ENS Governance Infighting Escalates: Co-founder Proposes Delegating 5 Million ENS to Dilute Single Large Holder's Voting Power

ENS co-founder Alex Van de Sande has proposed delegating 5 million ENS tokens from the DAO treasury to community participants, diluting the voting dominance of a single large holder and pushing for decentralized governance reforms.
(Background: ENS announced a major upgrade—migrating from Ethereum to L2, integrating TLD top-level domains, a hierarchical registration system... and the token price surged)
(Additional context: Taiko DAO launches on-chain governance, appoints 4 directors—including a former Binance executive and a Harvard professor—to strengthen decentralization)

Table of Contents

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• Delegating 5 million tokens is not a no-cost operation
• Background of ENS governance disputes
• Implications for DAO governance

ENS co-founder Alex Van de Sande proposed a new plan on July 7: delegate 5 million idle ENS tokens in the ENS DAO treasury to community participants, thereby diluting the voting dominance of a single large holder and driving DAO governance reform.

At present, the voting structure of the ENS DAO is effectively in a “one person alone constitutes a quorum” state—one representative’s voting power can reach quorum, execute any proposal, and its weight exceeds the combined voting power of the next 50 representatives. In other words, ENS DAO’s governance decisions are actually dominated by a very small number of people.

Delegating 5 million tokens is not a no-cost operation

Van de Sande emphasized that the delegated tokens still belong to the DAO, and participants only gain voting rights and cannot sell or transfer them. This is essentially a temporary delegation of voting rights over the DAO’s own assets to active participants, so that governance outcomes align more closely with the will of the community majority.

If estimated based on ENS’s current total voting power of about 40 million tokens, 5 million tokens represent roughly 12.5% of the weight—enough to offset the concentrated votes of 1–2 large holders, which is meaningfully significant for governance balance.

Background of ENS governance disputes

This round of internal governance infighting has not been smooth or without friction. Previously, ENS Labs proposed transferring the DAO operating wallet, ENS token holdings, and fund allocation to a five-member board, which triggered accusations that “the treasury has been captured by insiders.”

Over the past year, ENS has also gone through infrastructure upgrades—including migrating from the Ethereum mainnet to L2 networks, integrating TLD top-level domains, and implementing a layered registration system. These upgrades raised community expectations for governance efficiency, while also exposing decision-making bottlenecks caused by concentrated voting power.

Implications for DAO governance

ENS’s current governance situation is not unique. In most DAOs, voting power is concentrated in the hands of early participants or airdrop whales, and the “one person alone constitutes a quorum” structure also exists in protocols such as MakerDAO and Aave. The delegation proposal put forward by the ENS co-founder offers a replicable template: DAOs do not have to wait for tokens to be distributed to passively disperse power; instead, they can proactively allocate voting rights of their own treasury resources to active members to rebuild governance balance.

If this proposal is approved, it will provide a new reference point for DAO governance—not by passively waiting for weight dispersion through tokenomics, but by actively converting treasury resources into leverage for governance participation.