ENS Founder Uses Half of DAO Voting Power to Kill Security Council Vote

Published by James Harris on June 30, 2026June 30, 2026

Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS, used roughly half of the protocol’s active voting power to kill a renewal vote for the ENS DAO Security Council on June 30, 2026, deepening a governance crisis that has now produced two major conflicts in under two weeks. The move was unilateral, unannounced in the earlier off-chain Snapshot process, and immediately prompted Lefteris Karapetsas, a longtime Ethereum community member, to declare the DAO “dead.”

The stakes are not abstract. The ENS DAO treasury holds approximately $350 million in assets according to DeFiLlama, though that figure drops to around $88 million when the ENS token itself is excluded. The ENS token currently trades at roughly $4.07, more than 95% below its November 2021 peak of $85.69, which means the circulating market cap sits around $166 million while treasury assets dwarf it. That gap is precisely the attack surface the Security Council was designed to close: a sufficiently capitalized buyer could acquire enough tokens on the open market to capture governance votes and extract treasury value, a scenario the community refers to as an RFV raid. Community member AvsA put the exposure bluntly, writing that “the DAO is a $130M treasury safeguarded by at best $20M worth of tokens.”

The Security Council’s defining power, canceling proposals even after they clear a community vote and enter the timelock queue, was always going to become a flashpoint once the token price collapsed this far below treasury value.

Hours after the renewal failed, katherine.eth posted a draft for a replacement council on the ENS governance forum, proposing eight members and raising the cancellation threshold from a 4-of-8 to a 5-of-8 supermajority. The official ENS DAO account confirmed the submission and stated nominations are open until July 3. That speed matters: the new draft arrived the same day the old council’s renewal died, suggesting at least some coordination, or at minimum a prepared contingency. The proposal also flags that the definition of a “malicious” governance attack has grown increasingly unclear, which is the core problem Johnson’s vote exposed without resolving. Johnson had also backed a separate June 19 proposal by katherine.eth to transfer operational control and treasury management to the ENS Foundation, a plan critics including ENS constitution author Brantly Millegan argued would concentrate power away from tokenholders. Anyone tracking this dispute should screenshot headers, URLs, and the full record of on-chain activity, since governance narratives in contested DAOs tend to get relitigated selectively once the dust settles.

The nomination window closes July 3, and the replacement council proposal will move through ENS’s standard governance process from there. Whether Johnson participates in that vote, and how he uses his delegation, is now the only question that structurally matters.