Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, unveiled its own governance token on Monday in an attempt to give voting rights for its new decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, to active users of the ecosystem.
Brantly Millegan, ENS’ director of operations, spoke about the nonprofit’s plan to switch to a DAO model and his thoughts on the ENS community’s power:
“ENS is an open public protocol. The core components of ENS are decentralized and self-running (e.g., no one can take away another person’s .ETH name), but there are a few things that require some human discretion.”
Previously, ENS was governed through a four-of-seven multisignature mechanism, with keyholders being members of connected initiatives. They handled the ENS treasury’s finances, coordinated upgrades, and maintained the.eth pricing registration system for domain names.
However, according to Millegan, replacing this multisig and transferring ENS control to the community via a DAO “has always been the idea.”
“Weu20re doing it now because we think both ENS and the DAO space have matured enough.”
When users claim ENS tokens from the protocol’s recent airdrop, the service requires them to vote right away to ratify the proposed ENS Constitution and empower the DAO to take over the multisig’s functions.
Before receiving their tokens, community members must also assign their future DAO voting power. Instead of requiring constant interactions from every tokenholder in the space each time a new vote is necessary, the delegate mechanism allows a smaller number of engaged users to make decisions for the ENS community.
Despite the fact that many ENS contributors offered to serve as potential delegates, users are not limited to the platform’s proposed list. Instead, they have the option of delegating their votes to any address they want, including their own.
Brantly spoke on the distribution of ENS tokens and the operation of a fair governance model.
“The ENS DAO will [be] one-token-one-vote, but we’ve chosen distribution rules that favor egalitarianism and users over speculators.”
He said that the organization distributed tokens depending on the number of days an individual had even a single ENS name, rather than the number of domains they had registered.
Users who pay renewal fees up to eight years in the future will receive an additional cache of tokens in the airdrop, and those who have their primary ENS name established will receive a twofold increase in the number of tokens they are otherwise entitled to. Additional claims are available to participants on the protocol’s Discord and Twitter channels.
Any revenue received by the protocol’s nonprofit organization will ultimately be spent by the DAO. Within Web 3.0, monies are to be dedicated to ENS development, the broader ecosystem, and public goods, according to Article 3 of the ENS Constitution. “There is no profit sharing motive,” Millegan said, adding that the token-based DAO system “allows for a lot of flexibility.”
The new ENS governance token had already reached a fully diluted valuation of $3.16 billion just 24 hours after its launch. One day later, at the time of publication, the figure had risen to $8 billion and was still rising.
