Ethereum Name Service tokenholders have voted to transform the ENS Foundation from an informal body into a fully staffed legal entity with administrative control over a $65 million endowment. The proposal, titled “Next Era of ENS DAO: Empowering the ENS Foundation,” passed onchain on Aug. 11 with roughly 70% support, 1.27 million ENS votes in favor against 481,000 opposed, according to the ENS Foundation's own announcement.
Before the vote, institutional functions such as trademark defense, regulatory engagement and standards-body representation either went undone or fell informally to ENS Labs, the protocol's engineering organization, which was never mandated to handle them. The restructuring gives ENS a dedicated Foundation, based in the Cayman Islands, staffed with a full-time Executive Director and employees accountable specifically to that institutional mission.
Who's running it
Alexander Urbelis, formerly General Counsel and CISO at ENS Labs, becomes the Foundation's inaugural Executive Director. He's joined on the five-member board by ENS founder and ENS Labs CEO Nick Johnson, along with three independent directors: Kartik Talwar of A.Capital Ventures and ETHGlobal, Brett Sun of Prelude and formerly of Aragon, and Anthony Leutenegger, Aragon's CEO. A one-time transfer of 1 million ENS tokens, worth roughly $4.2 million, will fund staff compensation under multi-year vesting terms.
The endowment itself is funded from .eth name registration fee revenue, giving the Foundation a self-sustaining budget tied directly to protocol usage rather than dependence on periodic DAO treasury transfers.
Guardrails stay with tokenholders
The DAO retained meaningful checks on the new structure. Tokenholders continue to control the core treasury and hold the power to appoint or remove Foundation directors, and Foundation transactions are subject to a nine-day timelock before execution. That balance mirrors a broader trend among major DAOs, including Uniswap and Optimism, toward pairing professionalized foundations with retained tokenholder oversight rather than ceding full control to appointed boards.
With a formal legal entity in place, the Foundation says it will pursue recognition and stewardship of the .ens top-level domain and represent ENS directly in forums like ICANN, IETF and W3C, engagement that was difficult without a legally recognized counterparty to sign agreements or hold standing in those bodies.
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The move puts ENS among a growing list of protocol DAOs formalizing their governance into structures that can interact with regulators, courts and international standards bodies on comparable footing to traditional institutions. Whether the new Foundation delivers on goals like ICANN recognition for .ens will be the first real test of whether the restructuring translates into tangible outcomes rather than just a governance upgrade on paper.
