ENS DAO is voting to install a new Security Council, an effort to restore the emergency veto that protects the naming protocol from malicious governance after ENS co-founder Nick Johnson blocked an earlier renewal last month.
Johnson, who uses the name nick.eth, filed the executable proposal on Sunday and moved it to an onchain vote on Tally the same day. As of Monday, the measure had 712,320 ENS votes in favor, zero against, and 66,730 abstaining. That was enough to clear the majority-support threshold, but total participation stood at 779,050 votes, still below the DAO’s 1 million-token quorum. Voting is set to close around July 20.
The proposal would place the DAO’s only backstop against malicious governance in the hands of a group that would hold that power for two years, until July 16, 2028. Ethereum Name Service, the largest onchain naming protocol, has a token market capitalization near $172 million. Over the past month, the project has been stuck in a governance dispute over who should hold that veto power and how much influence Johnson has over the outcome.
What the proposal would do
The executable proposal makes a single call to the DAO’s TimelockController, granting the PROPOSER_ROLE to a Security Council contract built by security firm Blockful. That contract is controlled by a multisig whose signers are the members elected in EP 6.50, the DAO’s council election.
The council’s powers are deliberately narrow. It can cancel timelocked proposals it considers malicious, and nothing else. It cannot propose, amend, or initiate governance actions. The design follows the original council created under EP 5.13, which was first set up as a 4-of-8 multisig.
The successor council raises the cancellation threshold to 5-of-8 from 4-of-8. Elected members must also operate under a binding Appointment Agreement with the ENS Foundation, a public mandate, a mechanism to remove members who act outside that mandate, and mandatory know-your-customer and background checks before they can take their seats.
The proposal also includes an expiry mechanism. After two years, any address can call renounceTimelockRoleByExpiration() to remove the council’s cancel power, unless the DAO first passes a separate proposal to extend it.
Who got the seats
The eight signers on the new council’s multisig can be read directly from the contract, which is configured with a 5-of-8 threshold. Seven of those addresses map to public ENS identities.
- ENS co-founder Nick Johnson;
- ENS co-founder and longtime Ethereum designer Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth);
- Alex Netto (netto.eth), an ENS delegate since 2022 and founder of Blockful, the firm that built the council contract;
- Griff Green (griff.eth), co-founder of donation platform Giveth and of the White Hat Group, which led recovery efforts after the 2016 DAO hack;
- Pablo Sabbatella (pablito.eth), founder of security firm Opsek and a member of the Security Alliance who has served on the Arbitrum and Optimism security councils;
- ENS delegates Colton Liberacki (coltron.eth);
- ENS delegate Kevin Gaspar (validator.eth).
The eighth signer uses a dedicated address with no public name attached.
The lineup is not a single faction. Johnson helped design the DAO and sits on the ENS Foundation board, while Van de Sande is his fellow co-founder. Netto, by contrast, has been one of the sharpest critics of the recent push to concentrate power in the ENS Foundation and ENS Labs. Green, Sabbatella, and the remaining members come from Ethereum’s independent security community rather than ENS Labs.
A handoff under deadline
Johnson argued that the pace of the vote is necessary. The current council’s term ends on July 24, and any gap would leave the DAO without veto coverage.
“It’s also time-critical as we need to ensure it completes before the current security council expires,” Johnson wrote on the governance forum. He added that the executable proposal implements what delegates had already approved in the earlier social proposal.
At least one delegate objected to the timeline. “It would have been nice to have this proposal up on the forum for at least 12 hours before it was moved to vote,” delegate James Waugh wrote in the thread. Johnson replied that the executable enacts exactly what had already been voted on and introduces no new terms.
To prevent any lapse, the proposal allows the new council to become an additional veto authority during any overlap with the outgoing council.
The governance clash behind the vote
The current vote follows a dispute that began in June. An earlier renewal proposal, EP 6.45, passed an offchain Snapshot vote but failed in the binding onchain vote after Johnson voted against it. Johnson, who is estimated to control roughly 3.26 million ENS tokens, or about half of all ENS delegated to any single address, said he supported renewal but not with that group of members.
The failed vote triggered strong criticism from delegates who said one address had come to dominate DAO outcomes. It also led one community member to suggest dissolving the DAO altogether. Hours after the vote failed, ENS Labs Chief Operating Officer Katherine Wu, known as katherine.eth, posted the draft that became the successor framework now up for a final onchain vote.
Muted market reaction
ENS token price action was relatively muted. According to CoinGecko, ENS rose 3.2% over the past 24 hours, lagging ETH’s 5.3% gain but ahead of Bitcoin’s 2% rise. Over the past week, ENS was roughly flat, and over the past 30 days it was down about 14%.
Not decided yet
The proposal is advancing, but it is not final. Voting closes around July 20 and still needs to clear the DAO’s 1 million-token quorum. As of Monday, total participation was about 779,000 votes, below that mark.
The measure also preserves the same voting dynamics critics pointed to in June. Johnson’s holdings alone were enough to swing an onchain result then, and in this case he wrote the executable proposal, will sit on the resulting council, and controls a large share of the votes being used to seat it. Critics have said that concentration leaves the DAO effectively steered by one person.
The new council’s tighter 5-of-8 threshold, legal agreements, and removal mechanism are meant to address those concerns.
If the vote passes and is later queued and executed, the new council contract will hold the DAO’s cancel power for two years. Elected candidates must sign the Appointment Agreement within 48 hours of the election’s close and complete KYC and background checks before being seated. Anyone who declines will be replaced by the next-ranked candidate who cleared the election’s “NONE BELOW” threshold.