ENS governance crisis deepens as Millegan exits, $143.5M treasury at stake

Brantly Millegan's departure from ENS and the shutdown of ethid.org remove one of the protocol's most significant contributors as a $143.5 million governance battle unfolds.

Brantly Millegan left ENS on July 4 and began winding down ethid.org, the identity services provider to the ENS DAO, as a governance dispute over the protocol's $143.5 million treasury escalates.

"Given recent events and other reasons, I have decided to leave ENS and begin shutting down ethid.org," Millegan wrote on X. Team members are open to new opportunities, he added.

The closure removes key ecosystem infrastructure. Projects supported by ethid.org — including GrailsMarket, ENSMarketBot, and the Ethereum Follow Protocol — will cease operations in the coming weeks, though their code will remain open-source. EFP had recorded over 36,000 unique list minters, 55,000 lists created, and more than 1 million list operations, according to Dune Analytics.

The departure comes as the ENS DAO considers its most significant governance reform since inception. A temperature check proposal would transfer management of an $86.9 million endowment fund and $56.6 million in liquid assets — $143.5 million total — to the ENS Foundation, removing operational decisions from token-weighted voting. Millegan had publicly opposed parts of the proposal.

Governance Turmoil Widens Beyond One Departure

The leadership exit follows a broader crisis. Co-founder Nick Johnson used delegated voting power to block the Security Council's term renewal, prompting community member Christoph Jentzsch to propose dissolving the DAO entirely. The Public Goods Working Group, which operated for 4 1/2 years under the ENS DAO, also ended, distributing $450,000 USDC and 72.5 ETH in its final funding round.

Katherine Wu, COO of ENS, has publicly supported the restructuring, arguing that the token-weighted governance model created in 2021 is ill-suited for day-to-day operational decisions and long-term capital allocation.

$143.5M Treasury Decision Tests DAO Model

ENS traded around $4.25 in early July, according to CoinMarketCap, after a sustained decline even as broader digital asset markets performed well. The governance outcome carries high financial stakes: the treasury assets under discussion are worth several times the token's market capitalization, a recurring tension in DAO governance where small groups of tokenholders control large pools of capital.

If the Foundation proposal passes, it would be one of the first instances of a major DAO transferring operational responsibility from tokenholder governance to a professional foundation while retaining decentralized protocol ownership. If it fails, the argument that large treasury assets must remain directly accountable to tokenholders — governance inefficiencies notwithstanding — will be strengthened.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.