
- A defined posture toward state actors and registries operating in the namespace adjacency, including alt-roots, and the DNSSEC community.
The ENS Foundation, once properly stood up, will make a determination based on its responsibilities and priorities to project initial staffing needs. Job applications will be made public.
Revenue and treasury
Under this proposal, treasury oversight is delegated to Foundation governance under bylaws adopted on the basis of this proposal, with the explicit objective of advancing the long-term viability of the ENS protocol consistent with Article III of the DAO Constitution. That includes the DAO’s operational wallet, the ENS tokens currently held by the DAO, the Endowment, and the relationship with the Endowment Manager. The Foundation’s role is to execute within a strategy that tokenholders can review and ultimately hold leadership accountable for. ENS Labs has always committed 100% of the revenue from its applications to the broader ENS ecosystem, and continues to do so under this proposal. The beneficiary of that revenue does not change. What changes is the structure responsible for long-term stewardship of ENS’s capital base.
This is the largest structural change in the proposal, as the treasury, the Endowment, and the locked ENS supply are among the most important long-term assets in the ENS ecosystem. They require a planning structure that can operate across years, not only across individual votes, funding cycles, or short-term budget decisions. One of the major shortcomings of the current model is that ENS has not had a durable vehicle for short, medium, and long-term capital planning. The result is not that tokenholders have failed to care about the ecosystem; it is that the structure has not been well suited to continuous capital stewardship.
The open source foundation model is instructive here. Organizations like Linux, Mozilla, Signal, Wikipedia all place long-term institutional stewardship at the Foundation level. That does not mean ENS should simply copy those models. In many of those organizations, the community has no formal governance backstop if the Foundation drifts from its mission. ENS can build a stronger version: the Foundation leads stewardship, and tokenholders keep control over protocol governance and over approving and removing Foundation directors.
Each year, the Foundation will publish its full annual operating budget. In addition, at the end of each fiscal year, the Foundation will publish audited financials on Treasury operations on the whole. Under the Foundation’s Articles of Association, the Foundation will also be barred from using any ENS tokens held in its treasury, including the locked DAO supply, to influence ENS governance. It will not vote those tokens on protocol upgrades, governance proposals, director appointments or removals, or any other matter. The Foundation is also prohibited from delegation, lending, pledging, or other arrangements that would indirectly transfer governance influence unless specifically authorized by DAO-approved policy.
Grants Program
Going forward, grant-making is consolidated under the Foundation’s Grants program, with focus on funding public goods and core infrastructure that benefit the ENS protocol and the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Examples of the kind of work this program would prioritize: funding Ethereum core development, ICANN-related namespace work, and infrastructure that the protocol depends on (such as eth.limo).
At the Mozilla Foundation, the Board sets strategic priorities and approves the annual envelope, the Executive Director sizes individual cohorts and award amounts, and review committees handle individual award decisions. The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), the nonprofit behind Let’s Encrypt, runs the same architecture at a smaller scale, with the founding ED sizing programs against sponsorship and donation revenue under Board-set strategy. The Wikimedia Foundation operates at a much larger scale (roughly $177M annual budget) with the same fundamental structure: Board approves the annual plan and envelope, ED and grantmaking team run the programs, program officers and committees handle individual decisions.
As our Foundation is meaningfully smaller in size compared to Wikimedia and Mozilla, it makes sense to model it after a smaller group such as ISRG. For ENS, the Foundation Board sets strategic priorities annually (this strategic plan will be published) and approves the annual budget envelope. The Executive Director sizes the public goods grant program against available revenue and the priorities the board has set. The Foundation publishes quarterly reporting on grant deployment as part of its standard financial reporting.
Note: Given the timing of this proposal and out of respect for moving pieces on programs like SPP3, the Foundation will work alongside the SPP Committee for the funding and administration of SPP3 if it passes. Upon the natural conclusion of SPP3, SPP in its current form will be absorbed into the larger Grants program. The SPP program made sense as a coordination mechanism in a DAO working-group that needed distributed contributors. In a Foundation-led model with focused grant-making, separate program administration is redundant. The Foundation’s grant program will continue to fund work that genuinely advances the ENS mission, but the structure changes. This explicitly means that the Foundation will have a dedicated Grants program, and will be managed by the Executive Director (and any staff that the ED chooses to hire). Reporting requirements from grant recipients will not change.
Working group transition
Existing stewards, active streams, and current-term commitments are honored through their natural conclusion. Working group stewards have been the backbone of DAO operations for years. The intent of this transition is not to displace that contribution, but to consolidate the coordination function into a body with the standing and capacity to carry it forward sustainably. A transition plan covering ongoing SPP3 disbursements, Endowment Manager continuity, and the timeline for moving from the current working group model to the Foundation grants program will be worked on collaboratively with all parties involved if the Foundation is stood up. Stewards and contributors will continue to have a clear path to participate in the new model, through grant-funded workstreams, advisory roles, and program-specific engagements managed by the Executive Director, so that institutional knowledge and community contribution are carried forward rather than lost.
ENS has the chance to demonstrate something the broader DAO ecosystem has not yet shown: that a foundation-led model with structural community accountability is more robust than either pure DAO governance or closed-loop foundation governance. The DAO experiment of 2021 made specific bets about running operations through decentralized voting, and the evidence now weighs heavily against those bets. The web2 nonprofit model is the proven architecture for mission-driven open-source infrastructure, but lacks a level of accountability that ENS can uniquely introduce given its tokenholder governance model. This is a chance to prove that the architecture works even better when the foundation is structurally accountable to the community it serves, on a mission-grounded standard. Ultimately, there will be fewer DAO-wide votes than today, but each one is consequential. The goal is a DAO that votes rarely and matters every time it does.