Ethereum Name Service co-founder proposes delegating 5M ENS tokens to reform DAO governance

ENS co-founder Alex Van de Sande put forward a proposal on Monday to delegate 5 million ENS tokens from the project’s dormant community treasury directly to individual participants. The move, he said, would end the DAO’s dependence on what he characterized as “just a 1-of-1 multisig.”

A governance crisis months in the making

The proposal didn’t materialize out of nowhere. ENS DAO has been mired in governance disputes throughout June and July 2026, with blocked votes and escalating tensions between community factions. At the center of the controversy sits Nick Johnson, ENS’s other co-founder, who reportedly holds approximately 50% of the active voting supply through self-delegated tokens.

The disputes have also touched on attempts to expand the ENS Foundation’s role, which some community members interpreted as a potential “governance attack.”

What 5 million tokens would actually change

The ENS DAO originally received an allocation of 50 million ENS tokens. Of those, 5 million were claimed early in 2021 during the project’s initial distribution phase, leaving a substantial portion sitting in treasury wallets.

Van de Sande’s proposal would take 5 million tokens, roughly 10% of the original allocation, and delegate them to individual governance participants. The tokens would remain in the treasury, but their voting power would be assigned to active participants. The ENS DAO treasury valuations range from approximately $88 million in liquid assets to over $350 million in total worth when including the underlying ETH-based endowment managed by Karpatkey.

Katherine Wu, another prominent figure in ENS governance circles, has been involved in the ongoing discussions.

What this means for ENS holders and DAO watchers

Van de Sande’s framing of the current setup as a “1-of-1 multisig” is a deliberate provocation, designed to highlight that the current governance apparatus has the trappings of decentralization without the substance. A multisig wallet typically requires multiple signers to approve a transaction. A 1-of-1 multisig is just a regular wallet with extra branding.

Delegating treasury tokens to active participants, rather than selling them or letting them sit idle, represents a middle path between hoarding assets and diluting existing holders. However, redistributing voting power means existing large holders would see their relative influence diluted — the same stakeholders who would need to approve the proposal are those whose power it would reduce.