ENS Labs COO Katherine Wu posted a revised executable draft Thursday that creates an ENS Foundation but drops the plan to hand the DAO's operational wallet to the new entity. The Foundation will instead administer only the Endowment Safe under new timelock and Security Council safeguards, after weeks of delegate opposition to the original plan.
ENS Labs COO Katherine Wu posted an executable draft Thursday that establishes an ENS Foundation but drops the plan to move the DAO's operational wallet to the new entity. The revised structure keeps the DAO's roughly 54.6 million ENS tokens and its operational wallet, which holds an estimated $16 million in ETH and stablecoins, under tokenholder control. Only the roughly $65 million Endowment Safe moves to Foundation-administered control, and every transaction there now passes through a timelock with a Security Council cancellation right.
Endowment Moves, Wallet Stays
The draft also caps the Foundation's initial token grant: a one-time transfer of 1 million ENS, restricted to employee compensation with multi-year vesting. Any further use of the DAO's remaining token holdings would still require a separate proposal through ordinary governance. The Foundation also gets no operating budget until its executive director publishes one to the DAO forum, and until then Endowment transfers are capped at $500,000 for standup costs.
According to Crypto Briefing, the original proposal was modeled after governance structures at nonprofits like the Mozilla Foundation and the Linux Foundation, aiming to professionalize grants and long-term capital planning.
Delegates Had Called the Plan a Power Grab
The retreat follows weeks of opposition to the June 19 temp check, which proposed delegating the operational wallet, ENS token holdings and the Karpatkey-managed Endowment to Foundation governance. ENS co-founder Nick Johnson said in June he would self-delegate his ENS holdings to support the plan, a move Rotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas said would leave Johnson effectively controlling the DAO. Security Council member Brantly Millegan called the plan "the equivalent of treasury capture by ENS Labs."
Governance Fight Widens Beyond the Foundation
Johnson later used his self-delegated voting power to block an onchain vote renewing the DAO's Security Council, the multisig empowered to cancel malicious proposals already in the timelock queue. Christoph Jentzsch, who wrote code for the original 2016 "The DAO," responded by proposing that ENS DAO dissolve itself outright. Separately, co-founder Alex Van de Sande has proposed delegating 5 million ENS from the DAO's dormant community treasury to outside stakeholders, an unrelated push aimed at the same concentration of voting power.
ENS traded at $4.34, up 4.2% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko, and the protocol generated $216,369 in fees over the past 30 days, according to DefiLlama. Crypto Briefing put the DAO's total treasury value between $350 million and $400 million, a figure that includes the DAO's ENS token holdings alongside the Karpatkey-managed Endowment.
Sources: The Defiant, Crypto Briefing
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