DeFi drama: ENS governance battle, EF cuts and Gnosis reboot

Last week was a dramatic week for DeFi with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) DAO facing a proposal that’s been branded an attempt to “steal its treasury,” Gnosis DAO rerunning recent treasury redemption discussions, and the Ethereum Foundation announcing a 20% staff cut.

The proposal facing the ENS DAO entitled “Next Era of ENS DAO: Empowering the ENS Foundation,” would see day-to-day operations and treasury assets transferred to the ENS Foundation, “led by a full-time executive director and staff.”

It cites issues such as “delegate fatigue,” exacerbated by the DAO making “too many small decisions and too few big ones,” a lack of accountability from grant recipients, coordination problems and the potential to put treasury funds to work. 

DAOs are so dead that I see nobody noticed or discussed this proposal that @ENS_DAO essentially dissolves itself and transfers control of the entire treasury (almost half a billion in ENS + stables) to the ENS foundation. pic.twitter.com/Le0i4KLUeQ

Lefteris Karapetsas, who admits he’s “inactive and no longer participates in DAO governance,” got into a heated exchange on X with ENS lead developer Nick Johnson, who’s worried the DAO is “almost solely concerned with how best to spend the treasury.”

Karapetsas accuses Johnson of “delegat[ing] ~50% of the entire voting supply to yourself,” though Johnson counters that such low delegate participation is “a testament to how difficult it’s been to keep the DAO secure using token-weighted delegated voting.”

Almost six years ago the pair clashed on the topic.

Johnson stressed the need for the legitimacy of a DAO over treasury spending, while Karapetsas had hoped that ENS wouldn’t have a token at all.

The controversial proposal’s author Katherine Wu made a lengthy post in an attempt to “clear some things up” but, by turning off replies, has only faced further criticism.

Johnson has insisted that ENS was always meant to be a governance only token, with the treasury solely meant for “building ENS, and… funding public goods, and not to be used for anything else.”

With many upset at the direction of Ethereum’s most popular name service, an L2BEAT researcher decided to set up an “ownerless and unruggable” alternative.

announcing https://t.co/ABYbVwyopF, a ENS alternative forked from @z0r0zzz's wei(.)domains to be ownerless and unruggable. funds used to buy and renew domains are burned permanently to remain neutral. domains start from