Token holders of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) have approved a significant governance overhaul of the project. The ENS Foundation will transition into a fully operational organization, complete with a hired CEO, staff members, and a five-person board.

Introducing the evolved ENS Foundation.

ENS tokenholders have approved and executed a proposal establishing the Foundation as a fully operational organization.

Here’s what changes, what stays the same, and how tokenholders remain in control. 🧵

Read: https://t.co/g6ymxZuWPk pic.twitter.com/JCSD8xpEHl

— ens.eth (@ensdomains) August 11, 2026

According to Agora, community members voted in favor of implementing the initiative Next Era of ENS DAO with 1.2 million tokens supporting it, while 480,690 were against. The transaction was executed on the morning of August 11.

Going forward, the foundation will handle off-chain policy, branding, and operational activities. ENS Labs will focus on protocol development, primarily the upcoming ENSv2 update.

The ENS Foundation will also gain administrative control over the ENS's target capital, which held approximately $65 million in Ethereum and stablecoins as of the end of July. These funds are generated from .eth domain registrations. Additionally, the foundation will manage the protocol's revenues.

Source: ens.

The DAO will transfer 1 million ENS tokens to the new foundation for employee salaries, while nearly 55% of the total supply (around 54.6 million ENS) will remain with the token holders.

Coin holders will retain the right to appoint and dismiss the foundation's directors. The initial board is composed of:

  • Executive Director Alexander Urbelis;
  • ENS Founder Nick Johnson;
  • Independent directors — Kartik Talwar, Brett Sun, and Anthony Leuthenegger.

A new EndowmentTimelock contract, featuring a nine-day delay, has replaced the previous DAO mechanism as the wallet owner. Now, only the foundation's multisig (requiring three out of five signatures) can queue transactions, while the Security Council can cancel any of them. The council's authority to block transfers will expire on August 7, 2028.

Context and Reactions

A governance dispute arose on June 19 when ENS Labs' COO, Catherine Wu, published the first draft of the proposal to transfer operational control and capital oversight to the foundation.

Some delegates expressed opposition. Co-founder Alex van de Sande stated that the initiative would cause the decentralized autonomous organization to lose control over its wallet, asserting that all spending restrictions and conflict-of-interest policies exist only in text, not in code.

Analysts at Curia noted that the ability to remove directors relies on Cayman Islands legislation and can take months, while the transaction itself is completed in minutes.

Developers from Blockful confirmed the accuracy of the contracts but pointed out that the nine-day delay does not apply to two existing modules — the asset management karpatkey and the Allowance Module from the MetaGov working group.

Wu addressed the criticism by stating that the document was revised following initial discussions, that DAO tokens remain with the holders, the operational wallet has not moved, and transactions involving target capital now have a time lock along with an independent cancellation mechanism.

It’s worth noting that in February, ENS Labs abandoned plans to create the L2 network Namechain in favor of Ethereum.