ENS tokenholders approve Foundation to speak for the protocol at ICANN

The change gives ENS its first legal body able to sit in rooms where a DAO cannot. Also, the body will be handling the day-to-day operations while the token voters will continue to control the protocol.  

Why a DAO couldn’t sign the paperwork

According to ENS Labs, a DAO has no standing to sign standards agreements, employ full-time people, take a trademark holder to court over a phishing clone, or answer legal process. 

Before now, most of the representative work went undone, with ENS Labs handling some of it, a role that they were not well-equipped to speak on, given that they are primarily focused on engineering.

Now that the Foundation is live, ENS Labs says that it can now focus on building, and this includes the ENSv2 upgrade. 

The Foundation is tasked with carrying the offchain load. It can now join ICANN, IETF, and W3C discussions and chase recognition of the .ens top-level domain. 

As a named entity, it is also responsible for meeting with regulators, registrars, standard bodies, and courts. It is also tasked with consolidating the ENS trademarks and brand assets so it can move against impersonators. 

What does ENS say about where the money stays?

ENS DAO’s holdings is 54.6% of the total token supply, and it will continue to stay under the control of the DAO, which comprises tokenholders. 

The Endowment, funded by .eth registration revenue, keeps its assets where they are; however, its transactions now run through a nine-day timelock. 

During this nine-day window, the ENS Security Council can terminate any transaction that falls outside the Foundation’s mandate. 

In the same post, it was highlighted that the ENS Foundation and ENS Labs are not the same legally, with each one operating as a separate entity. The Foundation does not own ENS Labs, and the latter has no governance rights over the Foundation, the endowment, or the protocol. 

The closest relationship the lab has with the Foundation is that the founder has a founder seat on the Foundation’s 5-person board; however, they are not involved in the decisions that pertain to funding for the Lab.  

Who are the members of the ENS Foundation five-seat board?

The inaugural board includes Alexander Urbelis, a cybersecurity lawyer who has served as general counsel and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at ENS Labs and CISO of the NFL, who takes the executive director role. 

ENS founder and Labs CEO Nick Johnson holds the Founder seat. 

Kartik Talwar of A.Capital Ventures and ETHGlobal, Brett Sun, the cofounder of Prelude, and Anthony Leutenegger, CEO of Aragon, make up the remaining three independent directors. 

The independent directors will be serving a two-year term, which can be renewed by the tokenholders.

The update from ENS comes in a year that has already seen some governance scuffles on the platform. In June, a temp check proposal was published with the aim of restructuring their operations with a focus on the DAO and the foundation.

Johnson, the CEO who holds an estimated 3.26 million ENS, has also been the point of some controversy as he has the ability to change the direction of votes given the size of his holdings. This came up when he was reportedly able to drive about 80% of the votes cast against a Security Council renewal in late June. 

They later approved a successor eight-member council with a stricter 5-of-8 multisig for a two-year term. 

ENS currently trades around $4.12, having declined by over 1.9% in the past 24 hours, per CoinMarketCap data. It is now below the $85.69 peak it hit in November 2021 by more than 95%.