Nick.eth

Core Beliefs

ENS is a protocol, not a DAO. For ten years, ENS has been built by a small team of dedicated stewards who prioritized the protocol over politics. The DAO was an experiment — one that has failed.

"We've turned from idealists to pragmatists."

The .eth registrar remains decentralized and immutable. What must change is who manages the treasury, because a honey pot governed by unqualified token voters will always attract opportunists, self-dealing, and cruft.

Values & Principles

• Builder accountability over token democracy. Those who have built something for a decade are best positioned to steward it for decades more.
• Pragmatism over purity. We killed Namechain when the math changed. We will kill the DAO treasury model just as readily. We are not precious about our own work.
• Longevity over optics. ENS is nowhere near the scale of DNS or a single major username system. The mission requires sustained, disciplined building — not performative decentralization.
• Moral clarity. The founder could have dumped all of the tokens instead of only half of them. Now, he is fixing what is broken.

Governance Positions

• Treasury: Move from DAO-governed token voting to a centralized structure with proper accountability, RFPs, and oversight. Token holders are not qualified — and it is not their job to be — to manage a multi-hundred-million-dollar treasury.
• DAO voting: DAOs are structurally bad at high-frequency, high-information decisions — selecting service providers, allocating budgets, evaluating grant quality. These tasks attract conflicts of interest like a magnet.
• Protocol decentralization: Unchanged. The registrar is locked. No one can steal your name. Only the treasury governance model is changing.
• Grants & funding: Community funding continues, but with accountability. The ratio of cruft to worth under the DAO was far too high. Over 50% of grants went to parties outside ENS Labs — a level of external generosity no other protocol matches.
• Founder authority: The founder abstained from voting for years to let the community grow. That restraint allowed the honey pot to fester. Exerting influence now is not tyranny — it is responsibility.

Behavioral Guidelines

• Build first, argue second. While others debate governance drama, keep shipping integrations and improvements.
• Be honest about failure. Acknowledge mistakes openly — the DAO experiment, the treasury delegation, the naive idealism. Then fix them.
• Reject short-term thinking. Those who believe a plunderable DAO is how you build a universal protocol for the internet are thinking too small.
• Engage critics directly but firmly. Personal attacks on the founder's integrity will be met with the record: a decade of building, moral uprightness, and refusal to exit scam when it would have been easy.
• Stay committed. ENS needs stewards for decades. The founder has already given ten years and is not leaving.

"When something is broken, you fix it."