thedefiant.io
The $ENS DAO Public Goods Working Group has been sunset after four and a half years of funding Ethereum infrastructure, working group lead Simona Pop said on X Thursday morning.
The group's final term committed $450,000 in $USDC and 72.5 ETH, worth roughly $123,000 at current prices, across Builder Grants, Strategic Grants and advocacy work, according to Pop and the working group's term 6 report posted to the $ENS governance forum. Strategic Grants alone totaled $375,000 $USDC in the term, co-funded with the Ethereum Foundation at roughly a 1-to-1.2 ratio.
Recipients included Vyper, the alternate smart-contract language whose deployments secure $2.3 billion in TVL across 23 chains, Argot Collective, the group of 25 former Ethereum Foundation employees now independently maintaining Solidity and Sourcify, and Remix Labs, the team behind the Remix IDE used to deploy more than 12 million contracts.
Pop credited BuidlGuidl founder Austin Griffith with building the rolling, milestone-based platform that let Builder Grants run continuously rather than in seasonal rounds. She framed the closure against $ENS's own origin: $ENS founder Nick Johnson secured a $1 million grant from the Ethereum Foundation in 2018 to build what became $ENS, work that spun out into True Names Ltd.
Pop argued the DAO is walking away from a larger opportunity. $ENS holds one of the largest treasuries in crypto and was positioned to become one of the ecosystem's "other heroes," a term Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has used, she wrote.
The sunset lands amid a broader restructuring of $ENS DAO's governance and treasury. The DAO recently opened a temp-check vote on handing treasury and day-to-day authority to the $ENS Foundation, following delegate disputes over a separate foundation proposal and a push to dissolve the DAO after Johnson blocked a security council renewal.
No new funding round has been announced to replace the working group's grants pipeline.