ENS Labs has asked the ENS DAO to activate ENSv2 on Ethereum mainnet, a step that would freeze new .eth registrations on the original v1 registrar and move them to the new system.
ENS founder Nick Johnson, posting as nick.eth, published the executable proposal on the ENS governance forum on Oct. 11. It bundles 15 calls from the DAO timelock into a single atomic transaction. Those calls pull all five controllers now authorized on the v1 BaseRegistrar and add back just two: ETHRenewerV1, which handles renewals for names already reserved on v2, and a Graveyard contract that can claim names left expired past grace. Ownership of the registrar then passes to ETHRenewerV1, which, according to the post, can neither register new names nor add controllers. The post does not give a voting date, and no Tally or Snapshot vote had been linked as of publication.
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What It Means for .eth Holders
Existing owners don’t have to act. “If you own a .eth name and do nothing, it keeps working,” the post said, adding, “There’s no deadline to migrate.” Owners can move a name to v2 through the ENS app whenever they choose. Names that have lapsed past their grace period won’t carry over and will open up for anyone to register on v2.
ENSv2 shortens the post-expiry grace period to 28 days from 90. To compensate, “each name’s v2 expiry is extended by 62 days to make up the difference,” according to the proposal.
Registrations stop on both v1 and v2 between the proposal’s execution and v2 going live, a gap the post expects to last “a few hours.”
Labs Hands Over Control
Only one of the five activation stages requires a DAO vote. The last step, according to the proposal, is for ENS Labs to renounce its admin roles over the v2 contracts and pass them to the DAO timelock. Before that, Labs plans to re-run its name reservations after the freeze, let the v2 registrar take sign-ups and route name lookups through v2. Those steps are commitments by Labs, not part of the onchain vote. “When that’s done, the DAO controls ENSv2 just as it controls v1 today, and Labs holds no privileged role in either,” the post said. Registration fees on v2 are paid to the timelock, which has owned the fee-handling contracts since deployment.
The post also lists tradeoffs, including the loss of an emergency path on v1 that lets a designated controller disable a registrar controller without a vote. “The v1 freeze is reversible; migrating a name is not,” it said. The DAO could restore v1 controllers with another executable, but migrated tokens can’t be returned.
ENS Labs first pitched ENSv2 in 2024 as a move to a layer 2. The new proposal says the full v2 contract set is already deployed on Ethereum mainnet.
Related Listen: How One ENS Vote Reignited the DAO Governance Debate: Uneasy Money
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