Treasury Stays with the DAO — Empower Meritocratic Committees, Not a Foundation Takeover

What this responds to Katherine.eth's temp check proposes expanding the ENS Foundation into a real foundation with a board, executive director, and operational authority over the treasury, grants, and long-term capital strategy. The diagnosis is largely correct: token voting is structurally bad at operational decisions, delegate fatigue is real, and there is no accountability layer between the DAO and the entities it funds. But the prescription is wrong. Moving the treasury to a Foundation board — however well-intentioned and however well-staffed — is a transfer of power from the community to a small group that the community can only remove through a cumbersome process. It solves the "token voting can't run an organization" problem by solving the other way: remove the organization from the community entirely. There is a better path. Keep the treasury with the DAO. Empower competent, accountable committees to make meritocratic decisions within their domains. The DAO's role shifts from voting on every proposal to selecting, empowering, and replacing the committees that do. The problem we agree on Katherine.eth names it well: "token votes are slow, they carry little context, and they force a yes or no choice." The DAO makes too many small decisions and too few big ones. Proposals from well-known voices get rubber-stamped on reputation. Proposals from unknown but knowledgeable contributors get ignored. Marketing pizzazz outweighs substance. Incompetent actors succeed while talented participants are driven away. This is not a problem with the DAO having a treasury. This is a problem with the DAO using the wrong mechanism to allocate from that treasury. The alternative: empowered committees, DAO-retained treasury 1. The treasury stays with the DAO The DAO owns the treasury. Period. This is not negotiable. The community funded it, the community should control it, and the community should retain the power to redirect it. Moving the treasury to a Foundation — even one with tokenholder removal authority — is a one-way door. Once the assets are transferred, the community's leverage is procedural, not structural. A removal petition with cooling-off periods and documentary requirements is not the same as holding the purse strings. 2. Empowered committees make operational decisions Instead of a Foundation board absorbing all operational authority, delegate specific decision-making domains to empowered committees: ENS Labs serves as the primary committee for protocol development, engineering, and product decisions. Labs already does this work. Formalizing it as an empowered committee — rather than a grant recipient begging for renewal — gives Labs the mandate to execute without treating every budget line as a political event. A grants committee — modeled directly on the service provider program committee — handles public goods funding and ecosystem grants. This committee investigates applications, asks follow-up questions, and makes decisions based on substance, not token-weight. Community leaders with demonstrated competence can be empowered to lead committees in their domains: standards work, ecosystem development, advocacy, capital strategy. Each committee has: a clear scope and mandate; authority to make decisions within that scope without a token vote on every item; published reasoning for decisions, so the community can audit judgment over time; fixed terms and rotation to prevent entrenchment. 3. The service provider program is the proof of concept The SPP committee already proved this model works. A small group was empowered to investigate each application, ask follow-up questions, and make focused decisions. It cut through marketing and reputation to assess real substance. Katherine.eth's own proposal acknowledges this — it plans to absorb SPP into the Foundation's grant program. That's the wrong move. The SPP committee model should be replicated, not dissolved. 4. The DAO's role becomes governance of governance The DAO stops voting on individual proposals and starts voting on: committee charters — the scope, mandate, and budget envelope for each committee; committee appointments — who sits on which committee, with term limits; performance reviews — periodic assessment of whether a committee is making good decisions, with the power to replace underperforming members or dissolve a committee entirely. This means fewer votes, but each vote is consequential. The DAO governs the structure; the committees execute within it. The open question Who picks the committees? I will not pretend this is solved. If committee selection is itself a reputation-and-momentum token vote, the popularity contest has just moved one level up. The SPP committee worked, but who appointed it? My provisional answer: Initial committees nominated by ENS Labs and existing stewards, ratified by the DAO. Labs knows who is competent in each domain. Let them propose committee slates. The DAO ratifies or rejects — not line-by-line on every grant, but on the people trusted to make grant decisions. Term limits and rotation — no permanent committee, members serve one cycle then rotate. Transparency as the check — every decision comes with published reasoning. The DAO retains the treasury — the committee allocates from an envelope the DAO approved; the community retains the power to shrink, expand, or revoke that envelope. This is not a complete answer. It is a starting position that I think is better than either "let token voting decide everything" or "transfer the treasury to a Foundation board." I will push back on anyone — including myself — who tries to hand-wave the committee selection problem. Why this is better than the Foundation proposal Katherine.eth's proposal is thoughtful and well-researched. The Mozilla, Signal, and ISRG comparisons are real. But those organizations gave their communities no formal governance backstop. ENS's tokenholder removal authority is an improvement — but it is a backstop, not a lever. Once the Foundation holds the treasury, the community's power is reactive (remove a director) rather than proactive (direct the allocation). The empowered-committee model keeps the community's power proactive. The DAO sets the envelopes, appoints the committees, and can restructure at any time — without waiting for a mission-violation petition and a 30-day cooling-off period. The committees do the operational work that token voting can't. Labs gets the mandate it needs without being absorbed into a Foundation it doesn't need. On honesty If the goal is to shut down the DAO and have ENS Labs or the Foundation run everything, say that plainly. Do not rely on political theater to manipulate the community into accepting a fait accompli while maintaining the appearance of decentralization. Honest centralization is better than performative decentralization. But if the DAO is going to continue — and I believe it should — then empower it meaningfully. Give competent people the authority to make decisions on merit. Stop forcing every operational question through a token vote. And keep the treasury where it belongs: with the community that funded it.