ENS’s vote to switch on ENSv2 ended with 1.69 million votes in favor and exactly one wallet against, which cast 24.94 ENS. Quorum, which looked uncertain a week ago, was cleared by 69%.
Few wallets carried the result, though. Sixty-two addresses voted for the proposal, and the three largest supplied about a third of all the votes. Once the timelock opens around October 27, their decision runs 15 contract calls, including five that remove every existing authority over how .eth names are registered on ENS v1. The final tally, set against the calls themselves, shows where the calls go beyond the summary.
Quorum Held, With Room to Spare
The proposal, Activate ENSv2, was published on-chain by nick.eth on October 18, and voting opened the same evening. To pass, it needed 1 million ENS votes, about 1% of supply, plus a majority in favor.
It wasn’t on track early on. When voting opened, six wallets had cast 531,252 ENS. By October 20, support had reached about 619,420 votes, still about 380,000 short of quorum.
The final result on Tally:
- For: 1.69 million, from 62 addresses
- Against: 24.94, from one address (0xB778…85e9)
- Abstain: 0
- Quorum: 1.69 million of 1 million, met
After October 20, more than 1 million votes came in, almost tripling the total in the vote’s final five days. The voting period ended on October 25 at about 06:01 UTC. Tally shows the proposal was queued at the same time, which started the two-day timelock.
How Concentrated Was the Final Turnout
The largest For votes on Tally:
- ensteward.eth: 200,000
- jefflau.eth: 190,750
- liubenben.eth: 180,030
Together, those three wallets cast about 570,780 votes. That’s 33.8% of the final For total, and 57% of the votes needed for quorum. Add coltron.eth’s 117,920 votes, and a handful of delegates account for more than 40% of the result.
The vote was also carried largely by people already involved. Jeff Lau co-founded ENS, and liubenben.eth publicly backed the upgrade on the proposal’s forum thread. On the same thread, one delegate, FireEyes, said they would vote yes but warned that ENS Labs’ delegated voting power was concentrating influence in the DAO.
Even so, the result stands. Opposition was effectively zero, and turnout was well above quorum. Still, a proposal reshaping ENS’s core registrar passed on the participation of 62 wallets, and the three largest could have covered most of quorum on their own.
What the 15 Calls Actually Do
All 15 calls run together from the DAO timelock, in a single transaction. The forum post groups them like this:
- Calls 1–6: point .eth resolution at the new ENSV2Resolver, let new adapter contracts write v1 reverse records, approve two v1 public resolvers, and approve an account implementation used by v2.
- Calls 7–11: remove five controllers from the v1 BaseRegistrar.
- Calls 12–13: add two new controllers: a Graveyard contract that reclaims expired v1 names, and ETHRenewerV1, which handles renewals for names not yet migrated.
- Call 14: transfer ownership of the v1 BaseRegistrar itself to ETHRenewerV1.
- Call 15: upgrade the Universal Resolver to a proxy managed by ENS’s security council.
Sequence is critical here. Calls 12 and 13 have to run before call 14, because once ownership passes to ETHRenewerV1, the old owner can no longer add or remove controllers.
Where the Contract Calls Go Beyond the Summary
The proposal’s summary says it “freezes new .eth registrations on the v1 registrar.” Calls 7 through 11 show what that involves. They remove these controllers:
- The current ETHRegistrarController, which handles today’s registrations
- The NameWrapper, which also stops wrapped-name registration, since the wrapped controller depends on it
- The 2020 RegistrarMigration contract
- A legacy 4-of-7 Safe that still held controller rights
- The original 2020 ETHRegistrarController
In practice, the change is more than a pause on new registrations. It removes every existing account and contract with controller authority over the v1 registrar, including an old multisig most users wouldn’t know still had that power. After call 14, the only things that can act on the v1 registrar are a renew-only contract and a contract that reclaims expired names.
The forum post is open about the trade-offs. The freeze can be reversed until migration begins: the DAO could have ETHRenewerV1 return the registrar and add the old controllers back. However, some things can’t be undone. Migrated v1 tokens held by the Graveyard “cannot be returned.” The v1 emergency disable path also no longer applies after the handover. During the transition, ENS Labs holds admin rights over v2, and the security council administers the intermediate resolver proxy.
The Open Items in Blockful’s Review
Blockful, a delegate team, rebuilt all 15 calls from the on-chain calldata and confirmed they match the published proposal. Its review on the forum thread also flagged:
- One High finding, resolved: the .eth token was initially assigned to the Endowment Safe and has been moved to the DAO Safe.
- A Medium finding, acknowledged: a single outside key, run by the Rhinestone service, controls the new account contracts. ENS Labs plans to make that service immutable in Q4 2026 or Q1 2027.
- A Medium finding, acknowledged: on.eth and about 306 other names were skipped in the v2 copy. ENS Labs will register on.eth to the DAO before handover.
- A Low finding, still open: code changed in pull requests #470 to #472 after the Certora and Nethermind audits, so no published audit report covers those changes.
Voters approved the proposal with these items on record. They’re the points to check against ENS Labs’ follow-up work, including a planned proposal about a month after launch to remove v2 roles that are broader than needed long-term.
What Happens When the Timelock Opens
With the proposal queued on October 25 at about 06:01 UTC, the two-day timelock lets anyone execute it from around 06:00 UTC on October 27. All 15 calls run in one transaction from the DAO timelock.
Users will notice a short gap. New .eth registrations stop on v1 as soon as the transaction executes, and they won’t be available on either v1 or v2 until v2 goes live. ENS Labs expects that to take “a few hours.” Meanwhile, renewals continue through ETHRenewerV1, and other name operations on v1 work normally. Afterward, ENS Labs will run a final sync, open v2 registrations, switch resolution to v2, and hand all v2 admin roles to the DAO.
The forum post also lists checks anyone can run after execution. The v1 BaseRegistrar owner should be ETHRenewerV1. The five removed controllers should show as false, while ETHRenewerV1 and Graveyard should show as true. The .eth resolver should point to ENSV2Resolver. Those checks will confirm whether execution matches what 62 wallets approved.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services.
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