ENS proposes 5 million-token delegation plan to break founder Johnson’s vote grip
- The Ethereum Name Service DAO is preparing to give away voting power to strangers because one delegate keeps winning every vote.
- The proposal would delegate 5 million treasury tokens to vetted stakeholders across five categories, with no ownership transfer.
- ENS has three weeks before the Security Council’s veto power lapses on July 24, and no council is in line to replace it.
The Ethereum Name Service DAO is preparing to give away voting power over 5 million of its own governance tokens in a move designed to break a single delegate’s ability to decide DAO outcomes.
ENS co-founder Alex Van de Sande, posting as avsa.eth, uploaded the draft proposal to the ENS governance forum on July 6, calling for the DAO to delegate roughly $21 million worth of ENS tokens to vetted stakeholders across five categories rather than continuing to let them sit unused.
The one-delegate problem the plan is written to fix
On June 30, ENS founder Nick Johnson cast about 3.26 million ENS tokens against the on-chain renewal of the DAO’s Security Council, the emergency multisig that can cancel malicious proposals before they execute. The final tally sat near 82% against, per The Block.
Johnson’s stake represents only about 3% of the total 100 million ENS supply but roughly 50% of active delegated voting power, a gap that reflects how few tokenholders participate in ENS governance.
As Cryptopolitan earlier reported, Rotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas said Johnson had “delegated ~50% of the voting supply to himself, essentially becoming the DAO.” The Security Council’s veto authority lapses on July 24, 2026, leaving ENS a narrow window to seat a replacement council before it loses its primary emergency backstop against malicious proposals.
How the delegation plan actually works
The proposal moves 5 million tokens from a treasury holding more than 50 million ENS tokens into a delegation contract. The tokens themselves stay owned by the DAO.
Only the voting rights transfer. Recipients would be split into five categories with one million tokens each, according to the draft on the ENS forum: everyday users, app and exchange integrations, core developers, legacy domain and DNS providers, and DAO governance representatives.
The top ten candidates in each category would receive an equal share, selected by category-specific metrics. Delegates would have no ability to sell the tokens or claim their value. If they fail to vote for six months, their delegation ends and the tokens redistribute.
The verdict from one of DAO’s original architects
The proposal arrives as ENS also wrestles with a parallel plan from ENS Labs COO Katherine Wu to shift operational control and treasury management to the ENS Foundation. Brantly Millegan, an ENS constitution author who resigned from ENS Labs on July 4, called Wu’s plan “the equivalent of treasury capture by ENS Labs.” A sharper voice came from outside the ENS community entirely.
Christoph Jentzsch, who wrote code for the original 2016 “The DAO” project and now runs Tokenize.it, posted on X on July 1 that ENS should dissolve its DAO entirely and burn the key on the ENSv2 Universal Router.
Jentzsch’s status as a founder-generation DAO builder makes his call for dissolution the sharpest external verdict yet on where token-weighted governance ends up when one delegate holds decisive power.
Whichever route ENS picks now, other DAOs facing the same concentration problem will study the answer.
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FAQs
Who proposed delegating 5 million ENS tokens and why?
An ENS co-founder posting as avsa.eth proposed it on July 6, 2026, to spread voting power to outside stakeholders after the DAO's own holdings and one large delegate came to dominate governance.
How did Nick Johnson influence the Security Council vote?
ENS founder Nick Johnson voted against renewing the Security Council using roughly half of the active delegated voting supply, and the renewal was defeated with about 82% opposed, according to EtherWorld and the on-chain record.
How much treasury is at stake in the ENS governance dispute?
The Foundation restructuring proposal would place stewardship of an $86.9 million endowment and $56.6 million in liquid assets, about $143.5 million in total, under the ENS Foundation, according to Cryptopolitan.
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Micah Abiodun
Micah Abiodun makes good use of his Environmental Engineering and Management (MSc) at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) to polish content and price prediction news at Cryptopolitan. Now on his 7th year in the crypto media space, he covers major cryptos, altcoins, DeFi, stablecoins, macro trends, and emerging tech.
