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- [00:00]
A
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, 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 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 icann, not because ICANN is 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.
- [00:59]
B
Hey everyone, I'm Kane Wark and welcome to Uneasy Money Feels. What happens on Chain never stays on chain. I'm here with my co host Taylor Monahan, 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 Der sand, another Ethereum super og. I've been out Etho G'd by like a fair margin today. I'm like the larpy 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.
- [01:42]
C
This episode is brought to you by Kape, America's privacy first mobile carrier, so 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 Unchained.
- [02:05]
B
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 DAO Security Council, the body that can count, 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 onchain renewal failed. Nick Eth, that is this gentleman who's with us here, the glasses. ENS Lab's 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 currently control 50% of the ENS tokens?
- [03:15]
D
No.
- [03:17]
B
Okay, all right, so what is the voting proportion at the moment in NES typically?
- [03:26]
A
So there's 100 million ENS tokens at launch. 50% of those went to the DAO, 25% went to an airdrop, and 25% went to core contributors. As of today, of course, everything is mixed about. The DAO 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 7 million.
- [04:00]
B
And so just to be clear, you've delegated all of your tokens to yourself?
- [04:05]
A
Almost all of them.
- [04:06]
B
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 that is voting, which was roughly 50, so about 6%, let's call it 6. 7% of the tokens are being actively use for voting, which is like, broadly in line with other daos, maybe even high, potentially. So, you know, the fundamental issue here, obviously being that there is very little participation by token holders in, in DAO governance here. Like there, there are more than enough tokens to outvote you, clearly, like in the world, right? Theoretically, Theoretically.
- [04:59]
A
And, and I think the. What emphasizes that is that at launch, of course, I had, you know, my launch allocation, which was, you know, 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. Than my own token.
- [05:22]
D
Why?
- [05:23]
A
You know, because everybody is, is selling tokens and, and is moving away because 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.
- [05:38]
B
And, and so remind me, what was the percentage that was airdropped, you know, which I got, by the way? I think I still hold those tokens, but yeah, what was, what was the
- [05:50]
A
percentage of tokens that were airdropped 25% to ENS users. And then some of the, some of the contributor allocation was to ecosystem integrations and so forth as well.
- [06:02]
B
Yeah.
- [06:03]
C
So full disclosure, I think I have, I have like personal, because I was, I have ENS things. But then I think we also got a builder community allocation as well because we integrated ENS and tay.
- [06:13]
B
Did you, did you vote on this recent proposal to try and overthrow oh, benevolent dictator Nick here? No, I assume not.
- [06:21]
C
I think I voted on some stuff very early on.
- [06:23]
B
But hey, letting us down, Letting us down, the resistance.
- [06:28]
C
Okay, here's, here's the issue with, with this, right? That 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 a better ens.
- [06:57]
B
But all the people complaining on Twitter definitely would be. You have to. Right? And, and Alex. I know, I know, I know.
- [07:05]
C
This is.
- [07:06]
B
Alex, you're. You gotta unmute yourself, my friend. This is, this is the, this is the talk show.
- [07:12]
D
Okay, so here's, here's the thing. Here's some context, right? Yeah. Okay. So I don't overstate my own credentials, right? So I founded ENS with Nick back then, but then I stepped out of the project. I was focusing on other Ethereum foundation projects. Nick took ens, made ENS Labs, launched the dao, and is, I would say, the person most responsible for making ENS what it is today. After the air, after the ensuing launch that was launched, I came back and started working. I became Meta Governance steward, a public good steward. I participated in the vote. So I can say that I saw all, like all those things were happening live, right? We're seeing delegations are coming down and it was becoming harder and harder to participate on, to pass the quorum and to get the votes. 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 100,000 tokens to more builders that I, I don't think that made much of a difference because people still didn't participate a lot. And, 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 delegate, self delegated tokens with himself and now. He can outvote the 50 largest other delegates. Right. So, and I think an interesting point is that it, it's not that it's a problem that Nick can outvote the 50 or 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 we get in a situation where there are so very few people voting on faangs? Right. And I think that was happening before and the fact that people are talking about this now, it's because those votes were activated very recently to. 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 DAO that what seemed to be a problem in governance is now clearly.
- [09:55]
C
Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah. And again, 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 said, with the last
- [10:24]
D
vote though, they're upset with the other things that were happening before that led to the vote.
- [10:30]
C
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, recontrolling the whole ens and now Nick's gonna steal all of our Ethan names, 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 daos and allocations and expectations.
- [11:22]
B
And that, that is the crux of the people that I'm seeing that are frustrated, outraged, whatever, whatever you want. You know, people like Left Terrace, right? This is like a proxy war arguably, right in this like long running dao, you know, collapse, where all of these DA A, you know, we talked about A 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 Stanley 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, very similar. It's very similar. Right. Like there is obviously there's nuances. There's nuances, of course.
- [12:10]
D
But then Kane, I don't think it is like it is. There is like the months long debate. There is a years long issue of governance. There is the immediate issue of the Security Council. And we are talking about Security Council. I would say because the Security Council vote made it created an image that is very mimetic and easy to see. It's an image where people can just see, hey, there's a huge red bubble of Nick saying no and a sea of green bubbles of Nick saying yes. Right.
- [12:43]
B
But it's neck. Why didn't you found some guys on Twitter and.
- [12:49]
D
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 ENS DAO and what is the ENS Foundation. And I think that's an interesting topic
- [13:06]
B
in which we should, I think, I think like, you know, there's the dao, there's this DAO kind of existential of like, what is the purpose of daos? Do they work? All of these things that, you know, the daos that we have kind of held up as the best examples, a. Right. Then, you know, turn into, you know, a pitch battle. And so I think there is like this open question of do daos work? And every time a DAO appears to fail or there's something that, you know, goes against what people want the dao to do or expect daos to do, it brings up this, this, you know, existential angst, right? About like everything that we've done over the last 10 years in building DAOs has failed. And you know, people start getting frustrated about that.
- [13:54]
A
Yeah, I, 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, governance or anything like that and is controversial.
- [14:17]
D
Yeah, of course I would love for Nick to start telling that story. Right. So Nick, what is in your vision, like what it should be or what is the proposal that should be the future of the dao, the future of the NS Foundation. What do you think? What do you defend that the path where we should go, which is the reason in which most people were creating the huge debate about. I would love for you to explain it to the viewers and we can have a discussion on this.
- [14:51]
A
Yep. So, you know, we, 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, it's still a proportionately larger impact on, on voting. And you know, that's symmetric of the, the problems we're having with the NSD and really everyone's having with daos in general. You know, the participation gets harder, but at the same time we have this massive honey pot 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 the way they want it 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 or just fun to build and they want to see them funded and they're sort of prepared to put their votes, you know, where they're, 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, you know, as time goes on, the votes concentration in 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.
- [16:12]
B
And sorry, just Nick, just to, to pause there for a second, right. Like one of the things that I would say I was naive about when, when starting a dao and when, you know, I got involved in Dallas in the first place was this idea that it would become a debate over capital allocation, right. That like, which is a bit ironic because the first Dao, you know, of hack fame was about capital allocation. But outside of, outside of that, right, like the ENS Dao was not supposed to be an investment vehicle investing in projects and, and you know, it was supposed to be kind of stewarding the ENS ecosystem. So the idea that a dao 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 and so therefore it does devolve into that. Like, you know, is that kind of some of the crux of this issue for you that like the dao shouldn't be targeted by people who are looking for it to turn into essentially a investment vehicle.
- [17:17]
A
I think it's a big chunk of it. You know, when we launched the dao, 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. Yeah. So protocol governance in a nutshell, all the stuff we would love to decentralize and like remove control of entirely, but for one reason or another, is it's impractical to do so. And the second issue we had was that we had amassed as treasury through, you know, 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, ENS has always, from day one being conceived as a public good in itself and as a nonprofit. 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 three commons and with a specific focus of course, on naming an identity and the things that ENS was, was focused on. And over time that allocation of funds has become, you know, more or less all consuming with the, the protocol side taking a back seat in many ways. But the, the larger issue I think even is, isn't even just the, 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, the people who are hired are often individually competent, but there's no over overall sort of organization that knits 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, you know, internal processes, that does, that operates independently but accountably to the rest of the, the environment they're in.
- [19:40]
D
So you mentioned that a lot of allocation is investment. I don't think ENS has a problem with discussion investment or anyone wants time to, wanted to have a return. Most of the discussions involve allocation of funds towards other things, towards public goods, to work hackathons, and toward other teams.
- [20:02]
B
Sorry. So just to be clear, like when I say capital allocation, right, like capital allocation doesn't. It could be to nonprofits, 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
- [20:15]
D
know, I think DNS now sort of tries to think of the return as in the return for development. Right. So one of the things I helped on board when I was a steward of MetaGov was I created a program to try to onboard 10 new teams. Mostly because I was worried about the buzz factor of what happens if Nick is hit by a bus. Right. What happens to ensuring 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 dao, a lot of the politics comes in and start discussing on. You 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 DAO wasted funds or a lot of money where misappropriator.
- [21:18]
B
No, no, I don't. I'm not suggesting that. I'm not suggesting that the Dow wasted funds. I'm. I'm saying that like if you have a pot of half a billion dollars or take. Right. That, you know, your job almost necessarily becomes how do you allocate those, those funds? Right now you can also not allocate them. But then there's going to be a bunch of people that say you got half a billion dollars and you're in Ethereum. Why are you not making Ethereum better? Why are you not funding public goods? You can't opt out of this. Right.
- [21:48]
D
Like, 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 not necessarily is. So the part, it's shrinking. And at some point people will start realizing that, look, it doesn't fit everyone, everyone at the same time anymore.
- [22:06]
A
And I want to push back a little bit on. The DAO 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 sub name 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, this kind of resulted in a lot of duplicate funding on something that honestly neat but quite low.
- [22:45]
D
That is true. But it, but it's also true that the DAO allocated almost half of its budget to NS Labs and ENS Labs also had projects that tried to do things and then had to cancel. Right. We, we. So it is I think trying to do things and then having to walk back on it. It's part. Right, yeah. We had to walk back on namechain. We had to walk back on Name
- [23:07]
C
wrapper like okay, but here, let me, let me I guess zoom out a little bit because yeah, this is, I mean Laughters for example specifically calls out the, the name chain stuff and the name change 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, we don't like this was. This is an extra. Yeah, okay. And like both, by the way, both me and Kane have been there before.
- [23:35]
B
We've I also building a chain like it like the whole Ethereum L2 scaling roadmap. Now we sit here in shambles going, actually we should have just focused on L1 but at the time you didn't have the luxury because L1 was 100 bucks per transaction. Right. So we had to do something and
- [23:55]
A
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 Namechain 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 our, an existing chain architecture with our own needs catered to. We had to about probably about 20% of the NSV2 code that was concerned with cross chain transactions and synchronization and so forth. But the, the very much the bulk of it was, you know, work on version two of ens. 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 high. This is sustainable.
- [24:51]
B
Of course.
- [24:51]
A
And when we announced we were canceling it, everybody went, yep, that makes sense. Exactly.
- [24:58]
C
And, and by the way, the daos. Daos in general, yeah. It was like when ENS launched, like you had to do a dao. Of course you had to do a dao. 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 daos in general, we're not just this like shallow regulatory thing to absolve yourself of responsibility. No, no, we all drank the Kool Aid.
- [25:28]
B
We believed it, we believed
- [25:31]
C
worked. It worked as regulatory protection because we actually were naive enough to believe it. However, I think over time, and this
- [25:42]
B
is like more cynical now, we're a bit more cynical now.
- [25:45]
C
We're just a bit more realistic.
- [25:46]
B
Like, can we just talk. Yeah, sorry, can we just talk about the. Because I think, you know, AAVE is one thing, right? Like we talked a lot about aave. AAVE in another reality could just be a company, right? People are paying for services and you know, they, they pay the company to operate the thing and it could be smart, contract based and 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, 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 it isn't a company, it shouldn't be a company. And we have like a real world proxy for this, right? In domain TLD governance in the world, right? Like that's 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? So I think like it made a lot of sense for it to be a dao. 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 daos 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, 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 ETH holders would vote for weird things that were not good for ensdao, et cetera? Like what? Like what drove that? Was it genuinely that you thought you would need funding and then the price of ETH went up so much that it didn't actually become a problem? How do you unpick all of that?
- [28:08]
A
So, yeah, so it was never about funding, you know, and in fact, in a way, it was the reverse. You know, when the DAO 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 Treasuries, the DOW and said, hey, can we have a bit of it back so that we can keep building ens? You know, so definitely wasn't the funding question. I think the, you know, the reason we, 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 protocol levers, you know, and we've designed it as much as possible to lock in immutably the things that really, really matter. You know, so you, the dow, me, the Security Council. None of us can affect somebody's existing name, you know, 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 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 vote weighted voting on it, there are plenty of rich people out there who could buy enough ETH and, and, you know, take control and basically run a griefing attack on ens. And if ENS was as popular and as widely used as we wanted it to be.
- [29:41]
B
You're talking about Tom Lee, right? That's the guy you were worried about?
- [29:45]
A
I mean, no, it's Vitalik, to be honest.
- [29:48]
D
Fair enough.
- [29:51]
A
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, and basically hijack the name registration process or you know, affect one of the levers they could affect in order to, to mess with the. Or it could just be, you know, that they, they had the money that you don't have to spend it to vote. You know, you can just go in there and, 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 showed commitment to ens. You know, I probably here isn't the time to go into like all the details of how the, the airdrop was allocated. But we tried to do it in a way that that made sense, you know, that that meant that the people who we thought had showed they were truly interested in ENS could, could have a vote on it.
- [30:39]
B
I mean, Alex. Yeah. What's you were, you were around for, for a lot of this stuff, right? Like what's your take on, on kind of the incentives at play and the origin of, of voting?
- [30:51]
D
I think I am an optimist and I am a reformist. So I, I think that there are a lot of things that went down went wrong with decentralized governance and there are a lot of things that went wrong with the way ENS was governance. We are talking about being og. I was the creator of the original DAO 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 garments guy of like the Grift tried to resurrect the dao. Right. And I still think that there is always a wait out for decentralized governance and for DAOs. And I still hope, have, have hopes for ENs in that that we can just take the DAO and do like a few things that are better to make it more auditable, to make it more responsible, to make the, 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 ENS Labs as them saying that DAO 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?
- [32:17]
A
I think there was a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation and you know, mia culpa part of that is the proposal. 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 along, came away with the wrong impression because of that. You know, the idea is basically to take the part of the DAO that committees are bad at running, you know, and that's, you know, fund allocation and day to day, the capital allocation.
- [32:47]
B
Right.
- [32:47]
A
Like, yeah, but you know, not just that, there's also things that historically Labs has been doing because, because Labs was the only one who, you know, seemed to be in the right position to do it, like interfacing with icann. And really that is something that should be done by an organization that represents all of the ns, 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 dao. You know, it is the DAO as far as the outside, you know, ecosystem is concerned. It would become responsible for leading and representing ENS 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, I would say, you know, and, and full disclosure, I'm a Kapatki investor and Kapatki are the, the ones who manage the Treasury. But I, I would say it's been managed well, competently, but, but disappointingly in terms of, you know, his 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,
- [33:55]
B
if these were at 10k, then we wouldn't be saying that.
- [33:58]
C
Right.
- [33:59]
B
Very happy. So we know who to blame for that.
- [34:03]
A
That's measured against eth, because part of it's in ETH and part of it's in 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 in a savings account would probably be doing better, you know, and that's part of that's a reflection of the conservative investment mandate they've had and, 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 anytime they want to change the investment mandate, they basically have to invent it themselves and then try and convince all of these people that 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, you know, good returns.
- [35:04]
C
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 DAO format where, I mean, we have to be real. Like, the expectations of what the NSDAO 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 hiring 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, 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 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, you, you comment on, like, the bus factor of Nick is like a, is like a problem. And it is. But at the same time, I think that we have to like, address the, 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 Dow, not, I mean, to a certain extent, laps. But like, it's Nick right now with that as like.
- [37:00]
A
Because it's not working.
- [37:04]
C
I'm just saying, okay, in my opinion, right?
- [37:06]
B
Make no mistake.
- [37:07]
C
Real thing.
- [37:08]
B
Just saying, don't make a mistake.
- [37:09]
C
No, I'm just saying, like. And then the fact that. But then the fact that that surface, the, like the, the appearance of it though, right, is that everyone that's not Nick is somehow accountable for this, right? That's what the DAO is. The DAO is supposed to be doing this. The DAO is responsible for this. But if something goes wrong and if something failure fails, the DAO is actually not accountable whatsoever. Period. End of 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 fault. 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,
- [38:00]
B
So I think, I think this is, like, 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, if 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 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, or whatever it was. Right. And it's seven. Most people do not care about governance. If we had looked at Tradfi, 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, on, you know, and as 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.
- [39:31]
C
Yeah.
- [39:32]
B
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?
- [39:46]
C
Yeah, sorry. Also to add on this is like, this is the question that I've been. I, 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 Kate 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 DAO's influence is going to go down or you can, we can keep doing what's been happening and like fix the DAO structure. And I think a lot of people are asking that question is like, is it possible to fix this? Is it possible to fix it out? Right. Is there an, is there an alternate universe where that's something that you can do or that anyone can do, theoretically or in real life?
- [40:37]
A
So let me answer them in reverse order because I think fixing the DAO versus empowering the foundation is a bit of a false dichotomy because I think that what we've learned here is that the DAO should not have been trying to run these things directly. It should have been doing it through an organization like the foundation that, that is accountable to it. And you know, in the case of the ENs, DAO and the foundation, the Foundation's articles and corporation actually specify, you know, that, that the, the directors of fiduciaries, they have a responsibility to the dao, you know, the DAO can appoint and remove them, that it is the organization that is beholden to the dao. And so I think, you know, what we've learned is that we should have been doing something like this all along and the DAO should have been focusing on the overall protocol, 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. And.
- [41:35]
B
Sorry, sorry, just on that point where we want to send this thing. Right, let's talk about, just from ignore the money. From a technical perspective, you talked about ENSV2, right, the decisions and structure, like the product level decisions around NSP2. There is no way in hell that a DAO is doing that.
- [42:00]
A
No. And thanks. Try to do it that way. Yeah, absolutely. No, I, I, I, I'm thinking, I, I don't know, I don't know what I'm, how I, how I, how I say it. It's, it's, you know, we need people, you know, at labs and at the foundation who has this vision for what ENs should be. But we, if we hadn't had the DAO, then there are a lot of contributors who have come along and have, you know, have pointed out some really novel ways for ENS to either build its, you know, its penetration of the market of, I hate word market of, you know, of crypto and improve 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 that 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 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, I haven't given up on this. Like Alex, who has been at daos for even longer than me, I want to believe that it 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, 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 real effort to turn this around and to focus on the things that matter and to redecentralize it. If it doesn't work, then we need to find another path forward that still is meaningfully decentralized, you know, and, and maybe that, I don't know what that looks, 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 icann, not because ICANN is evil or anything, but because I, 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.
- [44:54]
B
And maybe Alex, you can address.
- [44:58]
D
I want to add what I like about daos in general because I think that helps tell what I think is the path for ENS right Because, look, 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, 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 tallied. And I think that changes within Asdao. In Asdao, 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 Karpacky 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 is happening is that they. All the money that the DAO has is on chain. It's transparent, and every fund is on chain. And Karpathki has a bunch of very subtle controls in which what they can allow, they can do and they. They cannot do. And I think it may, maybe it's harder for them to get a. 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? We can still have a Treasury that is on chain, that is auditable, that is ultimately controlled by a dao, right? That you can have a foundation that is something that is, is. Is more active, is someone that it is controlling. It's proposing budgets, but ultimately the budgets are voted by the Dao and the treasury is still under the control of the dao. 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?
- [47:05]
A
So the proposal is that the foundation manages the Treasury. Whether it gets managed in the existing structure through Karpatke 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. It is a very 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 ENS and so on and preferably Also for public goods funding, even in the absence of ongoing ENS revenues for an extended period, both because of downturns, but also because we wanted the freedom to make the choice about what ENS names should cost, how they should be structured, how they should be billed, completely independently of financial day to day concerns. Because the goal was that visa regulating not 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 USD in the right proportions and an endowment that will actually sustain ENS 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 let CNS continue operating.
- [48:55]
D
I mean, I think part of the problem with daomond is that half of it is ether and I think half of it is ether because a lot of it was voted by people of the in the DAO that really believe ether are bears. Like I love ether. I am a big ETHER fan. I think it is undervalued right now. But I admit that if you want to build a huge amount of money that is very conservative, putting it half a meter is not, not a rational choice.
- [49:25]
B
Yeah, like that's, I mean for the
- [49:27]
C
record, everyone listening, I think everyone in this room right now is fully irrational. Like we all hold voice.
- [49:36]
B
I know we're sitting here being like, let's rationally discuss not 50% either. Let's say 25%.
- [49:42]
C
Yeah, you know, I'm like 90 still. What are you talking about?
- [49:47]
B
Oh man, completely insane. That's good.
- [49:50]
D
But the point is that the problem is not an eastern chain. The problem is that or the allocation. And of course that came from governance. Of course that's the problem with governance.
- [50:02]
A
But it's not, it's not the split really because the, the USD denominated part of the treasury has also performed very poorly compared to USD. You know, it, it's gained, you know, an average of sort of 2 to 3% a year. And, and honestly, you know, in most countries the savings account have done better.
- [50:21]
B
Usually we lose like 30% a year. So.
- [50:24]
A
Yeah, that's true. None of it has been hacked.
- [50:26]
C
Which puts it, I was about to say how much, how many went lost?
- [50:32]
B
Like, I think it's, yeah, it's a, it's a, I think a very high bar that you guys are holding yourselves to, 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, let's jump to ads quickly.
- [50:49]
C
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- [51:46]
B
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, it would be useful to try to like wrap this up and, 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 etc and, and I think, you know, ultimately this is one of the challenges with governance, right? Is like if the ENS DA's treasury were $5,000, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Like genuinely we wouldn't be, it wouldn't be interesting to people. It's interesting to people because it's a giant pile 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 ENS dao. They actually care about governing money and the ENS Dow 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 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 ENSV2, which hopefully will be better than ENSV1. 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 here. And, you know, the first two, not people don't care about genuinely. Right. Which is why, you know, we've the 67% of ENS 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 some very smart, very capable people who have been involved in ENS outside of the foundation, outside of like, direct, you know, just from being a representative or a delegate or, 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. 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, you cannot replicate in other governance structures. So, you know, that I think is. Is very good, but it's a vanishingly small proportion of the people, maybe, you know, a hundred people have. Have, you know, kind of it in that way, arguably, right? 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. You're redesigning this, and I think, Alex, you kind of were sort of hinting at this question, like, what is. For those three things that need to be managed? What is your optimal structure? How. How would you do this? If you could kind of go back in time in a time machine and, and redesign this, what would you do? What is the outcome you want?
- [55:30]
A
I mean, the, the outcome I want, that I've always wanted is, is removing those threats to the name service through centralization. And that's, you know, a combination of, you know, not having to trust an individual that, you know, your name will continue resolving, or that you'll be able to renew it next year or whatever, or, you know, that they are not going to be hacked or suborned or arrested by their governments, you know, recently passed laws or, 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, is independent and is actually sustainable for the very long run. As to how to build that, like, you know, from a clean slate. I, as I say, I, I would put the funding question to the side and, and make it, you know, part of a foundation that is accountable to the DAO, but not directly voted on every individual budget and so forth. They can show whether they're doing a good job or not, and the DAO can agree or disagree, but they're not having to pass every budget through them. They're not having to justify every allocation, having to account for it all, they're having to demonstrate it. But they have independence to actually do this. And I would still put the protocol levers in as decentralized hands as possible. And that would probably still look like some sort of token. But you know, ideally it would be structured in a way that facilitates token voting for governance, beta and speculation. Less, you know, and all the people that I've. There 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, so, you know, welcome new crew. You know, here is the old crew.
- [57:25]
C
Alex, wait. Alex, what do you, what do you, what do you think of that? Like, are we really. Are we enemies or. You know what I mean?
- [57:33]
D
Not at all. I'm still a big fan of Nick. I do disagree with some things that Labs has been doing recently and Nick
- [57:42]
B
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. Just to separate that out, particularly on
- [57:55]
D
the future, on how we can move, how can we reform the dao, 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's to still has to run one once per year, has to run a budget by the DAO and that endowment keeps on chain and we just change a mandate. But I want to go back to the credibly neutral infrastructure because that's interesting. I think the first thing that people says when they start, look, Nick is evil. We should fork ens, right? Let's suppose Nick is actually evil and ENS Labs is going to take over the. About the Treasury. Right. The interesting aspect of it is that we need to separate ENS from the DO E name. Right? The. So what labs could do. They could take. They could take over the. The treasury, which is not $500 million, by the way. That's. We are way past like we are.
- [58:59]
C
Wait, hold on, hold on. I thought we were arguing over half a billion dollars.
- [59:04]
D
How about. Well, we are in probably 100, 130 million. Last time I checked,
- [59:13]
A
130 million in ETH as stable and about 300 million in ENS tokens, right?
- [59:19]
B
Ignoring. Okay, ignoring the ENS tokens, it's 130 million in.
- [59:23]
D
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 if name, he could not change, take your if name from you. And more importantly, he does not control ENS 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 population box, you can create your own naming system that lives in ens. So if you do believe that nikazepu and you want to fork ens, you could in theory just build it still on top of ENS and be compatible with NS and just not care about eth. Right?
- [60:17]
A
Yeah. And my plea to anyone who is determined to fork 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 ens, 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 ETH 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 ens, you know, R eth, not the ENS eth. And it went to the wrong wallet, it went to some scammer or something.
- [61:12]
D
But that does show, I think, the importance of having a dao, right? Because There are a lot of other like naming systems out there that are just creating names that are clearly incompatible with icann and they are just a private company just selling names and promising that they will be integrated with something. And I think, I think they are not much different 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 dao is over, the dao is done said. 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 platform that tries or stands to being open and working with all the other like, already legacy systems.
- [62:06]
C
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 invested in the. 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 NS 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 built something and then you have to, 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 say, lives, livelihoods, personhood. Right. Tied to that. That's when you get people to be like, truly invested in 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. 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, when 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 gonna do, right? Like put, I don't know, put something behind it.
- [64:40]
B
Well, then I think in fairness, in fairness, like, this is part of why, you know, you've got people who are like legit people and say, you know, like, Alex is. Is concerned about the direction this is going. I think that that's like bare 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 to 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 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 adds value to the world. People are 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 want it 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 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%. Right. And ENS hasn't failed. And we're having this debate because it is valuable and people care about it. And, and it is a bit of a proxy war for the governance debate of, you know, what should we govern, etc. And I think that's why people care a lot. I think, you know, same thing for a. Right. I think, I think that's why these things, you know, do blow up on the timeline. It's not, it's not just people clout chasing or, you know, we. We genuinely do care about these things and I think they're hard problems. To solve. And I think if we can have a debate like this that you know, is, is reasonable and, and you know, kind of balances the, the different trade offs, then we can progress it. And, and we all want this to. We all want ENS to work with anyone that's saying we want ENS to fail.
- [66:51]
C
So yeah, I would say too 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 ax was a bad decision. This name chain was a bad decision decision. I would definitely encourage people to like just stop doing that. We are like where we are. The, 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 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, so we are where we are. I think it's much more productive to have conversation on where we can go from here that everyone can agree on. I think even Lefterists could is probably closer. Everyone's on even lefterus even even 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 were together at defcon some very verse defcons. Right. It's crazy. But yeah. So on that note though, what is like one sentence, Nick and then one sentence, Alex?
- [68:16]
B
The
- [68:19]
C
one sentence of what you want the ENs to be or to do or to overcome in the sort of relatively short term, not super long term.
- [68:32]
A
I haven't given up on ENS or DAO governance and I don't intend to. I think we've learned what daos 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.
- [68:54]
D
That's.
- [68:54]
B
I think that was a good one.
- [68:55]
C
I think that was, that was actually quite good. I'm terrible at that. That's why I love asking our guests this when I get asked.
- [69:06]
D
So I think what we need is just separate and specialized concerns in the sense that ens DAO should focus on just governing. It selects, let's say the board of directors of the foundation. The foundation just, just focus on budgeting and auditing and making sure the money is well spent and then it spends on teams like labs and labs do will do product decisions and do timeline decisions and all of that and hiring decisions. So each part gets to do its own thing, right? We shouldn't have the DAO making product decisions. We shouldn't have labs doing like governance. Like I think they making governance decisions on things like that. That's, that is my opinion.
- [69:53]
B
Yeah, I mean I, I think the final point that I'll say here is I do get a sense from 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, a frustration that people like this is a lot of money and you know, it's not fair that labs and. Let's talk about Stani for a second. Ignore ENS like, you know, there's people that are like Stani 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, and I think, you know, to go back to your point, Tay like this, these are still startup esque things. Even if they are supposed to be credibly neutral or 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, and I do think that like a lot of times those, those debates and, 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 Eth from me, right? Or more importantly, izzy.e my daughter's ENS 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, if you don't, if you don't like it. Fine. Not everyone has to like everything, but, you know, the idea that, that you don't have people who really care about the price product that is ens, the, the thing, you know, it's, it's core features and functionality and want to make it better, I think is wild. It's wild. And that on the timeline is just insane. Like you, 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 ICANN. You know, ICANN's not going to love a couple of maladies 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, you know, affordance for that, right? That, that like, you know, there's no bad actors involved in this, right? Like 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 to guys, why are you.
- [73:14]
C
Why Nick and Alex? Why are you both still here?
- [73:17]
B
Yeah,
- [73:19]
A
I seem to be really bad at making myself inessential. I've been trying.
- [73:27]
B
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 that we're humans. That's just how humans work. Alex, what's your, what's your reason? Why are you still showing up, fighting, fighting this fight?
- [73:44]
D
Look, I'm a dad full time. That is my job. Everything else I do, I do it for, for the pleasure of it. Right? I'm here, I'm here because I find meaning. I love. I. 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, that the world sort of moved on to AI and like, we are the ones who are still. Look, look, there's still value to be had on the things we've built. We've built an open ledger. We build an organization that you can. It's transparent, it's uncorruptible. I still think that that, that's fair. I think that's still interesting and some ways I still like to come here and defend that and say, look, crypto, like that's who crypto really is. All the scammers and the pumpers. That. That's not who we are. Right.
- [74:42]
C
Yeah.
- [74:43]
B
Amazing.
- [74:43]
C
I agree.
- [74:44]
B
Thank you both. Yeah.
- [74:46]
C
Wait, one last thing. So for the people who are right now viciously engaged on the timeline, or perhaps are listening 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?
- [75:18]
A
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, and so on.
- [75:29]
B
There's no forum, guys. Don't even worry about it. Forget we said anything.
- [75:32]
D
It's not about the means, about the methods. Right? Just don't come with memes and just write long, full, toughful responses and in any, any medium it will work.
- [75:45]
A
And. But I mean, you know, there's people like, I think it was Christophe Jens who, who said, you know, why don't you, you know, by removing control over the protocol and giving the treasury away to the, the new Ethereum, you know, protocol Guild and I, 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, or, or people shouting at me that they think I'm going to make off with the treasury and, and buy an island. I don't think you can buy an island with that. But anyway, you know, let's talk.
- [76:19]
C
Nick.
- [76:19]
B
There's be surprised there's some cheap, pretty
- [76:22]
A
crummy islands out there.
- [76:23]
B
Yeah, there's some pretty crappy islands.
- [76:25]
C
I've done this, I've done this research at the top every single time. And every single time I failed to buy the island and move there. And I'm stuck with you guys. That's why I'm still here, by the way.
- [76:39]
A
If you want to have a serious conversation, do come and have that serious conversation.
- [76:45]
B
Thank you both. This has been an awesome show. I think this is an important topic and fair markets where we actually get to focus on these things. There's still some angry people floating around fairly, but I think 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 engaging with those people, unfortunately, wherever they may be, whether it's X or or on the forum, is just a necessary, necessary part of this process. Right. So thank you both for joining us. It's been been an awesome show.
- [77:20]
A
Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
- [77:24]
C
Bye, guys.
- [77:25]
B
Bye. 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 in. You can find all our disclosures@unchain crypto.com uneasymoney.
- [78:02]
A
Sam.