Alex Van de Sande, a co-founder of the Ethereum Name Service, proposed Monday that the ENS DAO delegate 5 million ENS tokens from its dormant community treasury to individual participants. The move would strip decision-making authority from what Van de Sande called "just a 1-of-1 multisig," a single address that currently holds veto power over the DAO's capital.
The ENS DAO controls a treasury denominated in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets. How that treasury gets deployed—or whether it gets deployed at all—today hinges on a single multisig holder's sign-off. That's a structural problem for an organization that claims to be decentralized. Giving individual participants direct token authority would flip the approval chain: proposals would need distributed consent rather than a gatekeeper's rubber stamp.
Van de Sande did not specify in his proposal whether delegated tokens would come with full treasury access or limited caps tied to specific initiatives. Those details matter enormously. A broad delegation without guardrails could expose the DAO to the same governance attack surface that has hit other protocols—Curve and Beanstalk both suffered because governance tokens concentrated in a few hands or addresses made them vulnerable to flash-loan or whaledriven exploits. A tightly scoped delegation might fix the bottleneck but leave the core problem intact.
The proposal lands as DAOs across Ethereum wrestle with the gap between their stated structure and operational reality. Most started with multisigs as temporary safety valves while governance processes matured. The question now is whether those temporary controls ever actually get removed. Months or years of inertia later, they calcify into permanent architecture.
The ENS treasury includes its native token (100 million ENS in total supply) plus stablecoins and other assets. Distributing 5 million tokens—5% of the total—would give participants meaningful voting weight without betting the entire treasury on an overnight shift to distributed control. It's a graduated approach to the problem, not a full dissolution of centralized oversight.
Whether the multisig holder approves the delegation is the first real test. If the structure is truly temporary, approval should follow. If it doesn't, that's the real signal about how decentralized the DAO actually intends to be.