The $ENS DAO is voting to install a new Security Council, moving to restore the emergency veto that protects the naming protocol after its co-founder blocked an earlier renewal last month.
Nick Johnson, who goes by nick.eth, filed the executable proposal on Sunday and moved it to an onchain vote the same day on Tally. As of Monday the measure had 712,320 $ENS votes in favor, zero against and 66,730 abstaining, clearing the majority-support bar and sitting at 779,050 votes toward the DAO’s 1 million-token quorum. Voting closes around July 20.
The proposal hands the DAO’s only backstop against malicious governance to a group that will inherit that power for two years, until July 16, 2028. Ethereum Name Service, the largest onchain naming protocol with a token market capitalization near $172 million, has spent the past month locked in a governance fight over who should hold that veto and how much control Johnson wields over the outcome.
What the vote does
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 authority is deliberately narrow. It can cancel timelocked proposals it deems malicious, and nothing else. It cannot propose, amend or initiate any governance action. The design mirrors the original council created under EP 5.13, a body first seated as a 4-of-8 multisig.
The successor council raises the threshold to cancel a proposal to 5-of-8, up from 4-of-8. Elected members also operate under a binding Appointment Agreement with the $ENS Foundation, a public mandate, a removal mechanism for members who act outside that mandate, and mandatory know-your-customer and background checks before they can be seated.
The proposal also sets an expiry. After two years, any address can call renounceTimelockRoleByExpiration() to strip the council’s cancel power, unless the DAO passes a separate proposal to extend it first.
Who won the seats
The eight signers on the new council’s multisig can be read directly from the contract, which is set to a 5-of-8 threshold. Seven map to public $ENS identities. They are $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’s contract; Griff Green (griff.eth), co-founder of donation platform Giveth and of the White Hat Group that 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; and $ENS delegates Colton Liberacki (coltron.eth) and Kevin Gaspar (validator.eth). The eighth signer uses a dedicated address with no public name attached.
The slate is not a single bloc. Johnson helped design the DAO and sits on the $ENS Foundation board, and Van de Sande is a fellow co-founder. Netto, by contrast, has been among the sharpest critics of the recent push to concentrate power in the $ENS Foundation and Labs. Green, Sabbatella and the remaining members come out of Ethereum’s independent security world rather than $ENS Labs.
A time-critical handoff
Johnson framed the speed of the vote as a necessity. The current council’s term ends July 24, and a 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, adding that the executable implements what delegates already approved in the earlier social proposal.
At least one delegate pushed back on 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 was voted on and does not introduce new terms.
To avoid any lapse, the proposal enables the new council as an additional veto authority during any overlap with the outgoing one.
The fight that preceded it
The vote follows a governance clash that began in June. An earlier renewal, EP 6.45, passed an off-chain Snapshot vote but failed 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 address, said he supported renewal but not with that slate of members.
The failure drew sharp reactions from delegates who said one address had come to dominate DAO outcomes, and it prompted a community member to float dissolving the DAO altogether. Hours after that 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.
$ENS‘s token drew a muted response. The token rose 3.2% over the past 24 hours, trailing a 5.3% gain in ETH but ahead of Bitcoin’s 2% rise, according to data from CoinGecko. $ENS is roughly flat over the past week and down about 14% over the past 30 days.
Not final
The vote is on track but not final. The measure closes around July 20 and must clear the DAO’s 1 million-token quorum, and as of Monday it stood below that mark at about 779,000 votes cast. The proposal also concentrates the same voting dynamics that critics flagged in June, when Johnson’s holdings alone were enough to swing an onchain result. Johnson wrote the executable, sits on the resulting council and controls a large share of the vote seating it, a concentration critics have said leaves the DAO effectively steered by one person.
The new council’s stricter 5-of-8 threshold, legal agreements and removal mechanism are designed to answer the concentration concerns.
If the vote passes and is queued and executed, the new council’s 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; any who decline are replaced by the next-ranked candidate who cleared the election’s “NONE BELOW” threshold.
