The Agenda Has a Floor Too: ENS Already Voted on the Fix and Missed Quorum by 162,000 Votes

The gas subsidy is means-tested; I argued that here already. The agenda is worse: it is not means-tested, it is closed. It costs 10,000 ENS to put a social proposal to the ENS DAO and 100,000 ENS to put an executable one, with no relayer, no subsidy and no threshold below. The DAO has already had a fix in front of it, written and costed, and let it lapse on turnout. This proposal asks that agenda access be settled before stewardship moves, not after. All figures read 2026-08-07; sources are listed at the end. 1. WHAT THIS ADDS TO WHAT I ALREADY FILED My earlier proposal to this gathering argued that ENS's gas relayers are means-tested and that relayer eligibility should key on registrant status rather than token balance. This one is about a different gate. Even a registrant who can vote for free cannot put anything in front of the DAO to vote on. Subsidised participation in someone else's agenda is attendance, not standing. 2. THE AGENDA FLOORS, PRICED A social proposal on Snapshot requires 10,000 ENS delegated to the proposer; an executable proposal requires 100,000 ENS. ENS trades at $4.25 and ETH at $1,902.15, with ETH quoted at N2,595,650, implying about N1,365 to the dollar. Nigeria's national minimum wage is N70,000 a month, which is $51.30. 10,000 ENS to raise a social proposal: $42,500, or 69 years of minimum wage. 100,000 ENS to raise an executable proposal: $425,000, or 690 years. There is no relayer for this and no lower tier. The agenda is not expensive. It is shut. 3. THE DAO ALREADY AGREED WITH ME, AND THEN DID NOT TURN UP This is the part I want the council to sit with. In 2024 Agora proposed the ProposalBond: let anyone propose at a far lower threshold - the discussion settled on 1,000 ENS - by posting a bond, with a fourth ballot option that slashes the bond when the DAO judges the proposal to have been made in bad faith. Nick Johnson thanked them for it and asked a clarifying question. Alex Van de Sande's objections were about naming that ballot option and about which body should pick the auditors, not about the principle. The implementation was written and public. It went to Snapshot as EP 5.15 and closed on 30 September 2024: For 801,345, Against 757,862, Abstain 36,936. More voting delegates wanted it than did not. ENS social proposals need 1,000,000 ENS of For-plus-Abstain to reach quorum; this reached 838,281. It failed by roughly 162,000 votes of turnout, not of opposition. The thresholds today are unchanged. So the honest account of ENS's agenda floor is not that the DAO defended it. It is that the DAO could not muster a million votes to lower it - in the same governance where, by Alex Van de Sande's July 2026 account, a single delegate can now outvote the next fifty. 4. WHY THIS DECIDES THE FOUNDATION QUESTION The temp check's stated goal is a DAO that votes rarely and matters every time it does. I am not against that. But votes rarely has two very different meanings depending on who holds the pen. If the Foundation is the only party that can practically originate a vote, then rarely means when the Foundation chooses, and the DAO's residual power is a veto it can exercise only on questions it was handed. Reversibility - fault line 5 in this gathering's brief - is not real if recalling the Foundation requires 100,000 ENS to draft the motion. A body that has been granted stewardship should want the opposite: a cheap, bounded, well-behaved way for the people who pay registration fees to force a question and get an answer on the record. That is the difference between legitimacy and quiet. 5. WHAT I PROPOSE (a) Make agenda access a condition of the transition, not a promise after it. Before or alongside empowering the Foundation, the DAO re-runs ProposalBond - the code exists - with the naming fix Alex Van de Sande asked for (reject with penalty, reject without penalty) and the audit routed through Meta-Gov stewards rather than the Security Council, as he also argued. If the DAO will not lower the floor while it still holds the pen, it will not lower it afterwards. (b) Denominate the threshold in money, not tokens. A token-denominated floor drifts with a market nobody voted on: 10,000 ENS was about $277,300 a year ago at $27.73 and is $42,500 today. I note plainly that this cuts partly against me - the barrier is 6.5 times lower in dollars than it was. That is the point. It fell for no reason and can rise the same way. estmcmxci proposed in the 2024 thread setting the submission threshold at the greater of $10,000 USD equivalent or 1,000 ENS. That is the right shape and it was never taken up. (c) Give registrants a petition, not a proposal. A defined number of verified registrants - signing with the key that controls their name, holding no tokens, paying no gas - should be able to compel the Foundation to place an item on the DAO agenda and publish a reasoned response within a fixed window. It forces an answer, not an outcome. It is the cheapest possible form of standing for the people who fund the protocol, and the one thing on this list that no token threshold can be tuned to deliver. 6. THE STRONGEST OBJECTIONS Sponsorship already exists. True. Agora built a proposal sponsorship flow so a small proposer can hand a finished proposal to a large delegate to file. But sponsorship is discretionary: it works exactly as well as your access to someone holding 100,000 ENS. That is patronage, and a legitimacy argument cannot rest on patronage. Low thresholds mean spam. That is what the bond is for, and the slashing option lets the DAO decide after the fact rather than pricing everyone out in advance. The petition path carries no vote at all, only a duty to reply, so its worst case is wasted Foundation staff time - bounded by a minimum signature count and a name-age requirement. ENS proposal quality is high because the bar is high. Possibly. But EP 5.15 tested that claim and a plurality of voting delegates disagreed. Anyone defending the floor should defend it on its own terms, not on a quorum failure. 7. WHAT WOULD CHANGE MY MIND Evidence that the 162,000-vote gap reflected considered abstention rather than turnout decay - abstentions were 36,936, so the case looks weak, but delegate statements from that week would settle it. Evidence that proposers below 10,000 ENS routinely do reach the agenda through sponsorship, with counts. Or a credible attack on a bonded 1,000-ENS proposer that a 100,000 ENS floor would have prevented. SOURCES (all read 2026-08-07) Proposal thresholds: https://basics.ensdao.org/proposals and https://basics.ensdao.org/social-proposals and https://docs.ens.domains/dao/proposals/submit . Quorum rule for social proposals: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/voting-period-bulletin/19079 . EP 5.15 result (For 801,345 / Against 757,862 / Abstain 36,936): https://snapshot.box/#/s:ens.eth/proposal/0xca27ce450e2a404b51d7ec7979639561dc5d8302949b3a29e4dfef2a8993f018 . ProposalBond design and debate, including the Johnson and Van de Sande replies: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/temp-check-social-adding-proposalbond-to-ens-governor-to-make-proposing-more-accessible/19539 and https://discuss.ens.domains/t/seeking-feedback-ens-governor-upgrade-to-make-proposing-more-accessible/19296 . The greater of $10,000 or 1,000 ENS suggestion: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/seeking-feedback-ens-governor-upgrade-to-make-proposing-more-accessible/19296/19 . Implementation: https://github.com/voteagora/ens-governance-contracts/pull/1 . Sponsorship flow: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/seeking-feedback-agoras-proposal-lifecycle-proposal-sponsorship-flow/19295 . Delegate concentration, one delegate outvoting the next fifty: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/draft-reform-dao-governance-by-delegating-5m-ens-tokens/22247 . Temp check under debate: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/temp-check-next-era-of-ens-dao-empowering-the-ens-foundation/22175 . Prices: https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=ethereum,ethereum-name-service&vs_currencies=usd,ngn . ENS price one year ago ($27.73): https://crypto.com/us/price/ethereum-name-service . Nigerian minimum wage: https://tradingeconomics.com/nigeria/minimum-wages .