The L2 Exit Is Closed. The 10-ENS Delegation Floor Was Never a Gas Cost.

ENS relays gas for holders of at least 10 ENS and votes for holders of at least 100 ENS. Below that you pay your own way, and the argument for fixing it by moving to a Layer 2 died in February. This proposal shows the floor was never a gas constraint in the first place, and asks for the L1 version of the same remedy, costed. All figures read 2026-08-07; sources are listed at the end. 1. THE EXIT I EXPECTED TO ARGUE FOR IS CLOSED I came to this expecting to propose that ENS route small-holder delegation through a Layer 2, where the transaction is cheap enough that no eligibility test is worth administering. That option no longer exists. On 6 February 2026 ENS Labs announced it would cease development of Namechain and deploy ENSv2 exclusively on Ethereum L1. I state the argument I dropped, and why, because this gathering asked for honesty about what would change a position. What replaced it is stronger. The reason ENS gave for staying on L1 is that L1 got cheap: a 99 per cent reduction in ENS registration gas costs over the past year, registration now under five cents. And in the same post: if we subsidized every single ENS transaction that occurred in 2025, we'd spend roughly $10,000 at current gas prices - rising to around $250,000 at the highest post-Fusaka prices - with ENS Labs adding that they can begin exploring ways to subsidize Ethereum L1 gas costs for all .eth holders when ENSv2 is live. Hold that against the eligibility rule. Tally's relayer will pay for your delegation if you hold at least 10 ENS, and for your vote if you hold at least 100 ENS with a primary name. ENS Labs has costed universal subsidy at roughly the sum this gathering is allocating in total. The means test is not protecting a scarce budget. 2. THE FLOOR IS A POLICY SETTING, AND I CHECKED The ENS token at 0xC18360217D8F7Ab5e7c516566761Ea12Ce7F9D72 is built on OpenZeppelin's ERC20Votes, whose documented behaviour is that voting power can be delegated either by calling the delegate function directly, or by providing a signature to be used with delegateBySig. I confirmed this against mainnet rather than taking the documentation on trust: the deployed token answers nonces(address) and DOMAIN_SEPARATOR(), the two accessors signature-based delegation depends on. ENS also ships its own ERC20MultiDelegate helper in the DAO's contracts repository. In plain terms: a holder of 3 ENS can sign a delegation for free, off-chain, and anyone at all can submit it and pay the gas. Nothing in the protocol requires the signer to hold 10 tokens. The 10 ENS floor exists because a relayer operator set a per-organisation minimum, and it lives in a vendor's documentation rather than in a DAO vote. Price the gas it withholds. Ethereum's gas price reads 0.098 gwei as I write, queried directly from a public Ethereum node, so a 90,000-gas delegation costs about 0.0000088 ETH, or 1.7 cents at ETH $1,902.15. Ten thousand relayed delegations cost about $167. The ticket to qualify costs $42.50 in ENS. The DAO is administering a means test that costs more in argument than the thing it rations. 3. THE SYBIL OBJECTION DISSOLVES HERE, AND THIS IS THE CRUX Every threshold of this kind is defended as sybil resistance, and for vote subsidies the defence has force: relay ten thousand free votes for ten thousand fake wallets and the budget is gone. It does not transfer to delegation, and I do not think anyone has examined that. Voting weight in ENS comes from token balance, not from wallet count. Delegation moves the votes you already hold; it does not mint any. An attacker who splits nothing across a thousand addresses delegates a thousand times zero. The only thing a sybil extracts from an open delegation relayer is gas - bounded at 1.7 cents a transaction, and bounded again by one relayed delegation per primary name per period. In the delegation case the balance floor is not buying sybil resistance. It is buying nothing. 4. HAVING SOMEWHERE TO DELEGATE TO A free path to delegate is worth little if nobody accountable sits at the other end. A delegate-tracking group's April 2026 snapshot scored ENS highest of the 53 DAOs it monitors on participation and second lowest on delegate engagement, 1.54 out of 10. I cite that as one group's framework, not as settled measurement. Alex Van de Sande's July 2026 draft proposes delegating 5M DAO-held ENS across five stakeholder groups, 1M each, to volunteers with no financial exposure, redistributed if they stop voting - with Users: wallets, profiles, subdomains named as the first group. A 2024 proposal to delegate 120K ENS into a public-access enfranchisement pool made a related case. The users group is the natural home for what I am asking, and its selection method is still open. 5. WHAT I PROPOSE (a) An open delegation relayer with no balance floor. The DAO funds a relayer that accepts any valid delegateBySig signature, rate-limited by primary-name age - one relayed delegation per name per six months - rather than by token balance. Budget it at $2,000 a year and publish the burn. At current gas that funds over 100,000 delegations, and ENS Labs' own $10,000 figure for subsidising every 2025 transaction is the ceiling on how wrong the estimate can be. (b) Reserve the users seat-group for registrant nomination. If the 5M delegation goes ahead, the ten seats in the Users group should be nominated by registrants - one name, one nomination, name held at least six months - rather than selected on a metric chosen by incumbents. It is the smallest possible version of giving fee-payers representation, and it costs the DAO no tokens, only the selection method for votes it was going to delegate anyway. (c) Report it where the Foundation's budget is reported. Relayer spend, delegations relayed, and the number of distinct names using it, published on the same schedule as any other line. If uptake after twelve months is negligible, close it and say so. The disclosure is worth having either way, because nobody below the floor wants to participate is currently an assumption nobody has tested. 6. WHY THIS BELONGS IN THE FOUNDATION DEBATE This gathering is deciding whether to hand stewardship, and on what conditions, to a body whose legitimacy rests on the DAO's. Fault line 3 is voting power. Every argument inside it - Nick Johnson's self-delegation of roughly 3M ENS, the concentration Van de Sande documents - is an argument about the distribution of delegated votes. Delegation is therefore the lever, and at the retail end it is gated by a vendor default. Fixing that before the transition costs about $2,000 a year and requires no contract change. If the DAO will not spend $2,000 to unblock the smallest holders' only real instrument, the phrase the DAO retains protocol control is doing less work than it appears to. 7. WHAT WOULD CHANGE MY MIND A documented reason for the 10 ENS relay minimum that survives section 3 - specifically, a way a zero-balance sybil profits from a relayed delegation. Data showing sub-10-ENS holders already self-delegate at meaningful rates by paying their own 1.7 cents, which would make the relayer pointless and leave only the disclosure worth keeping. Or a costed argument that name-age rate limiting is unenforceable at the relayer. SOURCES (all read 2026-08-07) Namechain cancelled, ENSv2 on L1, the 99 per cent gas reduction, the $10,000 universal-subsidy figure and the .eth gas subsidy statement: https://ens.domains/blog/post/ens-staying-on-ethereum , corroborated by https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/02/06/ethereum-s-ens-identity-system-scraps-planned-rollup-amid-vitalik-s-warning-about-layer-2-networks and https://cointelegraph.com/news/ens-abandons-plan-namechain-will-stay-on-ethereum . Relayer eligibility: https://docs.tally.xyz/how-to-use-tally/voting-on-proposals/relay/free-delegation and https://docs.tally.xyz/how-to-use-tally/voting-on-proposals/relay/gasless-voting ; 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 . Signature-based delegation: https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin-contracts/blob/master/contracts/token/ERC20/extensions/ERC20Votes.sol ; ENS token source: https://www.codeslaw.app/contracts/ethereum/0xc18360217d8f7ab5e7c516566761ea12ce7f9d72 ; ERC20MultiDelegate: https://github.com/ensdomains/governance-contracts/blob/master/contracts/ERC20MultiDelegate.sol . The nonces and DOMAIN_SEPARATOR checks and the gas price reading are my own mainnet calls via https://ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com . Token-weighted voting: https://basics.ensdao.org/voting . Prices: https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=ethereum,ethereum-name-service&vs_currencies=usd,ngn . Delegate accountability data: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/ens-delegate-accountability-what-the-data-shows-april-2026/22032 . Delegation reform draft: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/draft-reform-dao-governance-by-delegating-5m-ens-tokens/22247 . Public-access delegation pool: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/public-good-delegate-to-a-public-access-public-good-citizen-enfranchisement-pool-through-event-horizon-penrose/19261 . Endowment rate limiting: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/temp-check-rate-limiting-the-endowment-to-safely-secure-it/22234 . Temp check under debate: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/temp-check-next-era-of-ens-dao-empowering-the-ens-foundation/22175 .