Katherine Wu, chief operating officer of ENS Labs, posted an executable draft Thursday of the proposal to establish an ENS Foundation, dropping a plan to shift the DAO's operational wallet to the new entity after weeks of delegate opposition to an earlier version of the plan.
The draft, "[Draft] [Executable] Next Era of ENS DAO: Empowering the ENS Foundation," keeps the DAO's roughly 54.6 million ENS tokens and its operational wallet, holding an estimated $16 million in ETH and stablecoins, under tokenholder control. The only ENS token transaction in the proposal is a one-time transfer of 1 million ENS, restricted to Foundation employee compensation with multi-year vesting. The Foundation Board would gain administrative control of the roughly $65 million Endowment Safe, with every Endowment transaction now subject to a timelock and a Security Council cancellation right.
The draft follows a temp check Wu published June 19 that proposed a broader transfer of authority. ENS co-founder Nick Johnson, who holds one of the Foundation's five board seats under the proposal, wrote on X that the changes responded to "difficult questions" and community feedback since that original post. The ENS DAO account summarized the revision as authorizing the Foundation "to administer the Endowment" while tokenholders "retain control over the protocol, remaining DAO-held ENS, the operational wallet, and the appointment and removal of Foundation directors."
