How I voted for SPP round 2
Top 2 picks: Core Infrastructure – Two-Year Stream
Eth.limo and Blockful really stood out as the backbone of what we’re trying to build with this program. Eth.limo is one of the most valuable services in the ENS ecosystem — the kind of thing you barely notice until you realize how fundamental it is. It brings real utility to ENS names, and that’s a huge value add.
Blockful, on the other hand, is like the silent operator that holds the whole thing together. Whenever something needs doing — infra support, vote coordination, maintenance — Blockful is just there. They are watching out for governance attacks, and doing all the dirty work that needs to be done: they deliver.
That’s why I voted for them even over my own project, firmly believe these two make perfect sense for a two-year stream.
Unicorn
I’m biased and also confident that Unicorn comes just behind those. I think it’s critical for ENS to offer a wallet utility to names and we do that in a way that protects our users, especially since no other large wallet provider in the space seems interested in solving that in a practical way. But we don’t need a two-year stream. A one-year stream gives us a chance to prove our value to generate revenue, which we can give back to the DAO.
We are the only proposal with a plan to bring new revenue streams to the DAO and give back our SPP stream. We designed the proposal in a way that could give the DAO back over 3x what would be streamed to us, along with a revenue stream forever.
If we do not get this stream (which it doesn’t look like we will) I hope to make this offer to the DAO in a future proposal.
Foundational Teams
Namespace is a team of rockstars. They’re providing amazing infrastructure that Unicorn itself depends on. Honestly, they’re powering the direction we see ENS seeing new PMF around: SUBNAMES. Millions of DNS and ENS subnames have been issued in the last year and we should double down on this, and Namespace is the best team to do it.
Unruggable deserves recognition for being the strongest research-focused team here. Their work on L2s and gateway design has been foundational. They’re not flashy, but the quality is top-tier and they’re doing work that no other service provider is really tackling at that level.
NameHash is another one I care deeply about. What they’re doing with the ENS node is massive. Unicorn plans to integrate it, and I see them as the closest thing we have to a secondary ENS Labs. Lightwalker’s leadership is strong, the execution is solid, the only reason they weren’t higher was that the ask was high. I had to be strategic. Putting them too high could risk pushing others out of the funding round. So while I rank them extremely high in importance, I kept them lower purely out of caution around budget constraints.
Namestone is also one of my favorites! I respect their work and their SDK looks great. But we had to make a choice in Unicorn between Namestone and Namespace, and Namespace simply delivered more for us. Namestone still counts as critical infrastructure, but the overlap and their larger ask made it harder to justify putting them above the others on the list… Looking at it now, they probably won’t make the cut… we need to do something to keep them building!
JustaName: Last Minute Vote Swing
Originally I did not have JustaName on my ballot. I didn’t vote for them because I saw a lot of overlap with Unicorn and other teams above.
But when it became clear Unicorn wasn’t going to make it, and I could actually swing the vote in JustaName’s favor, I wanted to do what I could to make sure JustaName did make it.
I truly believe that wallet utility has a chance to be the next explosive growth catalyst for ENS. We have seen cb.id & uni.eth both bring huge numbers of domains registered because of their wallet integrations.
JustaName does a lot of other core ENS work that is useful, but most of all I hope they can double down on making ENS names easy for enterprise clients to integrate into their custom wallet solutions, this is what Unicorn believes is necessary for ENS adoption, and why we do what we do. Hopefully JustaName can be an ally in that battle!
I believe every web3 user should have a wallet and an ENS name… they might as well be one product, and JustaName can help make that happen.
Governance Tools
Then we’ve got x23 — I actually use this tool for Arbitrum A LOT, and I think AI tooling for governance is a space we should be backing, if we had this better integrated now, we would have a lot easier time with this vote!
Same with GovPal. These tools might not be ENS-specific infra, but they’re still important to ENS governance and the wider Ethereum ecosystem.
Agora & Tally are also valuable, so I put them on the ballot but
Everyone Else I Supported
As for the rest of the projects — a lot of them were genuinely cool and felt worth the supporting. I won’t go into detail on each one here, but if they landed on my list, it’s because I saw something valuable and wanted to support it. The $300k min price wasn’t always worth the value they would produce… but i still wanted to recognize these projects
Final Thoughts
Overall, I tried to prioritize teams doing valuable, ongoing work that’s already powering ENS or showing strong signs of becoming relevant soon. Funding is tight, so I leaned into impact, delivery, and alignment with what I think can grow the ENS user base, and strengthen the core infra.