ENS DAO proposes expanding Foundation powers in governance overhaul

The Ethereum Name Service DAO, otherwise known as the ENS DAO, published a temp check proposal on June 19 to restructure how the organization operates. The proposal, authored by katherine.eth and posted on the ENS governance forum, states that the DAO’s current structure forces token voters into operational decisions they sometimes have no business making.

That’s why this motion is being considered to delegate protocol-level control to token holders, while the ENS Foundation itself handles day-to-day management. Under the new proposed structure, registration revenue, treasury management, grant distribution, and coordination across working groups would move under 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),” the proposal states on the ENS governance forum.

What are the five problems the ENS DAO proposal identified? The proposal identifies five structural failures in the current ENS DAO setup. The first is delegate fatigue.

Stewards and delegates face a growing queue of votes on topics they cannot evaluate well, and the cognitive cost is pushing experienced participants out. The DAO also spends its scarce voting bandwidth on routine operational questions while larger strategic decisions suffer neglect. The third problem is the absence of a formal accountability layer between the DAO and entities it funds.

The fourth problem the katherine.eth proposal flags is the slow pace of coordination across working groups and the service provider program. The fifth problem, which only became an issue in this version of the proposal, is the amount of treasury assets, endowment, and token reserves that ENS holds.

These assets require multi-year capital planning, and while token voting can approve decisions about these assets, it cannot execute a sustained strategy. That work