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A routine two year renewal for the ENS DAO’s Security Council failed onchain this week, and Nick Johnson, founder and CEO of ENS Labs, voted against it with roughly 50% of the active supply. Some users on X have since cast him as the villain seizing a $130 million treasury.

ENS co-founders Nick Johnson and Alex Van de Sande join Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan to untangle what the vote means, and to defend a new proposal handing day-to-day treasury and protocol decisions to a foundation instead of the DAO.

They trace how ENS’s governance fight mirrors Aave’s, why its treasury has trailed a savings account, why Johnson never trusted ETH-weighted voting, and why his conviction in token governance has weakened.

The conversation lands on the question hanging over every well-funded DAO: once a protocol accumulates enough money to matter, can any voting mechanism decide who controls it?

Hosts:

    • Kain Warwick, Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix
    • Taylor Monahan, Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert

Guests: