TL;DR:
- The draft proposes the delegation of 5 million ENS tokens from the inactive community treasury, without transferring economic ownership of the assets.
- The voting power will be fragmented into equal shares of 1 million ENS for five groups: users, integrators, developers, traditional DNS participants, and the governance community.
- The proposal stipulates an inactivity clause that will revoke and reassign voting power if a delegate fails to participate in decisions for six consecutive months.
Alex Van de Sande, co-founder of Ethereum Name Service, presented a proposal this Monday within the framework of the discussion forum to transform ENS DAO governance. The proposal comes after days of internal tensions related to the concentration of decisions within the decentralized organization.
Redesigning voting power through multiple contracts
The core of the technical draft focuses on the asset delegation mechanism. According to details from the ENS governance forum, the plan contemplates mobilizing 5 million ENS tokens from the community treasury to a set of multi-delegation contracts. This process will exclusively grant political voting rights, meaning that the recipients will have no financial rights nor the ability to trade the assets on exchange markets.
This distribution of tokens aims to mitigate asymmetry in decision-making. According to the specifications published in the draft, voting power will be divided equally among five key categories of stakeholders: network users, infrastructure developers, platform integrators, traditional members of the Domain Name System (DNS), and the active governance community. Each of these sectors will receive a fixed allocation of 1 million ENS tokens to exert their influence on the organization’s proposals.
The model’s design includes strict accountability parameters to prevent absenteeism. Technical data suggests that each group will select a maximum of 10 candidates based on specific performance metrics. If a selected representative does not actively participate in voting for a continuous period of six months, the protocol will automatically execute the revocation and subsequent reassignment of their political power.
Context of the ENS institutional crisis
The proposal comes as a direct response to the operational paralysis affecting the decentralized naming protocol. Published reports indicate that over the last 24 hours, the current structure allows a single delegate to have sufficient quorum to independently execute proposals or unilaterally block community initiatives. This situation became evident following recent disputes linked to the renewal of the organization’s Security Council and debates over the transfer of operational competencies to the ENS Foundation.
Imbalances in community participation have accelerated the search for structural alternatives. Historical data from the platform shows that the total volume of delegated votes has maintained a downward trend over the past fiscal year. The concentration of political control in a few digital wallets motivated the development of this regulatory framework, which seeks to replicate participation models from other protocols in the decentralized financial sector to incentivize community engagement.
The advancement of the technical plan will depend on how discussions evolve within the community’s official channels. Currently, the reform proposal for ENS DAO governance remains exclusively in its draft and feedback-gathering phase within the debate forum. The organization’s internal procedure requires the publication to first pass an informal consensus evaluation before formally proceeding to a binding on-chain vote.
