Unchained - How One ENS Vote Reignited the DAO Governance Debate: Uneasy Money

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

Nick Johnson's ENS vote sparked days of backlash. He and co-founder Alex Van de Sande join Uneasy Money to explain what actually happened. ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsors! ⁠Cape: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM swaps before they happen. Get 33% off your first six months at ⁠https://cape.co/unchained⁠ (use code: UNCHAINED). ======================================================== A routine two year renewal for the ENS DAO's Security Council failed on chain 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: Nick Johnson - Founder and CEO of ENS Labs Alex Van de Sande - Cofounder of ENS Timestamps 🗳️ 02:14 Kain unpacks whether Nick really controls the ENS Security Council vote 🔥 06:37 Taylor pushes back: is the pile-on on Nick actually fair? ⚔️ 11:30 Kain calls it a DAO governance proxy war, echoing Aave's Stani fight 🍯 15:00 Nick on why a DAO treasury becomes a honeypot for capital allocation 🪙 28:01 Nick on why ETH-weighted voting would have left ENS open to a takeover ⚖️ 32:47 Nick clarifies what the ENS Labs proposal actually changes at the DAO 🏛️ 40:27 Nick argues the DAO should stop trying to run ENS day-to-day 📣 52:04 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months with code unchained at https://cape.co/unchained 🍴 58:56 Could a fork let Nick walk off with ENS's treasury? Alex says no 🎤 01:13:31 Taylor asks Nick and Alex point blank: why are you still here? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want to believe that we can still act as a safeguard for the protocol. It can still make the right decisions without the noise of constantly trying to allocate individual pools of money and run working groups and so on. You know, focused on the right things, I want to believe it can still work. My conviction is weaker than it was. I want to make a real effort to turn this round and to focus on the things that matter and to re-decentralise it. If it doesn't work, then we need to find another path forward that still is meaningfully

decentralized and maybe it's going to be a conversation going forward trying to figure out, you know, can we make this work in this way still with token-related governance? If we can't, how can we make it in a really meaningfully decentralized fashion? You know, I don't want to become I can, not because I can as evil or anything, but because I got into crypto the whole, you know, for the whole reason that we should be able to build better decentralized governance structures. And I don't want to give up on that just yet. Hey everyone, I'm Kane Work and welcome to Uneasy Money, feels what happens on chain, never stays on chain.

I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monaghan, security expert, and we have two very special guests today, Nick Johnson, the founder of EnS Labs, and the current villain on crypto Twitter timeline. We'll get to the bottom of that. And Alex Van to send another Ethereum super OG. I've been out etho-ged by like a fair margin today. I'm like the LARPie new guy in this room right now, who built ENS back in 2017, but now does other things.

So first, before we begin, here's a word from the sponsors that make the show possible. This episode is brought to you by Cape, America's Privacy First Mobile Carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location, and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off six months at cape.co slash unchained. All right. Our first segment is ENS's Security Council War. Let's dig into this because it has been probably the last two or three days now, back-to-back Twitter coverage.

So the ENS Dow's Security Council, the body that can cancel a proposal, after it's been passed and entered the time lock, an emergency backstop against governance attacks, was up for a two-year renewal. The current expires July 24th year. The on-chain renewal failed. Nick.eath, that is this gentleman, is with us here, the glasses,

E&S Labs founder, voted against with 3.26 million ENS, roughly 50% of the active voting supply. Now, I just want to stop there, because I've seen on Twitter, many, many kind of hyperbolic statements about you voted with half of the tokens. Everyone seems to be very confused about this. So can we just at least address, do you apparently control 50% of the EMS tokens?

No. Is that, okay, all right. So what is the voting proportion at the moment in EES typically? So there's 100 million E&S tokens. at launch, 50% of those went to the Dow, 25% went to an e-drop, and 25% went to core contributors. As of today, of course, everything is mixed about,

the Dow still mostly has its 50%. I have about, you know, 3.2% of the total, and, you know, the remainder is distributed amongst a great deal, great number of holders. The actual amount that are delegated is about, seven million. And so just to be clear, you've delegated all of your tokens to yourself. Almost all of them. That's quite a, quite a draconian move for you to give yourself the voting power there of your own tokens. But, no, I'm kidding. So you have 3% of the token supply,

right, that is voting, which was roughly 50, so about 6%, let's call it, 6, 7% of the token. tokens are being actively used for voting, which is broadly in line with other DAALs, maybe even high, potentially. So, you know, the fundamental issue here obviously being that there is very little participation by token holders in Dow governance here. Like, there are more than enough tokens to outvote you clearly, like in the world, right? theoretically. And I think what emphasizes that is that at launch, of course,

I had my launch allocation, which was just shy of 7%. And my influence, had I ever delegated that, would actually have been less than it was today, because you know, delegated voting power and participation has diminished more quickly than my own token

fly, you know, because everybody is selling tokens and is moving away, mostly because there's strong financial incentive to sell something you got, especially if you got it for free, and none to participate in decentralized governance. And so remind me, what was the percentage that was air dropped? Which I got, by the way. I think I still hold those tokens. But yeah, what was the percentage of tokens that were air dropped?

25% to ENS users. and then some of the contributor allocation was to ecosystem integrations and so forth as well. Yeah, so full disclosure. I think I have like personal because I have EMS names, but then I think we also got to build their community allocation as well because we integrated ENS. And Tay, did you vote on this recent proposal to try and overthrow our benevolent dictator Nick here? No, I assume not, right? I think I voted on some sub very early on, but.

Hey, you're letting it's down. You're letting it down. The resistance. Okay, here's the issue with this, right? As I see it, I understand the community is very upset because Nick is the evil dictator who's going to take this over and do evil things. And this is a money grab, whatever, right? I understand that perspective.

I'm not standing up here and voting. I'm not doing anything. I'm not trying to build the better ENS. But all the people. Complaining on Twitter definitely would be. Are they not? And Alex, I know, I know, I know this is. Alex, you're, you got to unmute yourself, my friend.

This is, this is the talk show. Okay, so here's here. Here's some contacts, right? Yeah, okay. So I don't want to overstate my own credentials, right? So I founded YNS with Nick back then, but then I stepped out of the project. I was focusing on order each year and Foundation projects.

Nick took INS, made ENS labs, launched the DAO, and is, I would say, the person most responsible for making ENS what it is today. After the ENS launch, that was launched, I came back and started working. I became a meta-governance steward, a public good steward. They participated in the vote. So I can say that I saw all those things were happening live, right? We were saying delegations are coming down and it was becoming harder and harder to participate on to pass the quorum and to get the vote.

This has been going as a low drain for a while, right? And we've like, I've tried solving that, giving out more tokens. We gave out, I think, a hundred thousand tokens to more builders that, I don't think that made much of a difference because. People still didn't participate a lot. And until recently, Nick was the number one token holder. He had, I think, 300,000 or something like that. He was by far the original one.

But he wasn't that much. He then decided to become a more active, self-delegated tokens with himself. And now he can over, he can outvote the, the 50 largest other delegates, right? So, and I think an interesting point is that it's not that it's a problem that Nick can outvote the 50, like the top 50 delegates because Nick shouldn't be able to vote with his own tokens. I think the problem is, okay, how did you get in a situation where there are so very few people

voting on things, right? And I think that was happening before. The fact that people were talking about this now, it's because those votes were activated very recently, right? Nick was just voting a few things with tokens that other people had delegated to him. And now when, once he delegated his own tokens, it just made it very clear to the Dow that what seemed to be a problem in governance is now clearly. That's a crisis of it. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. And again, like, I want to be very clear here that the community and the conversation on Twitter and the forums and elsewhere, like, people are very upset and they're very outraged. And there's, there is, I think, a number of reasons underlying that. And I think it's all probably pretty valid. I think that... They're not upset with the last vote though. They're upset with the other thing that were happening before that led to the vote.

Right, exactly. And that's the... That's how these things work, right? Is that it's not the one little thing. It's like 8,000 things. I've seen conversations about how, like, for example, we have the... This idea that it's like a money grab is one conversation. Another conversation that's happening is...

that it's like rugging, reconrolling the whole ENS and now Nick's going to steal all of our evenings, which for the record is not what's happening. And then another one is, I think just like a general,

and I didn't really get to the bottom of the drama, but it's like a general unhappiness with the state of like Dow's and allocations and expectations. That is the crux of the people that I'm seeing that are frustrated, outraged, whatever, whatever you want, you know, people like left terrorists, right? This is like a proxy war, arguably, right? In this like long running Dow, you know, collapse where all of these Dow, you know, we talked

about Ave for months because you had, you know, Mark Zeller who was like, I am a good representative of this Dow mechanism and I've done everything right and then you've got Stanney who can just come in and do whatever he wants and that's not how it was supposed to be and and you know this again you know

it's very similar right like there's obviously there's nuances there's nuances of course right but then but Kane I don't think it is like there is like the month's long debate there is the years long issue with governance there is the immediate issue of the Security Council and we're talking about the Security Council.

I would say because the Security Council vote made it, created an image that is very memetic and easy to see. It's an image where people can just see, there's a huge red bubble of Nick saying no and a sea of green bubbles of Nick saying yes, right? But it's... Should it say it all right? Exactly. They just found some guys on Twitter and... But the vote wasn't about the Security Council.

I think what people started talking about was about a new proposal of redefining what is the NSDAO and what is the INS Foundation. And I think that's an interesting topic in which we should. I think like, you know, there's the Dow, there's this Dow kind of existential crisis, right? Of like what is the purpose of Dow's? Do they work? All of these things that, you know, the DOWs that we have kind of held up the best examples are they right then you know uh turn into uh a pitch battle and and so i think there is like this open question of do dow's work and every time a dowell appears to fail or there's something that you know goes against what people want the dow to do or expect dows to do um it brings up this this you know existential angst right about like everything that we've done over the last 10 years in

building dows has failed um and and you know people start getting frustrated about that. Yeah. I think there's another angle to that too, which is that all of us that have been in crypto for a while have sort of institutionalized trauma around rugs. And so the moment you see something rectangular and fluffy, you assume it's a rug, you know.

And so that very much applies to anything that touches on treasury governments or anything like that and is controversial. Yeah, of course. Okay, I would love for Nick to tell, like to start telling that story, right? So, Nick, what is in your vision, like, what it should be, or what is the proposal that it should be the future of the Tao, the future of the NS Foundation? What do you think, like, what do you defend that the path where we should go, which is the reason in which most people were creating, like, this huge debate? I would love for you to explain it to the viewer.

and we can have a discussion on this. Yep. So, you know, we've touched already on the fact that delegation rates have only been going downwards, that, you know, despite me having fewer tokens than when ENS launched, it's still a proportionally larger impact on voting. And, you know, that's symptomatic of the problems we're having with the NS Dow, and really everyone's having with DAOs in general. You know, the participation gets harder.

but at the same time we have this massive honeypot of a treasury that is calling out for people to find ways to allocate it and reasons to justify it and so forth. And so increasingly, you know, governance gets dominated by people who have reasons to want to allocate the treasury with the way they want to be allocated. And I think for the most part, these people aren't malicious. You know, these are people who have pet projects that they think will be useful or valuable, just fun to build, and they want to see them funded, and they're sort of prepared to put their votes, you know, where their, where their mouth is, so to speak, and, you know, make sure it happens. And it's kind of endemic to, you know, any sort of money buys influence voting, but, you know, as time goes on, the votes concentration, the hands of the people who can make money off owning

them, and usually that's by, you know, getting something in that they want. Sorry, just Nick, just to pause there for a second, right? Like one of the things that I would say I was naive about when starting a Dow and when, you know, I got involved in Dow's in the first place was this idea that it would become a debate over a capital allocation, right? That like, which is a bit ironic because the first Dow, you know, of Hack fame was about capital allocation. But outside of outside of that, right, like the NS Dow was not supposed to be an investment vehicle. investing in projects and, you know, it was supposed to be kind of stewarding the NS ecosystem. So the idea that a Dow is going to be a good way of allocating capital, it feels strange that that is kind of how it, but of course it's a giant pot of money.

And so it has to allocate it. And so therefore it does evolve into that. Like, you know, is that kind of some of the crux of this issue for you that like the Dow shouldn't be targeted by people who are looking for it to turn into essentially a investment vehicle? I think it's a big chunk of it. You know, when we launched the Dow, we had two problems we needed solving. One is that we wanted to decentralize governance over the protocol levers. So upgrading smart contracts, you know, coming up with, you know, pricing models and changes to those, dealing with upgrades to other components and so forth, you know, any vulnerabilities,

changes in price oracle. So protocol governance in a nutshell, all the stuff we would love to decentralise and remove control of entirely, but for one reason or another, it's impractical to do so. And the second issue we had was that we'd amassed this treasury

through registration fees on ENS names, and we wanted a good decentralized way to allocate that specifically to ENS development and to public goods. You know, E&S is always from day one, being conceived as a public good in itself and as a non-profit. And, you know, the intention of this was not, you know, this is an investment account. We didn't want to invest in other projects and see returns.

We wanted to sort of pay back the debt we felt we owed from from ENS being launched by a grant. And we wanted to continue to build the Web 3 Commons. And with a specific focus, of course, on naming an identity and the things that ENS was focused on. and over time, that allocation of funds has become, you know, more or less all-consuming with the protocol side taking a back seat in many ways. But the larger issue, I think, isn't even just the way interests affect all of this and the tendency for budgets only to go upwards, of course. It's also the fact that DAOs just aren't very good at doing this in real time

because, you know, every conversation has to be a committee, you know, everything has to be a working group and so on. The people who are hired are often individually competent, but there's no overall sort of organization that admits this into a coherent whole. And if we look at organizations that have succeeded in allocating this funding, then it's things like foundations and so forth, which have accountability to their constituents, but they act as a, you know, a coherent organization that, has internal processes that operates independently but accountably to the rest of the environment they're in. So you mentioned that a lot of allocation is investment. I don't think ENS has a problem with discussion investment or anyone wants to want it to have a return. Most of the discussions involve allocation of funds towards other things, towards public goods, put work, hackathons, and toward other teams.

Sorry, just to be clear, like when I say capital allocation, right, like capital allocation doesn't, it could be to non-profits, but you still need to do it well, right? Like there's still a problem, whether you're trying to get a return or, you know. I think BNSDAO sort of tries to think of the return as in the return for development, right? So one of the things I helped onboard when I was a steward of Medagov was a creative program to try to onboard 10 new teams. mostly because I was worried about the bus factor of what happens if Nick is hit by a bus, right? What happens to N.S? We should be able to have lots of other people, lots of other teams that are competent, that are able to do that.

And we had enough capital to do that. And we onboarded, I think, 10, 12 new teams. And I would agree, not all of them were great. Some of them were fantastic. And it is true that the Tao, a lot of the politics comes in and start spending a lot of energy, just discussing how to do the thing, how to allocate the thing. I don't think it means that the Tao wasted funds or a lot of money where misappropriator No, no, I don't, I'm not suggesting that.

I'm not suggesting that the Dow wasted funds. I'm saying that like if you have a pot of half a billion dollars for take, right, that, you know, your job almost necessarily becomes how do you allocate those funds, right? Now, you can also not allocate them, but then there's going to be a bunch of people that say, you've got a half a billion dollars and you're in Ethereum, why are you not making Ethereum better, why you're not funding public goods, et cetera? You can't opt out of this, right? And there's a problem that if you ask people to vote, you always vote to increase the budget.

So the budget is always increasing, but the revenue necessarily is. so the part is shrinking, and at some point, people start realizing that, look, it doesn't fit everyone out, everyone at the same time anymore. And I want to push back a little bit on the Dow doesn't waste its funds, because how many, do you remember how many of the funded proposals in the first service provider program were subname registries? It was four or five, and I think one has survived to the modern day. And the reason for that was like, because everybody voted for their favorite subname registry project, and everyone had a different favorite. And the ranking mechanism was just that the top end got in up to the budget limit. And, you know, this kind of resulted in a lot of duplicate funding on something that honestly is neat, but quite low. And it's true.

But it's also true that the Dow allocated almost half of its budget to NSLAD. And the NSLAD also had projects that tried to do, things. and then had to cancel, right? So it is, I think trying to do things and then having to walk back on it, it's part, right? Yeah, of course. We had to walk back on name change. We had to walk back on name wrapper. Okay, but here, let me, let me, I guess, zoom out a little bit.

Because, yeah, this is, I mean, Lafters, for example, specifically calls out the name chain stuff. And the name chain stuff is basically you guys worked really hard to build this thing that seemed to be necessary at the time and at some point you're sitting, I assume you're sitting there and you're like, shit, we don't. Like this is an extra, yeah. Okay, and like both, by the way, both me and Kane have been there before. We've had to break those decisions. I also lose this time building a chain.

Like, the whole Ethereum L2 scaling roadmap now, we sit here in Chambles going, actually we should have just focused on L1, but at the time, you didn't have the luxury because L1, it was 100 bucks per transaction. action, right? So we have to do something. And let me, you know, let me sort of correct the record a bit there, because about 80% of what we've been working on the last two years has been ENSV2 and about 20% was named chain because largely ENSV2 is chain independent. And, you know, when we decided we weren't going to do name chain, which was a fork of an existing chain with, you know, deployment of an existing chain architecture with our own needs catered to, we had to up out probably

about 20% of the ENSV2 code that was concerned with cross-chain transactions and synchronization and so forth. But the very much the bulk of it was, you know, work on version 2 of the NS. And I think, you know, people criticizing the decision are, you know, are looking back with, with, you know, the benefit of hindsight. Because when we announced we were going to be pursuing an L2, everyone went, oh, thank God, finally, you know, transaction fees are so hard. This is unstable. Of course. we announced we were canceling it, everybody went, yep, that makes sense. Exactly. And by the way, the Dow's, Dows in general, it was like when ENS launched, like, you had to do a Dow, of course you had to do a Dow.

You had to, one, just like the regulatory environment and the uncertainty and the fact that, yeah, but then also, you know, I think that it's important to call out that DOWs in general were not just this like shallow regulatory thing to absolve yourself of response. No, no, no, we all drank the Kool-Aid. We believed it. We believed it. That's why it worked. It worked. It worked as regulatory protection

because we actually were naive enough to believe it. However, I think over time, and this is like, you know... We're a bit more cynical now. We're a bit more cynical now. We're just a bit more realistic. Can we just talk? Yeah. Sorry, can we just talk about the

because I think, you know, know, AVE is one thing, right? Like we talked a lot about AVEA. Avey in another reality could just be a company, right? People are paying for services and, you know, they pay the company to operate the thing. And it could be smart contract base. It could be decentralized. But, you know, you just pay a fee to labs, labs, you know, keeps building the software. The software is, you know, semi immutable or whatever. But like, it didn't need token governance to decide. how to build the thing, right? Like a group of 50 people could get together in a room or a couple of rooms and say, okay, we're going to build this, this feature, that feature, whatever.

ENS doesn't feel like that, at least to me, right? And, you know, it isn't a company. It shouldn't be a company. And we have like a real world proxy for this, right? In like the main, gildy governance in the world, right? Like that's, you know, a lot of the prior art,

I think you guys pulled from, comes from that and like a naming registry shouldn't be a for-profit entity for a bunch of reasons right um so i think like it made a lot of sense for it to be a dow the question that i that i guess i have that maybe you guys can can clarify especially ens is also a bit unusual because it had revenue like people were paying for its services in a way that like other other dows did not have revenue, right? Their only revenue was issuing a token. So you guys issued a token for the purposes of governing the thing, which made sense. It was supposed to be public good and you needed to govern it. Like in hindsight, if you look back on that and knowing what you know now that the

treasury would be far larger in ETH than it is in its own token, could you have avoided all of this by just using ETH as the governance mechanism? Or was it genuinely that like if you didn't have a dedicated voting mechanism that you would have all of these perverse effects and eat holders would vote for weird things that were not good for E&S Dow, et cetera? Like what drove that? Was it genuinely that you thought you would need funding? And then the price of Heath went up so much that it didn't actually become a problem. How do you unpick all of that?

So, yeah, so it was never about funding, you know, and in fact, in a way it was the reverse. You know, when the Dow launched the Treasury was already fairly substantial. and we could have funded labs from that directly, you know, without a Dow. But we wanted to have that decentralization layer. You know, we effectively handed over the Treasury to the Dow and said, hey, can we have a bit of it back so that we can keep building E&S, you know. So it definitely wasn't the funding question. I think that, you know, the reason we did it the way we did it is because we, our primary concern was always, well, put it this way. Our secondary concern was someone coming in and stealing all the money, because our primary concern was somebody coming in and messing with the critical levers.

And we've designed it as much as possible to lock in and mutably the things that really, really matter. So the Dow, me, the Security Council, none of us can affect somebody's existing name. Change how it resolves, make it expire early asterisk here, because there's a vulnerability that we still have to patch due to the difficulty of the difficulty of. patching it. All of these things were designed to be as immutable as possible, but there are things we just can't make immutable. And if we had had, you know, ETH weighted voting on it, there are plenty of rich people out there who could buy enough Eath and, you know, take control and basically run a griefing

attack on E&S. And if E&S was as popular and as widely used as we wanted it to be. You're talking about Tom Lee, right? That's the guy you were worried about. I mean, no, it's Vitalik, to be honest. Fair enough. Yeah, I know. If the EnS were as widespread as we wanted it to be, and as we hoped it would be,

it could very well be profitable to do that, you know, to come in and basically hijack the name registration process or, you know, affect one of the levers they could affect in order to mess with the NS. Or it could just be, you know, that they had the money that you don't have to spend it to vote. You know, you could just go in there and grief the whole thing. So, you know, we felt we needed its own voting token. And we tried to design the allocation so that it would go to the people who actually show commitment to a UNS. You know, I probably here isn't the time to go into like all the details of how the aerdrop was allocated.

But we tried to do it in a way that made sense, you know, that meant that the people who we thought had showed they were truly interested in the UNS could have a vote on it. I mean, Alex, yeah, you were around for a lot of this stuff, right? Like, what's your take on, on kind of the incentives at play and the origin of focus voting? I think I am an optimist and I am a reformist. So I think that there are a lot of things that went wrong with decentralized governance. And there are a lot of things that went wrong with the way the NS was a government. So like, we are talking about being OG. I was a creator of the original Tao that broke down.

Everything went to ruins. I was part of the group that tried to save it. And then I'm still part of the new group of a guy of like the grief, try to resurrect the Tao. And I still think that there is always a wait out for decentralized governance and for Dao's and he still have hope for UNS in that, that we can just take the Dow and do a few things that are better to make it more auditable, to make it more responsible to make the foundation better.

And I think the elephant in the room and the reason that we are here and the reason that it was drama is that a lot of people read into the last proposal by NS Labs, as them saying, the Dow had failed. We would like to shut it down, take back control of the Treasury and the tokens. Nick, do you think that was a fair assessment of what was the proposal, or do you think there was a lot of misunderstanding in that? I think it was a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation. And, you know, Mia Copa, part of that is the proposal is really damn long. You know, you have to read the whole thing to get a clear picture.

And, you know, part of that is just it's trying to do a lot. But I think a lot of people came away with the wrong impression because of that. you know, the idea is basically to take the part of the Dow that committees are bad at running, you know, and that's, you know, fund allocation and day to day off. The capital allocation, right? Yeah. But, you know, not just that. There's also things that historically Labs has been doing because Labs was the only one who, you know, seemed to be in the right position to do it, like interfacing with ICAN. And really that is something that should be done by an organization that represents all of the ENS, not just the people building the protocol.

And so that's something the foundation would do as well. You know, it would become, it's already extant. It's already the wrapper, the legal wrapper for the Dow. You know, is the Dow as far as the outside, you know, ecosystem is concerned. It would become responsible for leading and representing E&S to the rest of the world. And, you know, that's the intention. And then, you know, similar sort of intention around the Treasury that it's been managed, I would say, you know, and full disclosure on a Kapaki investor,

and Kapakia are the ones who manage the treasury. But I would say it's been managed well competently, but disappointingly in terms of, you know, it's given returns that are a good percentage point below just putting it in a savings account or government bonds. And, you know, a good... I mean, if he's were at 10K, then we wouldn't be saying that. We'd be very happy.

So, you know, we know who to blame for that. That's measured against Heath, because part of it's beneath and part of it's in the US dollars. And each of them has been independently appreciating against its benchmark, but very slowly. But the simple truth is that if we'd put it, taken it all out and put it in like a Vanguard index fund, would be doing much better now.

And even if we put it in a savings account, we'd probably be doing better, you know. And that's, part of that's a reflection of the conservative investment mandate they've had and the fees that, you know, that occur on top of that. And part of that is a result of the fact, that their counterparty is the Dow, who is, you know, 300 people who, you know, don't agree on

anything. And any time they want to change the investment mandate, they basically have to invent it themselves and then try and convince all of these people. This incredibly complicated proposal is safe and reasonable and a good idea, you know. And they, to their credit, have done a very good job of walking through all of this, but it doesn't make for sound fiscal management or, or, you know, good returns. I mean, this is, this is, this is the heart of problems with building, right? Like, this is not, I think that, like, what you've just discussed is, like, definitely real. But I think it's much bigger, it's much bigger and much more common.

Like, when you have a group of people trying to accomplish something, especially in a Dow format, where, I mean, we have to be real. like the expectations of what the NS Dow is and was are not exactly agreed upon fundamentally. And like as someone who has run small teams and big teams, right, it's hard enough without a doubt. It's hard enough when you do have like actual goals, actual management, actual accountability, actually firing and firing and shaping teams, right? It is hard to ship stuff. It is hard to accomplish stuff. It is hard to do things well.

And I think that in my opinion, in one of the most interesting things about the NSDAO or the NS in general, the org structure of the DAO and the labs and everything, right, is the fact that nobody, nobody disagrees that Nick has been doing the lion's share of the work since day one, right? And I think that that's quite interesting, right? Like Alex earlier in this episode, you comment on like the bus factor of Nick is like a, it's like a problem. And it is. But at the same time, I think that we have to like address. the elephant in the room, which is Nick is, I think Nick is probably most accountable for the success and the failure of ENS,

regardless of what actually happens or how things play out. If, for example, the ENS fails, if it gets hacked, that is mostly going to fall on Nick's shoulders, not the doubt, not, I mean, to a certain extent, in labs, but like it's Nick, right? now with that as like uh you can't make me feel between that because it's not working i'm just saying okay in my opinion right that's like a real thing you're just saying don't make a mistake no i'm just saying like and then the fact that but then the fact that that surface the like the appearance of it though right is that everyone that's not dick is somehow accountable for this

right that's what the doubt is the doubt is supposed to be doing this The Dow is responsible for this. But if something goes wrong and if something failure fails, the Dow is actually not accountable whatsoever. Period. And a conversation. Like we can pretend that it is. We can talk about incentives. We can talk about money all we want.

At the end of the day, if the NS fails, it's Nick's false. And it's always been that way, even when the Dow was in more control. And so I, and that's at the end of the day, that's why I have a hard time getting very invested in hating Nick. because like I don't think I think you want to do So I think it's a critical point though right

like you know Nick you said you didn't trust ETH was the only alternative asset right if we're going to do token voting we're going to have some kind of decentralized voting mechanism and governance mechanism ignore the money for a second let's talk about the protocol ETH was not a viable alternative

right for reasons and and so therefore for you needed an independent token that could represent governance of the thing. And we've seen that a lot of our assumptions around voting were very naive. Like, you know, we had a bunch of idealists and we thought, you know, we'll have 80% of the tokens voting or whatever it was, right? And it's seven. Most people do not care about governance. If we had looked at TradFai, we could have probably figured that out pretty quickly.

you know, they only want to hold a token because they hope it'll go up, right? They don't care about governance. They don't, which is not everyone, but it's enough people who are holding a token that it becomes problematic, right? And even if you did have 100% token, you know, governance participation, it would still be really hard because people would not necessarily agree on, you know, and this is kind of shown, right? We can't even agree on Twitter whether you're a good guy or a bad guy. right so how are we supposed to agree on you know what what we should do from a protocol perspective so if we just isolate this yeah like how you know how should this public good ignore the money like how should the protocol be governed do you still believe that like token governance is the

right mechanism for governing the protocol yeah sorry also to add on this is like this is the question that I'm in I need to ask right because a lot of people are asking it and there's not a clear answer and it builds on what can't just said right like it seems like there's a choice on the table like go this way and sort of get back on a more let's call it a traditional org structure path and there's like different ways you can go about it but that's you know the tao's influence is going to go down or you can we can keep doing what's been happening and like fix the Dow structure? And I think a lot of people are asking that question is like, is it possible to fix it? Is it possible to fix it out, right? Is there an alternate universe where that's something that you can do

or that anyone can do theoretically or in real life? So let me answer them in reverse order because I think you know, fixing the Dow versus empowering the foundation is a bit of a false dichotomy because I think that, you know, what we've learned here is that the Dow should not have been trying to run these things directly. You know, it should have been doing it through an organization like the Foundation that is accountable to it. And, you know, in the case of the Ennis Dow and the Foundation, the Foundation's articles and corporation actually specify, you know, that the directors of fiduciaries, they have a responsibility to the Dow, you know, the Dow can appoint and remove them. It is the organization that is beholden to the Dow.

And so I think, you know, what we've learned is that we should have been doing something like this all along. And the Dow should have been focusing on the overall law governance and to a degree, the sort of strategy of, you know, where we want to send this thing, you know, in the broadest possible way. Sorry, sorry, just on that point, where we want to send this thing, right? Let's talk about just from it, ignore the money, from a technical perspective. You talked about NSV2, right? The decisions and structure, like the product level, the decisions around NSV2, there is no way in hell that a Dow is doing that. Yeah.

And it's just not. It's like to do it that way. Absolutely. No, I'm thinking, I don't know. I don't know how I say it. It's, you know, we need people, you know, at labs and at the foundation who has this vision for what E&S should be. But we, if we hadn't had the Dow, then there are a lot of contributors who have come along and have, you know, have pointed out some really novel ways for E&S to either build its, you know, its penetration of the market. of, I hate word market, of, you know, of crypto and improves the UX of people and who have,

you know, have really helped with that sort of stuff. And if we just said, no, this, this, you know, organization is just here to pull the upgrade lever when it's time for an upgrade, we would have missed out on that, you know, and people who have had the vision to say, look, I have a way for ENS to address, you know, anonymous payments and stuff like that. You know, here is the thing where the ENS could be uniquely good at. meanwhile yeah we definitely don't want to hand off you know protocol level decisions and which integrations to approach and so on to to committee control through a working group you know it wouldn't work any any better than fund allocation has but you asked do I still believe token weighted

voting can work for protocol decisions and I guess my answer is I still really hope so you know I haven't given up on this you know you know, like Alex, who has been at DOWS for even longer than me, you know, I, I want to believe that we can still, it can still act as a safeguard for the protocol. It can still make the right decisions, you know, without the noise of constantly trying to, you know, allocate individual pools of money and run working groups and so on. You know, focused on the right things, I want to believe it can still work. I, my conviction is weaker than it was. And I, you know, I want to make a, a, really for it to turn this round and to focus on the things that matter and to

re-decentralise it, if it doesn't work, then we need to find another path forward that still is meaningfully decentralized, you know, and maybe that, I don't know what that looks like, to be honest, you know, and maybe it's going to be a conversation going forward trying to figure out, you know, can we make this work in this way still with token-weighted governance? If we can't, how can we make it work in a really meaningfully decentralized? fashion. You know, I don't want to become I can, not because I can as evil or anything, but because I got into crypto the whole, you know, for the whole reason that we should be able to build better decentralized governance structures. And I don't want to give up on that just yet.

And maybe Alex, you can address. I want to add what I like about Dals in general, because I think that helps tell what I think is the path for ENS, right? Because, look, I, The deal you usually have is that you own a house, you pay taxes, and that money goes somewhere and you expect there will be some infrastructure built. You have police, you have things built in your porch, right? And like you don't see where the money goes. You vote, you don't see how the vote is styled. And I think that changes with Enstown.

InSdao, you have a property and you pay a property tax on it. and then you get to vote and you see where the money is going and Carpathchi is the one who is handling the treasury and I think a lot of the things that they do it is true as Nick said that they are tied

by a bunch of strings but I think those strings are beautiful because what it's happening is that all the money that the Tao has is on chain, it's transparent and every fund is on chain and Carpatky has a bunch of

very subtle controls in which what they can allow, we can do and they cannot do. And I think maybe it's harder for them to get a good return, or maybe we can just tell them, look, just be more conservative, but be still be on chain. But what I do hope is that we can still have that, right? You can still have a treasury that is on chain, that is auditable, that is ultimately controlled by a Tao, right? that you can have a foundation that is something that is more active, is someone that it is controlling, it's proposing budgets, but ultimately the budgets are voted by the Dow and the

treasury is still under the control of the Dow. And that's what I'm trying to understand from Nick, because do you still think that that's the way that we should be moving forward or would you like to have a new structure where the actual treasury is moved somewhere else? So the proposal is that the foundation manages the treasury, whether it gets managed in the existing structure through Karpakki or whether some of it gets invested elsewhere is an open question for the foundation directors. But I think the thing is I would also like that, and that's the reason we went with that structure. You know, it is a system technically. and it allows for that transparency, but it's been several years,

and the returns have been so poor that they're barely keeping up with inflation. And the reason the endowment was created was because the goal was that it would serve as a way to fund ENS, and that's the development and the proliferation of E&S and so on, and preferably also for public goods funding, even in the absence of ongoing ENS revenues. for an extended period, you know, both because of downturns, but also because we wanted the freedom to make the choice about, you know, what ENS names should cost, how they should be structured, how they should be billed, completely independently of, you know, financial day-to-day concerns, you know, because the goal was that fees are regulating, not, you know, for sustainability.

And it increasingly looks like we can't have both these things. We can't have an endowment that is 100% on chain and has a very conservative mandate that has to be neutral to both Ethan and USD in the right proportions and an endowment that will actually sustain E&S indefinitely. And if we have to choose between the two, and at least in the current climate with crypto and the climate for the last few years, then I'll choose the one that lets the NS continue operating. I mean, I think part of the problem with the development is that half of it,

is Eater. And I think half of it is Eater because a lot of it was voted by people in the Dao that really believe Eater are bears. Like, I love Eater. I am a big Eater fan. I think it is undervaloed right now. But I admit that if you want to build a huge amount of money that is very conservative, putting it half on Eater is not a rational choice. Yeah. That's good. I mean, For the record, everyone that's a name, I think everyone in this room right now is wholly fucking irrational. I know, we're sitting here being like, let's rationally discuss. Not 50% either. Let's say 25%.

Yeah. You know, I'm in like 90s still. What are you talking about? Oh, man. Why am I insane? Let's go to add. But the point is that the problem is not an reason change. The problem is that maybe or.

The allocation. And of course, that came from governance, of course. That's a problem with governance. But it's not the splurts, really, because the USD denominated part of the Treasury has also performed very poorly compared to USDA. It's gained, you know, an average of sort of 2 to 3% a year. And honestly, you know, in most countries,

the savings account and done better. Usually we lose like 30% a year. So, yeah, that's true. None of it had been had been had. Which puts a... That's what it's not to say. How much... Has been a lost.

Like, I think it's... Yeah, it's a... I think a very high bar that you guys are holding yourselves to, like, capital allocation. But we need to go to ads quickly, and then we're going to come back because there's still more to talk about here. So, let's jump to ads quickly. If you hold crypto on your phone, your biggest vulnerability isn't your wallet. It's your carrier.

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Go to cape.co slash unchained and use code unchained for 33% off your first six months. All right. We are back. We've got a few other stories to talk about, but this is definitely a luxury to have you two gentlemen with us. So I do think that it would be useful to try to like wrap this up and kind of get to the crux of the matter, right? You know, Nick, you pointed out that like we've ended up talking about the money and capital allocation, et cetera. And and I think, you know, ultimately this is one of the challenges with governance, right? It's like if the E&S Dow's Treasury were $5,000, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Like genuinely, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be interesting to people.

It's interesting to people because it is a giant file of money, right? And so, you know, there is like a little bit of a false signal from the market that, like, people really care about governing the E&S Dow. They actually care about governing money. And the ENSDL just happens to have a lot of it, right? And therefore, people are really excited about it because what, you know, having $500 million or $300 or whatever, you know, is, is a significant amount. of money that there is some, you know, tension and drama around how will it be allocated, how, you know, what will happen. So, so I think, you know, the split of maybe a three-way split

and, and, you know, forgive me if this is, is too cynical. But like the three-way split, as I see it is, you have to build a product. Like, ENS is still a product that, you know, you want to build NSV-2, which hopefully will be better than ENSV-1. presumably there's a bunch of issues that you're trying to solve, right? You want this to be credibly neutral in a way that, you know, it can be governed and not hacked or taken over or whatever. So there needs to be some mechanism for parameterizing the thing, right? And then you need to make sure that it's funded and it happens to have a giant pile of money

and you need to work out how to allocate it. Like those are the three challenges that we're dealing with. And, you know, the first two, not a lot of people don't care about genuinely right um which is why you know we've the six seven percent of bns governance voting that's happening right the vast majority of that i have to imagine is mainly for item three the money right now as you said nick right you've had um some very smart very capable people who have been involved in ns outside of the foundation outside of like direct you know just from being a a representative or a delegate or a community member or whatever that have contributed to the protocol

in in ways that otherwise wouldn't have happened and that honestly like i've seen that in synthetics i've seen that in a bunch of different protocols that is a genuine value prop that having tokens and having people that hold tokens that feel alignment that want to contribute um you cannot replicate in other governance structures so you know that i think is is very good um But it's a vanishingly small proportion of the people, maybe a hundred people have kind of participated in that way, arguably. So if you're redesigning governance, let's imagine there's no Twitter. There's no public discourse about this, right?

If you have a magic wand and you're redesigning this, and I think, Alex, you kind of were hinting at this question. Like, what is for those three things that need to be managed, what is your optimal structure? How would you do this if you could kind of go back in time and a time machine and redesign this? What would you do? What is the outcome you want? I mean, the outcome I've always wanted is removing those threats to the name service through centralization. And that's a combination of, you know, not having to trust an individual jewel that, you know,

your name will continue resolving or that you'll be able to bring you it next year or whatever. Or, you know, that they are not going to be hacked or suborned or arrested. by their government, you know, recently passed laws or whatever. And, you know, that has always been my primary concern to build a credibly neutral infrastructure that is governed in a way that is independent and is actually sustainable for the very long run. As to how to build that, like, you know, from a clean slate, as I say, I would put the funding question to the side and make it, you know, part of a foundation.

that is accountable to the Dow, but not, you know, directly voted on, you know, every individual budget and so forth. You know, they can, they can show whether they're doing a good job or not, and the Dow can agree or disagree, but they're not having to, you know, pass every budget through them. They're not having to, you know, justify every allocation. They're having to account for it all. You know, they have, you know, independence to actually do this. And I would still put the protocol levers in as decentralized hands as possible. it would probably still look like some sort of token. But, you know, ideally it would be structured in a way that facilitates, you know,

token voting for governments, beta and speculation less, you know, and all the people who are people out there who have been hating me for far longer than the people who hate me now. And that's mostly because I've always said I don't really like speculation on names. So, you know, welcome new crew, you know, here is the old crew. Alex, what do you, what do you think of that? Like, are we really, are we enemies or, you know what I mean? Not at all.

I'm still a big fan of Nick. I do disagree with something that Labs has been doing recently. And Nick says about building. When you say you disagree, is that on capital allocation, is that on decentralized governance or is that on product development? Which rail is to separate that? particularly on the future on how we can move how can we reform the Dow right I'm still a very very strong on everything should remain on chain I think what I went

forward is simply a new foundation is more empowered but it still has to run one once per year has to run a budget by the Dow and that the endowment keeps on chain and we just change a mandate but I want to go back to the incredibly neutral infrastructure because that's interesting. I think the first thing that people say when they start, look, Nick is evil, we should fork DNS, right? Let's suppose Nick is actually evil and ENS labs is going to take over the treasury, right? The interesting aspect of it is that we need to separate ENS from the dot-if name, right?

So what labs could do, they could take over, they could take over the, they could take over the the Treasury, which is not $500 million, by the way, that's, we are way past, like we are, wait, hold on, hold on. I thought we were arguing over half a billion dollars. How much are we telling about? We are probably $130 million less time we checked. What the, God, damn it. $130 million in EF as stable and about $300 million in the E&S tokens.

Right. Ignoring, okay, ignoring the E&S tokens is that it's 130 million in. But going back to that, right? There is like you, Nick could in theory take over the treasury of 130 million, right? He could have in theory take over the treasury of the tokens, which would go to zero. But there are, but he could not, if you own an, uh, if you have a if name, he could not change, take your if name from you. And more importantly, he does not control EMS in the sense that other people can create other names on it. If you have a top level domain, for example, like we have.

We have people who own that box. You can create your own name system that lives in NS. So if you do believe that Nick is able and you want to fork NS, you could, in theory, just build it still on top of ENS and be compatible with ANS and just not care about dot ETF, ETH, right? Yeah. And my plea to anyone who is determined to forked enS is, the thing we've been doing this whole time and the reason we believe it's so important to

play well with others in the domain ecosystem and why we interact with ICANN is because the most damaging thing for users is if the same name can resolve to two different things depending on who you ask. So if you're going to fork E&S, at least do what others have done and pick your own suffix and so on. All our code is open source. Feel free to grab it and deploy it. Deploy V2 ahead of us if you want. I don't advise it because, you know, we're still working on it, but you could. Just please don't make it.eath because I really don't want to be, you know, even tangentially responsible for people losing their funds because it was like, oh, no, this was the E&S, you know, R.eath, not the E&S.

dot Eith and it went to the wrong wallet. It went to some scammer or something. But that does show the importance of having a Dow, right? Because there are a lot of other, like, naming systems out there. They're just creating names that are clearly incompatible with ICAN. And they are just a private company, just selling names and promising that they will be integrated with something.

And I think they are not much difference than a company that's selling like land on the moon or the naming rights for stars, right? And my fear is that we could just take in as private and say, look, the Dow is over, the Dow is dead. And then how much is it different? than any other of those competitors. I think what makes ENS ENS is that it has a credibly neutral platformer

tries or stands to being open and working with all the other, like, already legacy systems. Yeah, but I mean, I think this gets to the heart of why I'm just not, again, I've said this before, but I'm not super-industed in the conversation on Twitter and, like, making people out to be evil is because at the end of the day, I do not feel like myself or frankly anyone else is in a better position to ensure that the NS is doing what the ENS should do. Like, I can't even reason about what the ENS should do next because I'm not, I don't, I mean, I have actually quite a stake in this game, but not really, right? the protocol choices, the governance choices, the product choices, the future choices, the hard decisions, right? When you have sunk costs because you build something and then you're like, okay, that was a bad idea, right? And you have to eat that.

Those are things that require people to be truly deeply, like, not just invested financially, but having their, let's say, lives, livelihoods, personhood. right tied to that that's when you get people to um be like truly invested and making making those hard decisions and they have all the context necessary and this was like one of the hardest things that I learned as a founder was I love to share with my team all the time all the gory details I love to get their input um I I thought I do and I did have a number of people working for me that are so much smarter than me right but the thing that is important to remember is like no matter what even if you give them more context they don't necessarily have the full stake in the game and ultimately what it comes down to the hard decisions in the future it really is going

to come down on like one or maybe two people's heads and everything else around that is to try to get the best outcomes to hold the accountability to you know to to de-risk some of the stuff but ultimately you know it is there are some people whose lives are severely upended if ENS dies and for me personally

it's not the people bitching on Twitter and that's why I think that it's a bit unfair for those people to be like say they I mean anyone can talk trash right but like it's just show me like what are you what are you going to do right

like put I don't know put something behind it. Well, I think in fairness, in fairness, like this is part of why, you know, you've got people who are like legit, people in fact, you know, like Alex is concerned about the direction and this is going. I think that that's like fair and reasonable. And it's not just, you know, for like Elon bucks right on the timeline. Right. Like this is like a genuine ideological debate, right? And, and, you know, it's a debate that I think that will continue.

have, you know, in terms of, again, like, how do you build products in an open fashion that are credibly neutral, you know, because the ENS is still a product, right? If no one wanted it, if it wasn't useful, then we wouldn't be having this debate. Because it's useful, because you guys have built a thing that is useful and people use and, you know, adds value to the world, people have paid for it. And therefore, it has a bunch of money. And now people care about what happens with the money, right? You know, and people also wanted to get better. Someone's responsible for making it better and you need to make sure that those incentives are aligned, right? Like so these are these are all things that are like only problems because

ENS has done a very good job historically, right? And you can you know, slice it up and say, don't do this, don't do that or whatever. But you know, 99% of things that people have tried to build in this space have failed. 99.9.9% right. And ENS hasn't failed and we're having this debate because it is valuable and people care about it. And it is a bit of a proxy war for the governance, debate of what should we govern, et cetera. And I think that's why people care a lot. I think, you know, it's same thing for Avey, right?

I think that's why these things, you know, do blow up on the timeline. It's not just people cloud chasing or, you know, we genuinely do care about these things that I think they're hard problems to solve. And I think if we can have a debate like this that, you know, is reasonable and, you know, kind of balances the different tradeoffs, then we can progress it. And we all want this to, you know, we all want the honest work. Yeah. I don't think anyone that's saying we want to end us to fail.

Yeah. I would say to a lot of the commentary on the timeline right now is criticizing without even, like, compare, contrasting. Just like saying like this was a bad decision. Like this X was a bad decision. This name chain was a bad decision. I would definitely encourage people to like just stop doing that. We are like where we are. The most important questions that need answers is like where to go from here.

And anyone can be criticized for anything. We've all made decisions that can be criticized. And there's always especially with 2020 hindsight, a variety of paths that you. You can be like, man, should have done that. That would have been better, right? But you're not there. You can't go back in time.

So we are where we are. I think it's much more productive, that conversation on where we can go from here that everyone can agree on. I think even Lefterous could is probably closer. Everyone's on a closer page. Even. Even, even, yeah. For what it's worth is quite funny because Lefters is also a super OG.

We've all met in real life. Like, we're all of us. We're together at Devcon, some very first Devcon's, right? It's crazy. But yeah, so on that note, though, what is like one sentence, Nick and then one sentence Alex? The one sentence of what you want the NS to be or to do or to overcome to, you know, in the sort of relatively short term, not super long term. I haven't given up on E&S or Dow governance, and I don't intend to. I think we've learned what DALs can't do well,

and it's time to learn from that and fix things and still work on a decentralized neutral future. I'm bad at one-liners. That's, I think that was a good one. That was actually quite good. I'm terrible at that. That's why I love asking our guests. Is that hate when I get asked?

It's really hard. It's so hard. So I think what we need is just separate and specialized concerns in the sense that ENS, Dow should focus on just governing, it selects, let's say, the board of directors of the foundation. The foundation just focus on budgeting and auditing and making sure the money is well spent. And then it spends on teams like labs and labs will do product decisions and do time decisions and all of that and hiring decisions.

So each part gets to do its own thing, right? We shouldn't have the Dow making product decisions. We shouldn't have labs doing like governance decisions, like I think they making government decisions or things like that. That's that is my opinion. Yeah. I mean, I think the final point that I'll say here is I do get a sense for a lot of people and this was with Abe as well, that they, there are, there

is an underlying frustration that a lot of people in these debates tend to have, which is that, you know, it's not fair that someone gets to allocate this money, right? Like, there is, like, there is a frustration that people, like, this is a lot of money and, you know, it's not fair that labs, let's talk about Stanley for a second, ignore ENS. Like, you know, there's people that are like, Stanley shouldn't be able to decide how this money is allocated, right? This is, you know, labs should not have this. power, this control, et cetera. And I think, you know, to go back to your point, hey, like,

these are still startup-esque things, even if they are supposed to be credibly neutral, whatever. Someone has to build them. Someone has to, like, rally a team. The team has to care about the thing that they're building. And I do think that, like, a lot of times those debates and frustration about, like, one person shouldn't have so much power. if you want good things to happen

unfortunately like sometimes one person or a few people need to have some power right like it can't be no one has any power and no one has any control you know you just got to find the lines right like I don't want Nick to be able to take Kane.Eath from me right or more importantly isy.orgh

my daughter's A.S. name that would be even worse but but I do want Nick to be deciding again in collaboration with the community, whatever, but deciding how to build ENSV2. I want a better ENS, right? Both of those things can be true, right? And we have to find the right, the right, you know, framework to govern

those things. And, you know, I think that the idea that there are bad actors here who are trying to steal all the money or whatever, like Nick could have stolen the money a long time ago, realistically. Now, like, you know, if you don't if you don't like it, fine.

not everyone has to like everything but you know the idea that you don't have people who really care about the product that is ENS the thing you know it's its core features and functionality and want to make it better I think is wild it's fucking wild and that on the timeline is just insane

like you know there's no there is really no justification for that like ENS has been a thing that's been built for almost a decade you guys are still building it you care a lot about it you work with people like i can you know i fan's not going to love a couple of the ladies showing up on a zoom call right like someone needs to show up and talk to them these are all hard things that you guys are doing every day and no one else is going to do it and it needs to happen and so i think that there should be some you know reasonable kind of uh you know uh affordance for that

right that like you know there's no bad actors involved in this right like everyone everyone Everyone involved in this could easily have stolen a bunch of money in a bunch of ways and, you know, gone off into the sunset years ago. And they haven't. Everyone's still turning up to a show like this. Guys, why are you? Why, Nick and Alex? Why are you both still here? Yeah.

What? I seem to be really bad at making myself inessential. I've been trying. It doesn't work. No one's going to care as much as you do. That's honestly, that's the harsh reality. No one's going to care as much as you do. And we're humans.

That's just how humans. Alex, what's your reason? Why are you still showing up fighting this fight? Look, I'm a dead full time. That is my job. Everything else I do, I do it for the pleasure of it. Right. I'm here because I find meaning.

I love. I still think there is a meaning in the work that I've done over the last decade and trying to make sure that we have better ways of governing, of giving out decentralization. I think that the world sort of moved on to AI. And like we are the ones where still look, look, there's still value to be had on the things we've built. We've built an open ledger.

It would be the organization that you can. It's transparent. It's uncorruptible. I still think that that's fair. I think that's still interesting. some ways I still like to come here and defend that and say like crypto like that's who crypto really is all the scammers and the pumpers that that's not who we are right yeah amazing I agree thank you both yeah um wait one last thing so for the people who are right now viciously engaged

on the timeline or perhaps are listening to this and want to be viciously engaged what in is there like a good a better way to engage is it the forum nick Alex either of you like if you know so that we can we can pivot from yelling screaming on crypto twitter to like finding a valid valuable legitimate path forward for you know where everyone mostly everyone is somewhat happy well yeah i mean you know i'm hesitant because if i say the forum then then i don't want the people who have been you know shouting slurs at me to suddenly show up and so on. There's no forum, guys. Don't even worry about. We said anything.

It's not about the message, right? Just don't come with means and just write longful, taffo responses. And in any medium it will work. But I mean, you know, there's people like, I think it was Christoph Schentz who said, you know, why don't you, you know, decentralized by removing control over the protocol and giving the treasury away to the new Ethereum, you know, protocol guild. And I don't think that's doable, but I think that's the sort of idea that I would like to see discussed rather than, you know, minutia or people shouting at me that they think I'm going to make off of the treasury and buy an island. I don't think you can buy an island with that.

But anyway, you know. Let's talk, Nick. There's in Canada. You'd be surprised. There's some cheap islands out there. There are some pretty crummy islands out there, yeah. That's pretty crappy islands. I've done this research at the top every single time.

And every single time, I fail to buy the island and move there. And I'm stuck with you guys. That's why I'm still here, by the way. If you want to have a serious conversation, do come and have that serious conversation. Thank you both. This has been an awesome show. I think this is an important topic. And fair markets are where we actually get to focus on these things.

There's still some angry people flooding around fairly. But I think, you know, most of the people who are still here are thoughtful and believe in some form of this and want to see a path forward. So I think that, you know, engaging with those people, unfortunately, wherever they may be, whether it's X or on the forum, is just an necessary part of this process. Right. So thank you both for joining us. It's been an awesome show. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for enlighting you. See ya. Bye guys. Hi. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain, and we want you to always do your own research before aping it. You can find all our disclosures at unchaincrypto.com slash uneasy money.