The Fee-Payers Are Not at the Table: Four Amendments Binding the Foundation to the People Who Fund It

ENS charges $640 a year for three-character names, $160 for four-character and $5 for five-plus, per the DAO's own revenue reporting (discuss.ens.domains/t/ens-revenue-reports/20577). kpk, the Endowment's manager, reports $7.71M in DAO operational revenue against $7.55M in operating expenses for the first half of 2025, with $115M in ETH and stablecoins - that last figure is DAO assets on kpk's definition, not the Endowment alone and not the token supply (discuss.ens.domains/t/kpk-h1-2025-review-for-the-ens-endowment/21055). kpk's 2025 review reports Endowment revenues covered roughly 20% of DAO operating expenses over the year (discuss.ens.domains/t/kpk-2025-review-for-the-ens-endowment/21829). The balance is registration and renewal revenue. Treasury figures in this debate have ranged widely: avsa cited approximately $130M in the forum thread, but the live Tally executable by nick.eth states the Endowment at approximately $65M. The discrepancy is real and unsettled; I am not relying on either figure here. The operating ratio is enough for my argument. In April 2026, ENS Labs proposed raising the 5+ character fee from $5 to $8 a year, a 60% increase, with multi-year discounts (discuss.ens.domains/t/social-ens-v2-pricing-5-character-name-price-adjustment-multi-year-discounts/22038). So: registrants supply the great majority of what the DAO spends, their price is going up, and the temp check moves stewardship of that treasury to a five-seat board whose first slate comes from a search led by the existing Foundation Board with input from Labs leadership. A dozen proposals in this gathering argue about custody, board composition and reversibility. None of them mention the payer. Tokenholders are not the payers The temp check keeps protocol control, pricing, and director appointment and removal with tokenholders. I am not asking to change that. But holding $ENS is not required to register a name, and most name-holders hold none. Tokenholder ratification protects against capture. It is not a channel for the people paying the invoice. The strongest objection, and my answer Katherine Wu argues that token-weighted DAO governance has been decentralisation theatre, and that delegating budget authority to the Foundation is the normal, boring, overdue thing to do (x.com/katherinewu/status/2070188090635993278). Jeff Lau describes what the DAO built as a honey pot with no accountability (x.com/Jefflau/status/2072244343881318415). Both would look at a registrant poll and see one more ritual on top of an already ritualised process. That objection is fair, and it constrains what I am willing to ask for. So I am not asking for a new vote, a new veto, a new quorum, or anything that can delay a decision. Nothing below adds a gate. Amendment 2 publishes a number next to a vote that happens anyway; Amendments 1 and 3 attach to processes the Foundation would run regardless; Amendment 4 changes who supplies candidates for one seat, not who appoints. If the complaint about DAO governance is that it converts every decision into a fight, then the correct fix for the payer's absence is information, not another gate. And there is something in it for the Foundation: a body that can show it consulted the people funding it has an answer to the legitimacy objection that no self-selected board can otherwise buy. Alex Van de Sande's middle path - talent selected and approved by the DAO, Endowment withdrawals capped at 5% a year, not a single multisig (x.com/avsa/status/2071608115598897522) - is the version of this proposal I would most like to attach to. A cap answers how much leaves. Amendment 3 answers what it must deliver to keep leaving. Four amendments follow. Each is written so that compliance is a lookup rather than something the community has to notice. Amendment 1. A registrant impact statement, published before the vote, not after the spend. Before any Foundation resolution that changes registrant-facing pricing, renewal mechanics, refund policy or resolution service, the Foundation publishes: the expected cost change per name-year by tier, the number of active names affected as read from the registry, and the alternative that was rejected. It goes in a text record under the DAO-controlled namespace that Six Amendments That Enforce Themselves proposes, at least 14 days ahead. No record at the deadline, no valid resolution. The temp check's audits, quarterly reports and slow removal process all run after the money moves. This runs before it, and checking it is a registry read. Amendment 2. A fee-payer poll published beside the tokenholder vote. Pricing authority stays with tokenholders. The amendment is that any pricing vote carries an advisory registrant poll, weighted by name-years held at a stated snapshot block, published in the proposal body before voting opens. It binds nothing and blocks nothing. It makes the cost of overriding the payer visible, which is what is missing today. Weighting by name-years means influence costs exactly what the names cost, so the anti-sybil property is the fee schedule itself, and ENS already owns the register that proves it. Amendment 3. Tranche release conditioned on registrant-facing metrics. The tranching proposals here ask how much of the operating envelope to release and when. This adds what it should be measured against. Each quarterly tranche is conditioned on three metrics, published to the same namespace and computable from public data: renewal retention on 5+ character names, availability of the public resolvers, and median time to close registrant support tickets. The DAO sets the floors at ratification. Miss a floor and the next discretionary tranche stays with the DAO until a tokenholder vote releases it. A default, not a punishment. Amendment 4. One independent seat nominated by fee-payers. Of the three independent seats, one is filled from a shortlist nominated by registrant poll under the same weighting, then appointed and removable by tokenholders exactly as the Articles specify today. This changes who supplies the candidates, not who holds appointment authority. No change to the Articles, no change to the removal path, no new legal structure. Brantly Millegan's objection is that a board selected entirely by the proposing party is not independent whatever the seats are called, and his answer is a founder seat plus four DAO-elected seats (x.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/2072330878185808207). Mine is compatible with his and answers the same objection from a direction neither a Labs-led nor a delegate-led search can reach: a nominee the payer chose is independent of both. These bind whichever way the custody argument goes Whether the treasury moves whole, moves in tranches, or stays with the DAO, the registrant is still the source of the funds and still has no channel to the body spending them. Each amendment attaches to the winning custody design instead of competing with it, and each ends in a state that resolves: the impact record exists or it does not, the poll was published or it was not, the metric cleared the floor or it did not, the seat came off the nominated shortlist or it did not. What it costs to adopt The amendments are text. The impact statements and metrics are records under a namespace this gathering already proposes to build, so the added work is a publishing step and a dashboard. The poll is the only new piece: a registry snapshot at a stated block, a tally weighted by name-years, published with the block height so anyone can recompute it. A script and a results page, not an onchain voting system. Scope and cost. The four amendments are text and cost the DAO nothing to adopt. The only thing to build is the poll: a registry snapshot at a stated block, a name-year tally with a per-address cap, and a published results page anyone can recompute. $4,000 covers a working implementation and its first run alongside a live pricing vote. $1,500 buys the specification alone, which is still useful. Past roughly $6,000 there is nothing further to buy until the DAO adopts the amendment, so treat that as the saturation point rather than a modest ask. Where this is weak, and what would change my mind Name-year weighting favours bulk registrants, including speculators, and one three-character holder outweighs many ordinary users on fees alone. That is a real distortion, and a per-address cap on counted name-years would blunt it. I would accept one. An advisory poll also becomes theatre if the Foundation reliably overrides it; visibility is a weaker instrument than a veto, and I am asking for the weaker one deliberately, because it touches no tokenholder authority and is therefore cheap to grant. I have no survey of registrant opinion. This argument rests on their structural position as recurring payers with no formal channel, not on a mandate, and I will update it if someone brings data that contradicts it. If the Foundation charter already commits to registrant-facing obligations that are publicly resolvable, in any technology, Amendments 1 and 3 are redundant and I would drop them and keep 2 and 4.