ENSv2 Activation Proposal Would Halt New ENSv1 Registrations

An Ethereum Name Service governance proposal would activate ENSv2 on Ethereum mainnet and end new .eth registrations on ENSv1, without imposing a migration deadline on existing holders.

Nick Johnson posted the proposal on Oct. 11 in the DAO forum's Draft Proposal category. It links to an onchain draft and specifies no voting or execution date.

$ENS maps human-readable names to cryptocurrency addresses. The upgrade would replace its flat registry with a hierarchy that lets name owners run their own subname registries and assign more granular permissions.

If approved and executed, the DAO transaction would remove ENSv1's existing registrar controllers and hand its BaseRegistrar to a renew-only contract. $ENS Labs would then synchronize the final set of existing names before opening ENSv2 registrations and switching name resolution to the new system.

Johnson estimates that registration gap would last a few hours, with neither version accepting new names. The draft is inconsistent about renewals during that interval: its activation instructions say they would remain possible through a new contract, while another bullet says they would pause.

Existing Names Can Stay Put

Under the plan, active .eth names and those still in their grace period would be reserved on ENSv2 for their current owners. Existing names would keep resolving from their ENSv1 records until migrated; renewing an unmigrated name would extend its ENSv2 reservation.

Migration through the $ENS app would move management to ENSv2. It would be irreversible: the old token goes to a “Graveyard” contract with no way to return it. Locked permissions on migrated wrapped names would be preserved.

$ENS's migration documentation describes separate renewal routes for names that stay on ENSv1 and those that move to ENSv2.

ENSv2 has a 28-day grace period instead of ENSv1's 90 days. The plan adds 62 days to each carried-over name's ENSv2 expiry to preserve when it becomes available to someone else.

Apps and integrations would need to use the Universal Resolver for ENSv2-compatible name resolution.

DAO Control Follows Activation

$ENS Labs would retain temporary ENSv2 admin privileges during the transition, then transfer them to the DAO timelock and renounce its own roles. The handover covers root permissions over the root and .eth registries, the .eth token in the root registry, ownership of batch-registration contracts, and administrative control of the intermediate Universal Resolver proxy.

The registrar, renewer and other ownable ENSv2 contracts are assigned to the DAO timelock at deployment, according to the proposal; registration fees also go there. The DAO already controls ENSv1.

Before ENSv2 goes live, the DAO could reverse the ENSv1 freeze through another executable proposal. However, moving BaseRegistrar ownership would remove the existing emergency-controller path for disabling ENSv1 registrar controllers without a vote.

Labs commits to publishing the handover transactions and a script verifying that its deployer account has no remaining privileged role.