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 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.