ENS Co-Founder Proposes Delegating 5M ENS Tokens to Reform DAO Governance

Alex Van de Sande, a co-founder of the Ethereum Name Service ($ENS), proposed Monday that the $ENS DAO delegate 5 million $ENS tokens from its dormant community treasury to individual participants, a step he said would end the DAO's reliance on what he called “just a 1-of-1 multisig.”

“Currently, one delegate has enough quorum to not only execute any proposal, but also to outvote the next 50 other delegates,” Van de Sande said in the proposal, in an apparent reference to $ENS co-founder Nick Johnson.

Van de Sande filed the idea as a formal draft, “Reform DAO governance by delegating 5M $ENS tokens,” in the Meta-Governance section of the $ENS DAO's discourse forum. In a post on X, he said participants would not own or be able to sell the delegated tokens, which belong to the DAO, and floated adding another 5 million tokens next year, an undelegation trigger after six months of inactivity, and a full sunset of the arrangement after two years.

Van de Sande said the proposal draws on unclaimed supply from $ENS's original airdrop five years ago, which set aside half its tokens as a “community treasury” to be distributed over five years. That window has now lapsed with little of the allocation distributed, he said.

Part of a Wider Fight

The proposal follows weeks of conflict over control of $ENS DAO's treasury and governance. On June 19, $ENS Labs COO Katherine Wu published a temp-check proposal to shift the DAO's operational wallet, $ENS holdings and Karpatkey-managed Endowment to a five-seat $ENS Foundation board, as The Defiant reported.

Three days later, Johnson said he would self-delegate his $ENS to back the measure, a move delegates said gave him effective control of the outcome. Rotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas wrote on the forum that Johnson had “delegated ~50% of the voting supply to himself, essentially becoming the DAO,” and Security Council member Brantly Millegan called the proposal “the equivalent of treasury capture by $ENS Labs,” The Defiant reported.

The dispute widened in late June when Johnson, using that same delegated voting power, blocked an onchain vote to renew the DAO's Security Council, a multisig empowered to cancel malicious proposals already in the timelock queue. Johnson controls an estimated 3.26 million $ENS tokens, roughly half of all $ENS currently delegated to any address. Christoph Jentzsch, who wrote code for the original 2016 “The DAO,” responded by proposing on X that $ENS DAO dissolve itself outright, calling the DAO “broken,” The Defiant reported.

Both the Foundation temp check and the Security Council renewal remain unresolved. Van de Sande's plan would not change that dispute directly — it draws on a separate, dormant pool of DAO-held tokens — but it lands amid an active debate over whether $ENS's governance concentrates too much power in one delegate.