The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) DAO has chosen a new fund manager to take charge in managing its treasury in the wake of crypto winter. In a vote that opened last Wednesday, Nov. 17 and closed Tuesday evening, Nov. 22. Community members selected Karpatkey DAO, a DeFi fund management organization originally incubated through Gnosis Ltd.
Karpatkey received 1.76 million votes. Notable addresses include ENS co-founder Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth), Founder of Rotkiapp Lefteris Karapetsas (lefteris.eth) and ENS Steward Griff Green (griff.eth), who altogether had a voting power of 468K ENS.
“None of the above” came in second place with 1.3 million votes.
Now that the community has chosen Karpatkey, the treasury management firm, going forward, will manage the bulk of ENS’s treasury composed of mostly USDC and ETH. With more than two years of experience, Karpatkey currently boasts over $397 million of non-custodial assets under management, excluding ENS.
The goal of the endowment is to create a sustainable fund that can fuel continuous development regardless of macroeconomics conditions that may adversely affect revenue stemming from ENS registrations and renewals.
Karpatkey said in its proposal, “The funds would be managed transparently and completely on-chain through a non-custodial solution… The core of Karpatkey’s non-custodial solution relies on the most battle-tested tooling to manage DAO treasuries: a proxy Management Safe and the Zodiac Roles Modifier.”
Zodiac, developed by Gnosis Guild, is “a collection of tools built according to an open standard” as said on its Github page, while Safe, securing close to $40 billion in all its Ethereum contracts, is one of the most popular ways to custody digital assets in a decentralized manner.
$52 million is the initial size of Karpatkey’s proposal for the ENS Endaoment and $69 million with a projected return of 5.83% is the final stage of Karpatkey’s proposal. “The strategy would use low-risk, medium complexity DeFi strategies such as providing liquidity to automated market makers.”
In an interview with CoinDesk, Facundo Peláez, Karpatkey’s business development manager, said, “It’s been a great exchange that has been in the forum, on the diversity of voices, how everybody could just give their opinion openly. And that’s been really healthy for ENS DAO because people can just speak their minds and have civil exchanges. When the forum asks questions [and] challenge[s] points, I think that’s something that is rich for the community and favorable.”
Mona El Isa, CEO and founder of Avantgarde, one of the potential fund managers up for consideration told CoinDesk a fund manager that endorses a non-custodial, completely transparent solution for the ENS’ endaoment “would be the first example of something being run completely on-chain”, where a FTX or Madoff situation “wouldn’t be possible.”
Read more: What Is the Ethereum Name Service? How ENS Works and What It’s Used For
