ENS DAO Overhauls Foundation to Gain Legal and Operational Standing

The newly empowered foundation will oversee a roughly $65 million endowment and handle daily operations previously restricted by the DAO's lack of legal status. Alexander Urbelis has been appointed as the executive director, holding one board seat alongside founder Nick Johnson and three independent directors: Kartik Talwar, Brett Sun, and Anthony Leutenegger. While the foundation assumes administrative control over the endowment, transactions are subject to a nine-day timelock, allowing the ENS Security Council to intercept unauthorized or malicious activity.

Legal standing provides the protocol with the necessary infrastructure to represent its interests before bodies like ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the World Wide Web Consortium. A primary objective is pursuing formal stewardship of the ".ens" top-level domain to bridge the gap between blockchain-based naming systems and conventional internet standards. Despite these operational changes, the DAO retains authority over protocol upgrades, registration fees, and board appointments. ENS Labs will persist as a separate entity, continuing its development work through a structured grant relationship with the foundation.