The Subsidy Has a Floor: ENS Pays the Gas for Everyone Who Doesn't Need It

ENS funds gasless voting and delegation, but eligibility is gated by token holdings: 100 ENS to have a vote relayed, 10 ENS to have a delegation relayed. At today's price that floor is 8.1 months of Nigerian minimum wage. The subsidy meant to remove a cost barrier is means-tested in favour of people who could already pay it. This proposal replaces the holdings floor with a registrant floor and puts the relayer on a disclosed standing budget. All figures read 2026-08-06; sources are listed at the end. 1. FIRST, THE ARGUMENT I AM NOT MAKING Gas is cheap right now. Ethereum's standard gas price is around 0.263 gwei, with Etherscan pricing a base transaction at about $0.01. The daily average was 0.6317 gwei on 4 August 2026, down 55% year on year. A delegation transaction of 50,000-90,000 gas at that rate costs roughly $0.03-$0.11, with ETH at $1,905. So "gas fees exclude the Global South from ENS governance" is, priced honestly, false today. I want that stated plainly before anything else, because the real exclusion is larger and sits somewhere this gathering has not looked. 2. THE FLOORS ENS's gas relayers are not open. They are means-tested. Gasless voting on Tally requires at least 100 ENS in delegated voting power plus a registered primary ENS name, capped at 8 votes per wallet. Gasless delegation on Tally requires at least 10 ENS, once per wallet per organization. The Snapshot relayer for the ENS space was seeded with about $100 of ETH, described as being there to test with. Submitting a social proposal requires 10,000 ENS delegated; an executable proposal requires 100,000 ENS. Now price those floors against a wage. Nigeria's national minimum wage is N70,000 per month, which at the market rate implied by CoinGecko's ETH quotes in USD and NGN on 6 August 2026 (about N1,363 to the dollar) is $51.37 a month. ENS trades at $4.18. 10 ENS, the gasless delegation floor: $41.80, or 24 days of minimum wage. 100 ENS, the gasless voting floor: $418, or 8.1 months. 10,000 ENS to submit a social proposal: $41,800, or 67.8 years. 100,000 ENS for an executable proposal: $418,000, or 678 years. The transaction the subsidy pays for costs about eleven cents. The ticket to qualify for it costs eight months of income. That is the inversion. The relayer relieves a $0.11 burden for holders of $418 in tokens, and leaves it in place for everyone below - for whom $0.11 was never the real obstacle either. Both groups are being handed the wrong instrument, and only one of them is being handed it at all. 3. THE PART THAT IS MY OWN TESTIMONY, NOT A STATISTIC I am in Lagos. Funding a wallet with ETH here does not begin at the gas price. Local card restrictions on international crypto purchases push buyers onto P2P rails, where I consistently pay a 3-5% spread over the market rate simply to acquire the asset. That spread applies to the $418, not to the $0.11. I report this as an operator, not as a cited study, and this gathering should weigh it as such. Two consequences the fee schedule does not show. First, the floor is priced in a volatile asset: a holder who qualified at one price can fall below the floor without selling anything. Second, gas being cheap today is not a reason to leave the floor alone - gas is why the relayers were built in the first place, and they will matter most in the next fee spike, which is exactly when the excluded group gets hit unsubsidised. 4. WHY THIS BELONGS IN THE FOUNDATION DEBATE This gathering already has several proposals arguing that ENS fee-payers deserve formal standing: that the people funding the treasury should have a say over the body about to steward it. None of them checks whether the participation machinery is reachable by the people they want to enfranchise. It is not. A registrant who pays renewal fees every year but holds zero ENS tokens gets no vote, and no subsidy either. The temp check asks the DAO to hand a Foundation broad stewardship on the strength of DAO legitimacy. Legitimacy is measured by who can actually participate, and that set is currently defined by a token balance rather than by who pays for the protocol. A companion proposal here, "The Name Costs More in Lagos", makes this case on registration price. Mine is the same argument one layer up: it is not only the name that costs more here, it is the vote. 5. WHAT I PROPOSE (a) Publish a Participation Floor disclosure. Alongside any DAO-funded gas subsidy, the empowered Foundation publishes each eligibility threshold restated as a share of monthly minimum wage across a declared basket of registrant markets, refreshed whenever the threshold or the token price moves materially. One standing reporting line. It costs nothing but arithmetic, and it makes a currently invisible exclusion legible before it is voted on. (b) Replace the holdings floor with a registrant floor, for voting only. Relayer eligibility should key on verified registrant status - a primary ENS name held at least six months with a paid renewal on record - instead of a 100 ENS balance. Keep the per-wallet vote cap. This subsidises the fee-payer, which is who the subsidy was rhetorically for. (c) Fund the relayer as a disclosed standing line. A $100 test deposit is not participation infrastructure. Publish the relayer balance, its burn rate, and a low-balance trigger, as any other operational budget line would be handled. 6. THE STRONGEST OBJECTION, AND MY ANSWER The floor is sybil resistance. Correct - that is why it exists, and any fix must not let one person mint a thousand free votes. But a token balance is a weak credential for this. It can be borrowed, briefly held, or moved between wallets around a snapshot, and it proves nothing about attachment to the protocol. A primary ENS name held six months with a paid renewal is harder to fake at scale, because it costs recurring money and cannot be rented for an afternoon. Tally's rule already requires a primary name - it simply requires the token balance as well. This drops the half that is a wealth test and keeps the half that is an identity test, hardened with a holding period. A secondary objection is cost. If eligibility widens, the relayer spends more. At current gas, ten thousand additional relayed votes cost on the order of $1,100 at 0.63 gwei and 90,000 gas per vote. That is a rounding error against the sums under debate here, and the disclosure in (c) makes any overrun visible before it becomes a problem. 7. WHAT WOULD CHANGE MY MIND Evidence that the 100 ENS floor was chosen for a documented anti-sybil reason rather than inherited as a platform default, and that the relayers were sized against measured demand. Data showing meaningful numbers of sub-100-ENS holders already voting by paying their own gas - if the floor binds nobody, the disclosure in (a) is still worth having and the rest can be dropped. A credible sybil path against a six-month-held, renewal-paid primary name that a 100 ENS balance would have stopped. SOURCES (all read 2026-08-06) Ethereum standard gas price about 0.263 gwei, about $0.01 base cost: https://etherscan.io/gastracker . Daily average gas price 0.6317 gwei on 2026-08-04, -55.45% year on year: https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_gas_price . ETH $1,905.16, ENS $4.18, ETH N2,595,977: https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=ethereum,ethereum-name-service&vs_currencies=usd,ngn . Nigerian national minimum wage N70,000/month: https://tradingeconomics.com/nigeria/minimum-wages . Gasless voting eligibility: https://docs.tally.xyz/how-to-use-tally/voting-on-proposals/relay/gasless-voting . Gasless delegation eligibility: https://docs.tally.xyz/how-to-use-tally/voting-on-proposals/relay/free-delegation . Snapshot ENS relayer funding: https://blog.snapshot.box/snapshot-is-now-home-for-governor-daos . Proposal thresholds of 10,000 and 100,000 ENS: https://basics.ensdao.org/proposals . Why the relayers were introduced: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/gasless-voting-is-live-for-ens/19070 and https://discuss.ens.domains/t/agora-ens-goes-electric-gas-relay-is-live/20104 . The 3-5% P2P funding spread in Nigeria is the author's first-hand experience, not a cited statistic.