ENS Co-Founder Moves to Unlock 5M Dormant Tokens for DAO Voting Power

Alex Van de Sande, a co-founder of the Ethereum Name Service, has put forward a proposal to delegate 5 million ENS tokens sitting idle in the DAO’s community treasury to individual participants, according to The Defiant. The move targets a structural weakness in ENS governance: a large bloc of voting power that has gone unused since it was allocated.

Dormant supply, live governance risk

Tokens parked in a DAO treasury without active delegation effectively function as dead weight in on-chain voting. They neither back proposals nor oppose them, which can distort quorum calculations and let smaller, more coordinated voting blocs push measures through with less resistance than the DAO’s full token supply would imply.

By redirecting 5 million ENS tokens from that dormant pool to individual delegates, Van de Sande’s proposal aims to reintroduce that supply into active circulation for voting purposes. For a governance system built on token-weighted voting, the reallocation would mechanically shift the base against which quorum and pass thresholds are measured.

What delegation to individuals changes

The proposal’s mechanism — delegating to individual participants rather than a single entity or working group — is notable in itself. Concentrating delegated voting power in a few large delegates has been a recurring critique across DAO governance broadly, since it can recreate the kind of centralized control that token-based governance is designed to avoid.

Spreading 5 million tokens across multiple individual holders would, in principle, distribute voting weight more broadly than routing it through a small number of delegate addresses. For analysts tracking ENS DAO voting patterns on-chain, this would be a measurable shift: a larger, more fragmented set of active voters rather than a static treasury balance or a handful of dominant delegate wallets.

Governance reform as the stated goal

The Defiant frames the proposal explicitly as a governance reform effort rather than a treasury management or tokenomics change. The underlying issue is participation, not supply: ENS DAO, like many token-governed protocols, has to contend with delegated voting power that sits unused while proposals are decided by whichever share of tokens actually shows up to vote.

Activating 5 million previously dormant ENS tokens would be one of the more direct interventions attempted by an ENS co-founder to address that gap. Whether the proposal passes, and how the DAO’s existing delegate structure responds to a fresh injection of individually held voting power, will determine if the reallocation meaningfully changes quorum dynamics or simply redistributes the same passive-voting problem across more addresses.