📺 The ENS DAO and $ENS Airdrop

hey bankless nation welcome to another edition of state of the nation david i'm super excited i'm full of energy you know why it's air drop season my friend ens just did a big airdrop and we are talking to who the people behind ens and the airdrop david who are we talking to and what's this episode all about yeah we are talking to brantley milligan and nick johnson of the ens team they have been hard at work building out the ens protocol for years now and now the era of dows are is upon us

and it's really uh in my opinion a very nice capstone to a lot of the work that uh nick and and brantley has been doing over the years tirelessly making ethereum more and more usable for all of us uh and now we are full they are folding the ens protocol into a dow to be community owned community governed and so we are going to unpack what exactly that means what does it mean to govern over ens can i just say we we're not just talking about ens because they're doing an air drop i mean that's why specifically this week okay because they just did an

airdrop and you guys should know about it we want to hear the details about this down everything they're they're planning with it but we've been talking about ens for a long time now on the bankless program both in our newsletter and through various interviews and conversations because this is kind of like um we talked about a tweet last week david where you know somebody tweeted out hey the the model for ethereum as a wallet is right but there's also the model for an ether dress as a profile as an identity and so your ens address can be

part of that it's like a dot eth type address you can also link this to a dns a domain name and it gives kind of a human readable destination for um for your ethereum wallet or your ethereum profile in this way and this unlocks so much david that we're gonna unpack here today um unlocks the ability to do like you know kind of single sign-on using uh using ethereum uh unlocks the ability to do very easy you know uh payments to and from the the legacy web 2 world so lots of things

going on here we're a big fan of the projects and have been big fans of the project but this airdrop is kind of fun too yeah hair talks are always fun yeah this is a huge participation from a number of people in the community so we're going to go over what's actually being governed over the next phases of ens how the dow is going to be organized how you can actually get the ens airdrop who's eligible and all of that and more uh dave before we get into this conversation we should talk about a few announcements few things going on in the bankless nation the first is brian

armstrong the ceo co-founder of coinbase was on the podcast on monday it was just a great episode super exciting to talk to brian also you had dc investor on layer zero i just listened to that this morning i love listening to dc investor like i totally vibe with that guy um fantastic episode as well anything you want to say about those two episodes david yeah it's just really nice to see the clarity of thought that brian armstrong has for coinbase and establish a vision for coinbase base that is fundamentally aligned with the world of crypto so

brian's not a short term or a medium-term thinker he is a long-term thinker with long-term plans for coinbase and having that podcast with him just like just like faith in the crypto world restored i can't wait to see what coinbase does in the next chapter of his life uh and then also yeah dc investor everyone loves cc investor really just connected the dots behind like uh you know becoming a good investor before crypto was even a thing also simultaneously watching the rise of the internet and then applying those skills to the world of crypto so a great way to like speed run the last 30 years of

investing in internet knowledge all at once uh it's kind of what hopefully a lot of like layer zero uh stories are all about is speed running the parts of the history of the world that you haven't been a part of yourself uh and so definitely tap into those two episodes yeah absolutely and speaking of speed running this i feel like we've been speed running user user experience in ux and d5 uh here lately um dharma wanted us to let you know they are sponsoring this message they wanted us to let you know that they now have a version of their smart contract wallet the dharma wallet

that works with polygon what's beautiful about this is um fees are reduced fees are like nothing to onboard so you can go from bank account to d5 in about under 10 minutes this is like connecting your bank account going through the entire process and purchasing a token in 10 minutes and if you do that now there's fifty dollars in free eth waiting for you on the other side they're actually giving away this money you have to um purchase above 500 but if you use the bankless magic link

then you get 50 in free eth crypto is full of these incentives to like uh incent you into using crypto not just like buying it and holding it that's one way to use but there are all of these other verbs all of these other ways to use crypto including opening a wallet including creating an uh ens address and registering that right it's like crypto isn't sending people to do this here's just another incentive so make sure you tap into that there's a link in the show notes directly where you get the magic link and you can get your fifty dollars

in free eth by doing that um david you and i are also doing this thing called office hours talking office hours yeah there's gonna be a new thing that we do for the bankless premium members so if you are a bankless premium subscriber that you and if you are not yet a bankless premium subscriber but you have some maybe you're brand new into crypto some 101 questions you've got and you guys listen to bank lists so maybe you want to ask me and ryan those questions and so at the last friday of every month uh except not this month because it's thanksgiving and also not next month because the holidays but moving forward the last friday of every

month we will be doing office hours where if you are a not a premium subscriber but then you sign up to be a premium subscriber you will be invited to office hours we'll be in the discord and we will answer your questions directly against uh only available for premium members so sign up for bank list premium if you want to ask me and ryan some questions that's gonna be fun david i gotta start by asking the question i always ask which is what is the state of the nation today sir into the nation ryan is claiming we are claiming we're claiming the air drops it's always a fun day when you claim an airdrop and i made

a call to action for the the broader crypto twitter world's like why haven't i seen the the claymore meme and apparently here it is so we have the claymore meme and so here we're delivering you're getting a meme of the week a little bit early this week with the claymore i'm claiming uh that's what we're doing we're claiming we're claiming the ens airdrop that's what basically everyone in crypto is doing this week we are claiming and this is an economic incentive to help decentralize these networks decentralize these multi-stakes we're going to talk all about the ens claiming process why they are creating a doubt when we get

back but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand

new in the uniswop ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again dows have money and they are in need of labor if you think that you have something to contribute to the una swap dow apply for a grant to uniswap just look at the size of the uniswap treasury it's almost three billion dollars this mountain of capital is looking for labor do you have something of value to contribute to the uni swap dow no matter how big or small your idea is you can

apply for a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go that's exactly what we did to get uniswop to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same for your project thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless the ave protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on ethereum which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets ave version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the ave protocol even more powerful with ave you can leverage

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course a domain name we're here with brantley milligan who's the director of operations at ens you've been on the bankless podcast before also nick johnson he is a founder lead developer of ens his first time on the podcast brantley nick how are you guys doing good are you uh are you relaxed and you know doing okay or has this been like a totally frenetic wild time for you like what's the what's the vibe like right now i i think for me like we had like a war room for the launch and and my team was like

wow nick you're so calm and i'm like dealing with stuff and then today i'm like there are 10 000 things i need to check and i haven't had any time to look at them oh god yeah it feels crazier than the actual launch did well thank you for covering out some time for coming on the bank list everyone in the nation appreciates it yeah we appreciate it brantley how are you doing you hanging in there too yeah i mean i i would say a huge amount to do and so i think uh the team has mostly been just focused on doing the work we haven't really had

time to really reflect that much because it's just been like so much to do how big is the team right now so like when you talk about distribution work like how many people are you uh eight full-time people and then a couple part-time and other people who do different things but eight full-time okay so it's like a relatively small team like the you know this is like the bankless size team i mean we're a bit fewer but we know very much what it's like to operate that and like you guys are operating i think with a a a few more help desks probably

requests than we are um so like how does it feel uh coming on the other side of this are you guys feeling uh like rejuvenated or is this uh yeah is there a feeling of excitement on the team are you just looking forward to getting this week over i think everyone's really excited like we you know we were all sort of we we thought we'd nailed down everything we could but there's always that like that jitter leading up to it look like you know is everything going to go as smoothly as we hope it will and you know we're like we're going to get a lot of people on the claim site in the first hour like is

our hosting robust enough is something to go down because so often it does you know and seeing it all come off smoothly was was a blast it's really great um i think everyone's excited i can't speak for everyone but like i'm a little bit intimidated because this has been like far more popular than i thought it would be you know having been like quietly building enes for nearly five years now and then suddenly having like the entire crypto twitter and crypto internet just talking about it seemingly exclusively it's a little bit intimidating yeah you

know and i've been super impressed at the uh percentage of claims you guys have had i saw on a dashboard it's it's already up to like 33 something like this it might be even higher yeah i've been i've been astonished by that as well it's uh yeah it's doing really well let me let me just check for you uh we've got um 15 million left which means 10 million has already been claimed wow that's incredible wow that's that's the sign of a very surgical and precise airdrop that's exactly who you want the people

that are ready to to claim their ens because they are active users of the ens system and of ethereum at large so nice job with it with a dispersion of ens tokens we're going to talk about the ens allocation later on in the show but just overall like very assigned a really good sign of health on day one yeah thank you i've got to confess i haven't uh i haven't claimed mine yet but i do still have some time right guys you have six months i haven't either i haven't claimed either yeah you haven't had time

and gas prices have you seen gas prices yeah i know i just like wait wait for the you know that hurts to claim theirs and i'll get mine when the gas prices are cheap again your fingers yes can i say something also just on the the feeling here absolutely yeah i i agree with nick i mean it's it's it's it's exhilarating it's a relief there's tension um there's it's intimidating because it's like we've now decided to go down a path that you know we're committed to now that is gonna require you know dealing you know with a lot more people and things like this i mean there's just

there's a lot going on here um and i i really feel like this is almost like a second founding of ens this feels like a founding moment i mean it really is i guess the founding of ens dao which is a decisive milestone in the history of this protocol um and uh so i feel a lot of that um weight and excitement about that as well i never thought about that there's like no undo button for an airdrop is there it's like once it's out you can't you can't go back on that it's pretty pretty immutable yep nick you

were talking about how like once upon a time you started ens and it was very quiet you just were building this thing that you had a vision for and as brantley just said it feels like a second founding of ens first there was the inception of the the protocol and now there's the inception of the dao can you guys take us a little bit through that history when and who had the idea to do a dao and when did it become obvious that the dao is the right path and when when were these decisions made take us a little bit through a memory lane yeah so it's something that's come up repeatedly through ens's like

existence uh starting back you know when it first became a full-time project for me and then we started hiring you know other people um it you know it always kept coming up especially during like the sort of 2017 2018 like everybody is launching a token nonsense you know and uh i'd always felt that like first of all dowels weren't mature enough uh and secondly that uh that ens wasn't mature enough and that there were too many like risks from

like particularly you know things like hostile takeover and so on and so a number of things have changed like first of all ens has removed human control over some important letters so the key holders today can't actually affect existing.eth registrations and when that's handed over to the dow the dial won't be able to do that either and removing that from something that somebody could override and like you know decide that they you know every every ns address is now going to point at their wallet or something uh was like

a crucial step uh to being comfortable with uh you know with a less sort of tightly controlled i guess uh you know system so just just to rehash that what that meant is like i own davidhoffman.eth but previously there was a time where the keys that controlled the ens contracts could have revoked that from me but no longer this is now i own davidhoffman.eth until the end of ethereum as of now right so yes and no almost uh so first of all the the keys were a multi-secret of

seven independent people and it wasn't like there was a like take a name away function it would have been like really a major like you know replacing a bunch of contracts and stuff but it wasn't impossible you know it was the the worry um now if you've renewed davidhoffman.eth out 10 years there is nothing anybody can do to that name for at least the next 10 years what they could do in principle would be to like put in like discriminatory renewal rules you know like it's 10 bucks for everyone but for you it's 10 000 bucks or something you know um but given that there's a time lock on

this on any changes as well if something like that were to happen which i view is extremely unlikely uh you would just be able to go like okay fine i'll register for 10 000 years before the new rules come into place and then your name's safe it can't be affected you know would you go as far as to say nick that this is like one of the most censorship resistant protocols on ethereum like i don't you know there's many i don't want to either like but like there are there's degrees of decentralization here and what is ens

yeah like i i guess i would probably put things like uh uniswap for instance where like the deployed contract is entirely you know pretty much entirely permissionless and requires upgrades to new versions at one extreme where there's like the the governance is entirely social through like here's a new version we think you should use it and people like yeah that looks great um and then the other extreme you have a lot of new platforms where everything is under admin key control including things that i think really shouldn't be uh and i won't name names because i

don't want to make enemies and and i would say ens is much closer to the uniswapping of things particularly today there are a few things like we don't really feel it's safe to like because unlike say uniswap a complete migration to like a new platform to introduce a new feature isn't very practical because there's a big risk in something like that where some apps are using the old version and some are using the new version and that's a really that's a wide open window for someone to uh you know to use the chaos to to fill

people into sending things to the wrong place and stuff like that so we think like a single unified name space is important and that means that a few of these things do have to kind of be under somebody's control and that will be the dow going forward so you mentioned like um that you were kind of waiting i think until some of this infrastructure was built out to do the dow but like i i was wondering if you almost made a sound nick like a dow design was always the intent from the beginning is that the case or has that been an emergent idea within ens yes so so some form of

community decentralization to the community was always the idea and you know at the time the dows were the obvious choice because of well capital letters the dao um and then all the things that followed it but we've sort of just been keeping an eye on like the decentralized governance you know ecosystem in general for for whatever seems the most viable option and the emergence of like the compound dao which has a very straightforward and very like well-structured on-chain strategy and the emergence of tools like tally and snapshot to make it easier to work

with and and more importantly just the various projects proving out that model and demonstrating that it can actually function uh were i think really important factors it's so funny because so much of this has just emerged in the last year or so as you say it's relatively recent it is uh so guys um so many dows have been spun up and each dow has their own sort of flavor their own architecture their own components what components from other dows did you guys really like that you decided to borrow from when

constructing the ens dow so i really like the the compound style contracts for on chain governance with the delegation set up and so on because although it requires on-chain voting the the delegates you have reduces the number of people that have to vote and it gives you the highest level of security you know technical security against uh you know manipulation uh that's available um uh we we based our stuff was heavily inspired off bitcoin setup uh because we feel like they're you know very similar to us we're well aligned with fairmen so

we look closely at what they were doing what we ended up doing was using open zeppelin's new governance contracts which are based on the compound contracts but open zeppelin's engineering is is amazing they're really good at building modular secure like you know well architected contracts that permit customization without like you know well minimizing the risk of unexpected consequences so we ended up basing it on that and then um so let's go into this dive into the the delegation side of things because that's a big component that's

running around with dallas i know git coin dow did it um talk about the role of delegation with ens uh dao and when somebody claims their ens tokens tell uh illustrate like what they are prompted with and why delegation as a concept is important so as part of the claim flow you you ask to approve a constitution which is a separate thing and then you provide them with this delegates and every delegate is someone who's put themselves forward and said i want to be part of the voting on decentralized governance for the ens

they've they've said a profile picture they've said in ens name and they've written a short or in some some cases quite long uh description of their position on both the constitution and like ongoing governance and what their expertise is and so forth and you can flick through those and pick a delegate who you prefer and what you're doing by doing that is you are giving that person control over your voting power so you keep the tokens but when they vote they vote with the sum of all the tokens that have been delegated to them

um and this is kind of important because it's simply not reasonable to ask someone who has 100 ens tokens to keep abreast of like all the details of every development in the ens dow and the ecosystem and so on and vote intelligently on on everything you know most most people aren't going to want to do that and if you rely on that your participation is very very low but it's much more reasonable to ask someone to pick a delegate who has similar views to them and the delegate to be the one who keeps themselves up to date on everything is there real quick i'm sorry real quick

on that nick i just passed you again on the delegates can i see this guys it's been neck and neck can we see this is this happening in real time because people are watching bank list and they're like you know we're really liking what brantley's saying how should i share it with you if your screen share that'll work just fine yeah i can do that uh let me say been me nick and coinbase have been all have been neck and neck who who which delegates have shown up that you guys were surprised would show up coinbase was a little bit of a

surprise to me why do you think people are delegating to coinbase that's a good question uh i mean i guess they they're a popular and largely trusted name but uh and you know we've worked well with them but it does seem a little counterintuitive to me to delegate to a large company uh in this uh you know i still trust that they're going to interact with their users best interest in mind but personally i would pick one of the many excellent people who have put themselves forward personally nick dye ether would pick nick.eth i think

no so here's the funny thing if you go to my delegate profile which you can see by clicking on like the speech bubble link next to my thing the first thing i do is i list seven other people you should vote for ahead of me and ask you like tell you what's excellent about each of them and tell you why you should pick them because you know i i i'm happy to to accept people's delegations but i think there are there are many other excellent people and they don't all have the same opinions as me and and if you agree with them better you should vote for them can i ask a question what is the incentive of being a delegate right so you know is

it sort of like um operating on a on a board of some type um without financial compensation without financial payment you're sort of doing it because you believe in the cause you believe in the missions you're dedicating some of your your time to it is that the principle to a degree yeah i mean it's it's i guess it's uh in some ways it's like being on a board in other ways it's being like uh you know leading a department or something like that and and it's sort of it is the business of running the company so a board is a reasonable

parallel um the the compensation question is an interesting one uh do you want me to keep sharing this or should i oh yeah we can yeah we can stop thanks for that appreciate it um the the conversation question's an interesting one because uh on the one hand like you don't want people like seeing this as a sinicure that pays the money and having you know lots of delegates just show up for that on the other hand like i think this is going to be a good conversation for the dow to have because we also don't want to have a situation where the only people who can afford to be delegates

and spend the time to be properly informed on things are those who are like independently wealthy or those that are compensated externally by which i mean basically lobbyists um so i think there's a pretty good argument for saying like if you're a delegate and you have like more than whatever proportion then there is some sort of compensation available to compensate you for your time spent on this because we believe uh running this is as much a job or a profession as as anything else uh and i think you know we haven't tried to like nail

that down as a precondition of the dow but i think that's going to be an interesting discussion to have with everybody about what's reasonable because you also don't want a situation where people are seen to be like exploiting their position for profit either i'd love to unpack what it actually what a day in the life of a delegate might actually look like and i know ensl just started yesterday so it's very very fresh but in your guys's imaginations just give us a reminder of what are we actually governing over and what do you think are going to be the most common activities that all of the ens delegates

are going to do on behalf of the ens holders that have delegated to to them yep so there's going to be sort of three main things one is ens has a treasury that's accumulated from registration fees and i i think it would be very good for people to to propose ways that that could be put to good use to improve other ens to improve other public goods in the ethereum and ens and crypto spaces uh and you know perhaps even more widely than that if we satisfy ourselves that

it will be impactful um so there's going to be a lot of work around like identifying uh you know what things can can be effectively funded and improved with with some of the e s treasury and then just i guess the wider financials about like you know keeping track of enes's income and all that sort of stuff uh the second is like upgrades and changes to ens itself um and so for instance uh we the the true names team uh you know the development team have been working on a number of improvements to some of the

core smart contracts and so once those are ready to go we'll deploy them and then we'll ask the dow like hey here's the new code we propose to enable these as the new contracts for uh you know for these components and if the delegates approve then they sign a transaction that puts that into effect uh and the third thing that i that will probably happen a lot more in early days than than later is we have this constitution which spells out sort of the bounds of what the dow can you know legitimately do it's sort of a social

contract rather than a code contract um and i think people are going to be proposing amendments to that and that's going to be a big job the delegates is sort of the meta governance of how do we change how we govern i want to go into the the details of the treasury because the treasury is an interesting part of the story of ens but before i do that i want to zoom all the way back out and really just have a very broad uh conversation about um again why why dao is and maybe why a dow works why not just you guys why not why not you two why can't you guys govern the ens

system what's wrong with that well well so i think the you know the obvious question is like centralization which you know people are like oh boogeyman centralization but it's useful to sort of back up and say like why is that bad i mean apart from like the bus factor there is just the fact that uh if we're building a system that should be useful to a wide variety of people we shouldn't be relying on one single person's judgment on exactly how that should operate and what changes they should make and wherever possible i prefer to just remove power over things which is what we did

with the dot eth names but where that's not possible we need a reasonably decentralized system with a variety of viewpoints to decide like what's best for the users and i think the best way to do that is to actually have the users involved um yeah you know i trust myself uh but i don't trust myself with all of the nes and in fact right from day one uh we've had the route controlled by a multi-sig uh seven people uh only one of whom myself is actually on the ens team the rest are all drawn from the community fantastic okay uh so going into the

details of the treasury brantley you and i talked about this i think like three years ago or something on on pov crypto pod before i even started bank list with ryan and back in the day back in the day yeah back in the day before before ethereum was cool right um and uh we we were talking about the concept of ens and and all of the the great things that ens does and we we talked about the whole why why you have to actually sell enos addresses and the answer you gave me well we would love to hand out all these ens addresses

to whoever we whoever wants them but you have to actually put a monetary price on these things as the anti-sybil mechanism because you just give them out for free then one person's going to claim all of them and the whole thing kind of breaks so you have to sell enos addresses and so you guys use the selling mechanism as just a way to make the actual system actually work not as a way to actually make money and so from whatever from what i remember in that conversation uh you the ens uh system was just collecting a large amount of eth and like that was large back then i can't imagine how big it is

now uh over and over time really just as like a byproduct of what you guys wanted to get done which is get ens into the hands of people that want it and the right ens addresses into the right people's hands uh and so now there's this treasury of eth can you guys take us through that history has that treasury been used for anything at all before now uh and also where is that treasury going now is it all going to the dow how big is it yeah and also how big is it yeah

yeah good question so i just looked it up um and it's about 46 million dollars right now okay and uh you can see this on etherscan uh if you go to multisig.ens.ef uh that wallet that it points to is one of the places where it's held there's a second place that's controller.ens.eth and right now that's still held by the multi-stake one of the first things that the dao is going to do once the kind of the dust settles is to formally request we have a proposal that people vote on