Just DAO It! with Alex Soto - Governance Without Subordination

The first story of the show is about ENS or Ethereum Name Service and the ENS DAO, and it's what my AI called the 2026 governance crisis, which I think is fair.

For anyone who doesn't know, ENS is one of Ethereum's longest running projects or protocols and one of its longest running DAOs.

It's a naming system that allows you to map names.eth to addresses.

So your blockchain address, your websites, your social media, anything else, kind of like domain name service on the internet.

So the thing that allows us to have mydao.org, we also have mydaods.eth because mydao.eth was taken.

and won't sell it to us.

And later even bought dows.eth as an investment and what we thought could be a fun name to hold.

And so do you have any, Alex, do you have alex.eth or anything like that? I have.

I am alex.eth. And so the ENS DAO, which launched with the ENS governance token actually in 2021, governs the protocol, which means the software that runs the network, and its treasury, which is valued at around $100 million of cash, another couple hundred million dollars in ENS tokens.

So maybe not really worth quite that much, but that's the market value.

And there's also an ENS foundation in the Cayman Islands.

So similar to the work we do in the Marshall Islands, there's a lot of crypto projects that have their foundation in these jurisdictions.

And the foundation acts as the DAO's legal wrapper for signing contracts, paying taxes or not paying taxes, taking on liability and other off-chain functions.

The ENS website frames the DAO's role as governing the protocol in the treasury with one token, one vote and the option to delegate your tokens.

And so what happened recently? This crisis happened when there became some conflict over what to do with the treasury, both because people felt like maybe the treasury wasn't being spent effectively over the last few years, but also concern about governance hacks.

So like a lot of DAOs with one token, one vote, there's concern that someone could buy enough tokens, drain the treasury for more money than they had to spend on the tokens, and basically ruin the project by draining the treasury.

And this led to a series of proposals and discussions about the DAOs security council and whether they need a new security council about the foundation and whether to delegate either most of the treasury and or most of the operational responsibility for managing the project to the foundation saying things that we often hear these days in web three, which is just the DAOs inefficient.

It votes on too many things.

Nobody's paying attention.

The foundation would do a better job.

They'd be more focused.

And during these conversations, people have resigned.

The director of operations, Brantley Milligan, resigned.

There's been a lot of discussion, including accusations of homophobia and wokeism.

But we'll mostly leave that out of the show.