This isn’t true, it was not the vision for the ENS DAO to “run operations” for ENS or to vaguely “steward credibly neutral infrastructure”. You write as though the ENS DAO is in fact currently running operations but it isn’t: nearly every task that could be considered “running operations” for ENS is currently done by ENS Labs (more on this below).
The documents explaining the founding of the DAO (I wrote them) were clear that the ENS DAO did have two specific important roles:
(1) Control the levers of the protocol (which this proposal keeps), and
(2) Receive and manage the protocol treasury (which this proposal wants the ENS DAO to give up).
You write the ENS DAO isn’t meant to be a budget committee, but that’s actually exactly what it was meant to be, and we said so explicitly at the time.
These tasks are all important but they’re mostly currently being done by Labs. Moving these tasks from Labs to an expanded Foundation doesn’t help with DAO governance efficiency.
But I don’t think splitting those tasks off from Labs into the Foundation is what this proposal is really about.
What this proposal is really about
This proposal is a lot of words to say the ENS DAO should give up control of the ENS protocol treasury (one of the two primary reasons for the ENS DAO to exist) to a newly expanded ENS Foundation, where 2 of the 5 members are from ENS Labs and the other 3 were chosen by them. Essentially Labs is saying they just want to control the treasury directly.
This is because protocol revenues are way down, which means the pie is getting smaller, and Labs doesn’t like seeing other teams receive funding from that shrinking pool because Labs wants to ensure they can keep their large budget despite poor performance.
The subtext of Katherine’s post is “ENS is going poorly because of the ENS DAO”. It’s true that basically every metric for ENS has been down only since 2022. But that has nothing to do with the ENS DAO controlling the treasury.
In actual fact, nearly all operations work for ENS - protocol development, managing the brand accounts and website, the official apps, marketing, biz dev, dev rel, partnerships, everything - is done by ENS Labs. ENS Labs has had its every budget request approved by the ENS DAO. It has received and spent tens of millions of dollars. And every important proposal made by Labs for the ENS protocol itself has been passed by the ENS DAO.
Nothing about the existing ENS DAO structure has inhibited the work of ENS Labs in any significant way. And so it is not an indictment of the inefficiencies of the ENS DAO structure (which has given ENS Labs everything it’s asked for) but an indictment of the performance of ENS Labs.
My bottom line
While an expanded Foundation might be useful in other ways (I’ve offered some qualified support to Katherine’s previous proposal), transferring to them the treasury solves none of the problems ENS has right now.
As a top 10 delegate, I will vote against this and any other effort to transfer the ENS treasury away from the ENS DAO.