ENS Loses Identity Layer as Director Exits Over Governance Crisis

Published by James Harris on July 4, 2026July 4, 2026

Brantly Millegan, Director of Operations at ENS Labs, announced on July 4 that he is leaving the Ethereum Name Service ecosystem and shutting down ethid.org, the identity services company he operated as a service provider to the ENS DAO. The departure pulls one of the more consequential builders out of ENS at precisely the moment the protocol is attempting its most significant governance restructuring since the DAO launched.

The timing is not coincidental. Millegan cited “recent events and other reasons” without elaborating, but the context is not ambiguous: [Nick Johnson](https://thedefiant.io/news/nfts-and-web3/ens-community-member-proposes-dissolving-dao-after-founder-blocks-security-council-renewal) used a substantial block of delegated voting power to prevent the ENS DAO Security Council from renewing its term, which then triggered a community proposal to dissolve the DAO entirely. That episode, combined with the end of the Public Goods Working Group after four and a half years, signals an organization working through a legitimacy problem, not just a process dispute. The ethid.org shutdown carries concrete infrastructure costs beyond the personnel loss: projects including GrailsMarket, ENSMarketBot, and Ethereum Follow Protocol are being wound down, removing an ecosystem layer that had extended ENS from domain registration into on-chain identity, reputation, and social graph applications. EFP alone had logged over 36,000 unique list minters, 55,000 lists created, and more than one million list operations according to Dune Analytics, which is a real adoption signal, not a vanity metric.

Losing active infrastructure during a governance vacuum is a different problem than losing it during stable operations.

The ENS DAO dissolution debate now runs alongside a concrete restructuring proposal. A temperature check published on June 19 would transfer treasury management, grants, and long-term capital allocation to the ENS Foundation, which would then oversee roughly $143.5 million, comprising approximately $86.9 million in endowment funds and $56.6 million in liquid assets. ENS token holders would retain authority over protocol upgrades, pricing, and board appointments, but operational control would shift decisively. The proposed shift to foundation-controlled treasury management is a pattern seen across maturing DAOs that find open token voting too slow or too easily captured for day-to-day capital decisions, though it also concentrates risk in a smaller set of actors.

The Public Goods Working Group’s closure adds a separate signal. Its last funding round distributed $450,000 USDC and 72.5 ETH across 12 projects, including $375,000 in strategic grants co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation. Former working group lead Simona Pop described the closure as a missed opportunity for ENS to fulfill the role Vitalik Buterin calls “ecosystem hero.” Whether the proposed Foundation structure can absorb that function, or whether the restructuring simply consolidates financial control while leaving the ecosystem-building mandate unaddressed, is the question the governance debate has not yet answered.