ENS DAO Faces Dissolution Proposal After Founder Blocks Security Council Vote

Published by James Harris on July 2, 2026July 2, 2026

The Ethereum Name Service is facing a genuine governance crisis, not a forum debate. On July 1, a veteran Ethereum developer with no formal ENS role proposed dissolving the ENS DAO entirely, one day after the protocol’s own founder used concentrated voting power to block a Security Council renewal that the community had already supported.

Christoph Jentzsch’s proposal is blunt: wind the DAO down over 6 to 18 months, strip administrative powers from its smart contracts, and hand the remaining treasury to an outside institution like the Ethereum Foundation or the newly formed Eth Labs. For the domain fees and treasury assets, he floated either burning funds to deter squatters or dropping registration fees to zero, then acknowledged both options have problems. He admitted the plan has “technical gaps” but argued the concept deserves serious discussion. That framing matters: when a respected outside voice is proposing dissolution rather than reform, it signals that the internal governance mechanisms have lost credibility with people who have no stake in the outcome. The pattern echoes earlier DAO governance failures where concentrated voting power and unclear accountability created exactly the conditions for treasury-targeting attacks.

That last part is not hypothetical. The ENS token trades around $4, down over 95% from its 2021 high, while the treasury holds roughly $88 million in non-ENS assets. The gap between token market cap and spendable treasury is precisely what makes an RFV raid, where an attacker buys governance tokens cheaply and votes to drain the treasury, a credible threat rather than a theoretical one.

The Security Council exists specifically to prevent that kind of attack by allowing cancellation of passed proposals before they execute. Nick Johnson’s vote against renewing it, on the grounds that his concerns about council membership were unaddressed, removed that protection while the DAO is already attracting outside scrutiny. Delegate Spengrah.eth has publicly argued the DAO “looks like it has been captured,” with meaningful voting power sitting in very few hands. ENS Labs COO Katherine Wu has posted a competing proposal for a reformed eight-member council requiring 5 of 8 votes to cancel a locked proposal, a higher threshold than the current 4 of 8, and Johnson has indicated support for that plan and put himself forward as a candidate.

Nominations for the new Security Council were set to close July 3, which means the window between the old council’s effective collapse and any replacement is narrow and structurally exposed. Whether ENS v2 can be completed within Jentzsch’s proposed wind-down timeline is an open question he raised directly, and one that has not been answered.