On Monday, distributed domain protocol Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, launched its own governance token in an effort to distribute voting rights for its new decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, to agile users of the ecosystem.

Cointelegraph spoke with Brantly Millegan, ENS' director of operations, to larn more than about the nonprofit'southward decision to shift to a DAO model and his thoughts on the power of the ENS customs:

"ENS is an open up public protocol. The cadre components of ENS are decentralized and self-running (east.thousand., no one can accept abroad some other person's .ETH name), but there are a few things that require some human discretion."

He noted that previously, ENS was controlled past a four-of-seven multisignature scheme, with members of related projects interim as keyholders. They facilitated upgrades, managed the .eth pricing registration mechanism for domain names and handled the ENS treasury's funds.

Replacing this multisig and passing ENS governance over to the customs via a DAO "has always been the plan," however, co-ordinate to Millegan:

"Nosotros're doing information technology now considering nosotros call back both ENS and the DAO space have matured enough."

When users claim ENS tokens allocated in the protocol'southward recent airdrop, the service requires participants to immediately vote to ratify the proposed ENS Constitution and to authorize the DAO to take over the functions of the multisig.

Community members are also required to delegate their future DAO voting power earlier claiming their tokens. The consul process allows a fewer number of agile users to make decisions for the ENS community, rather than necessitating abiding interactions from every tokenholder in the space each time a fresh vote is required. Though a large number of ENS contributors volunteered to human action every bit potential delegates, users do not have to choose but from the platform's suggested list. Rather, they may delegate their votes to whatever accost they'd like, including their own.

Related: Mark Cuban bug burn discover on offensive ENS domain

Apropos ENS token distribution and the operation of a fair governance model, Brantly told Cointelegraph:

"The ENS DAO volition [exist] i-token-1-vote, only nosotros've chosen distribution rules that favor egalitarianism and users over speculators."

He explained that the nonprofit allocated tokens based on how many days an individual has held even a unmarried ENS name, rather than past the number of domains an private has registered.

Users who paid renewal fees up to eight years into the futurity are scheduled to receive an additional cache of tokens in the airdrop, and for folks who have their primary ENS name set, the number of tokens they are otherwise entitled to is multiplied by two. Participants on the protocol's Discord and Twitter are eligible for additional claims as well.

The DAO volition ultimately be in charge of spending any revenue received by the protocol'southward nonprofit organization. According to ENS Constitution Article 3, funds are to be allocated to ENS development, the broader ecosystem and public goods within Web 3.0. Millegan noted that "in that location is no profit sharing motive" and that the token-based DAO arrangement "allows for a large corporeality of flexibility."

Within 24 hours of its launch, the new ENS governance token had already reached a fully diluted valuation of $3.16 billion. One day later, at the fourth dimension of publication, this number has topped $viii billion and continues to rise.