The DAO can still veto through a Security Council, but a 3-of-5 Foundation multisig is now the only party that can propose spends from the treasury.
The Ethereum Name Service passed a proposal on 11 August that hands administrative control of its $65 million endowment to a newly staffed ENS Foundation. Onchain totals came in at 1.27 million ENS in favour and 480,690 against, roughly 72 per cent support, and the executable has already been run.
The changeover rewires how the DAO's balance sheet moves. The Endowment Safe used to sit directly under DAO control; the new owner is a timelock contract with a nine-day delay whose sole proposer is a 3-of-5 Foundation multisig. A Security Council of eight signers can cancel any queued transaction on a 5-of-8 threshold. In effect, spending decisions now begin at the Foundation and end at the DAO's veto, rather than the other way round.
The Foundation itself has been rebuilt as an operating body. Alexander Urbelis takes the executive director role, and the five-seat board pairs ENS founder Nick Johnson with independent directors Kartik Talwar, Brett Sun and Anthony Leutenegger. Each seat runs two years, and tokenholders keep the right to appoint or remove directors at any time. The DAO is also sending a one-time 1 million ENS allocation to fund employee compensation, which at current prices is a nine-figure grant for what has until now been a volunteer-heavy structure.
The endowment being moved is not small money. As of late July the balance stood at roughly $65 million in ether and stablecoins, funded over time by DAO allocations and .eth registration revenue. Its purpose is to keep the protocol running when fee income is not enough to cover client development, infrastructure and legal defence, which in practice means indefinitely.
Not every delegate signed off. Co-founder Alex Van de Sande voted against the executable after reading it carefully, arguing that the DAO effectively disappears from the endowment's control chain. His concern is structural rather than personal: once the timelock's only proposer is the Foundation multisig, tokenholders can no longer originate spends themselves, only ratify or block whatever the Foundation queues. Governance still exists; the surface where governance can act has narrowed.
The overhaul arrived after a climbdown. In late July ENS Labs withdrew a broader treasury-control plan following delegate pushback, and returned with a narrower package focused on the endowment alone that preserved the DAO's protocol authority. That retreat is why the vote cleared 70 per cent; a more expansive transfer would probably not have.
For readers who have watched other protocol foundations restructure this year, the shape will be familiar. Balancer folded its corporate entity into DAO-run operations in April; the Ethereum Foundation shipped Ethereum Institutional as a separate nonprofit in July after months of senior departures. ENS has gone the opposite direction: build a staffed foundation with its own board and give it the keys to the treasury, on the theory that a professional operating layer is worth the concentration of signing power.
Whether it works comes down to two things. First, the composition and behaviour of the Security Council. Five of eight signers can cancel any Foundation transaction, so the veto is only as strong as the coordination between those wallets, and the identities behind them have not been published in full. Second, whether the DAO uses its remaining protocol authority. Tokenholders can still change protocol parameters, replace directors, and in theory unwind the arrangement entirely. The endowment is now Foundation-run, but the mandate is still revocable.
ENS is not the first DAO to concentrate signing power around a smaller group this year. Seamless's final DAO vote in early August went the other way, freezing its contracts entirely rather than delegating them; BonkDAO lost $20 million in July after seven wallets outvoted 18,000 others on a proposal that was bought outright. The tradeoff between broad participation and legible accountability is the recurring theme, and ENS has come down on the accountability side.
Nick Johnson holds one board seat out of five and one multisig key out of three needed. The 1 million ENS grant vests to the Foundation, not to him personally. Van de Sande's dissent will be tested by what the Foundation does with the first few large spends, not by the vote result.
