ENS tokenholders have approved the Next Era of ENS DAO proposal, and the executable has been carried out onchain, establishing the ENS Foundation as a fully operational organization with a full-time Executive Director, staff, and a five-member board. This post explains the motivations behind this structure, what the Foundation can now do, and how it keeps tokenholders in control of both the protocol and the Foundation itself.
Over nearly a decade, ENS has grown into core infrastructure: millions of names, integrations across wallets and apps and L2s, and a protocol that other systems rely on for resolution. ENS has also engaged with policymakers and institutions such as ICANN that help coordinate the stable and secure operation of the internet's naming infrastructure. In 2021, the core team at ENS Labs launched the ENS DAO to safeguard the protocol. Namely, the DAO placed the protocol's core contracts, pricing, and treasury under tokenholder control, which was used to fund public goods, service providers, and community programs across the ecosystem.
A DAO, on its own, does not have the legal and operational capacity to act in many of the venues where that infrastructure now needs representation. It cannot pursue recognition and stewardship of the .ens TLD at ICANN. It cannot sign agreements required for participation in IETF and W3C standards work, employ full-time staff, enforce a trademark against a phishing operation impersonating ENS, respond to legal process, or represent ENS in regulatory discussions about decentralized naming.
For years, some of that work either went undone or fell informally to ENS Labs, an engineering organization that was never mandated to serve as the protocol's institutional representative. Naming policy is being shaped at ICANN, in standards bodies, and in regulatory discussions worldwide. Until now, ENS had no formal entity built to represent it across those venues.
The Foundation is that entity. Concretely, it can now:
- Represent ENS where naming standards are developed. The Foundation can participate actively in ICANN, IETF, W3C, and adjacent forums; pursue recognition and stewardship of the .ens TLD; and coordinate with SEAL and the DNS infrastructure community.
- Engage on policy. As a legal entity, the Foundation can meet regulators and lawmakers directly on questions affecting ENS and decentralized naming.
- Hold and defend the brand. The ENS trademarks, brand assets, and other intellectual property will be consolidated in the Foundation, allowing it to act against scams and impersonation.
- Employ people accountable to the mission. The Foundation can hire full-time staff to run operations, grants, and Endowment stewardship under a board that tokenholders appoint and can remove.
- Serve as the protocol's institutional counterparty. Courts, registrars, standards bodies, and other institutions will have a defined entity through which to engage with ENS.
This also clarifies ENS Labs' role. Labs has carried parts of this institutional work by default, alongside its core work developing the protocol and apps and supporting integration of the ENS standard across the crypto ecosystem. With the Foundation operational, Labs can concentrate on product and engineering work, including ENSv2 and the infrastructure that supports the protocol.
What emerges from this vote is a system in which each part of ENS strengthens the others. ENS Labs, the ENS Foundation, and the broader community and tokenholders acting through the ENS DAO, including service providers and public goods recipients, are aligned on one thing: the protection and proliferation of the ENS protocol in the decades to come.
To be clear, under the new proposal, the Endowment, which is funded from .eth names registration fee revenue, keeps its assets in place, and its transactions now pass through a nine-day timelock during which the ENS Security Council can cancel anything outside the Foundation's mandate. The Foundation spends only against published, Board-ratified budgets, and it will report publicly through annual audited financials and quarterly grant updates.
The DAO's ENS tokens (54.6% of total ENS supply) remain unmoved and will continue to stay with the DAO, fully under tokenholder control, with one approved exception: a one-time transfer of 1 million ENS to the Foundation, restricted to employee compensation under a published framework.
Additionally, the ENS Foundation and ENS Labs are separate legal and operating entities, each with its own leadership and board. The Foundation does not own Labs., Labs has no governance rights over the Foundation, the Endowment, DAO-held ENS, or the protocol, and its only presence in Foundation governance is the Founder seat, one of five of in the board, which is recused from decisions concerning ENS Labs funding.
ENS Labs continues to lead core development of the ENS protocol, which tokenholders govern. Tokenholders also oversee the institution that represents them, including through their authority to appoint or remove Foundation directors. The Foundation handles the offchain work needed to support the protocol, while its Board oversees operations and ensures that ecosystem contributors, including ENS Labs, are funded sustainably. Together, ENS Labs, the DAO, and the Foundation play distinct but complementary roles, aligned around the long-term stewardship of ENS. That symbiosis makes ENS stronger while helping the onchain protocol remain credibly neutral.
The inaugural five-member Board of the Foundation will be:
- Alexander Urbelis, Executive Director. A career spanning cybersecurity law, DNS threat intelligence, and policy: General Counsel and CISO of ENS Labs, CISO of the NFL, CCO of Richemont.
- Nick Johnson, Director. Founder of ENS and CEO of ENS Labs, previously at the Ethereum Foundation and Google.
- Kartik Talwar, Independent Director. General Partner at A.Capital Ventures and co-founder of ETHGlobal.
- Brett Sun, Independent Director. Co-founder of Prelude, previously led technical work at Aragon including AragonID, an early ENS integration.
- Anthony Leutenegger, Independent Director. CEO of Aragon, a major ENS integrator, and a delegate at Lido and Morpho.
Independent directors serve two-year terms renewable by tokenholders. Each director brings distinct experience that ENS will need in this first term.
Existing commitments continue through their agreed terms: stewards, active funding streams, grants, and current-term commitments carry on, and the Foundation will work with the parties involved on a transition plan for the grants program, SPP3, and the current working-group structure. Foundation roles will be posted publicly as staffing needs are defined.
With the proposal executed, the Foundation can begin implementing its approved operational, financial, policy, and institutional responsibilities. ENS Labs will continue operating under its own leadership and governance, building ENSv2 and the products and infrastructure that support the ENS protocol, while tokenholders retain control of protocol decisions and oversight of the Foundation's directors.
ENS set out to prove that critical internet infrastructure can be credibly neutral, publicly governed, and built to outlast any single company. The full governance record is available in the executable proposal, the onchain vote, and the execution transactions.
Follow the work that the ENS Foundation will be doing here: @ENSfndn. More will come from the official Foundation channel soon!
This post summarizes the Next Era of ENS DAO: Empowering the ENS Foundation proposal. In case of any conflict between this summary and the executable proposal, or the Foundation's governing articles, those documents control.