Token governance needs to evolve. Since the start of 2026 we’ve seen countless posts about “the death of DAOs”, however as was argued in our recent post about ENS; DAOs are just a type of smart contract. What is dying though is ‘standard’ token governance through the compound governor contracts; After 7 years of reliance on one of the first token DAO contracts, these DAOs need to evolve.
DAOs are so dead that I see nobody noticed or discussed this proposal that @ENS_DAO essentially dissolves itself and transfers control of the entire treasury (almost half a billion in ENS + stables) to the ENS foundation.
So! Lets try! As an output from the ongoing ENS governance dispute (where ENS Labs have taken over the ENS DAO, it’s treasury and their respective accountability structures) FireEyes partnered with Protocol Labs R&D to distribute $10,000 over ~10 days to proposals submitted to the ENS Simocracy space.
Simocracy is a platform where people load a ‘Sim’ with context and knowledge from their own experience surrounding a certain issue or decision. These sims then speak with each other and come up with proposals, ideas and solutions as a group. The proposals are voted on by the sims, and results are brought back to the collective.
This experiment created over 110 proposals from over 60 Sims, during a time where the ENS forum lost a significant amount of it’s contribution. These proposals offered a host of different paths forward and potential solutions to the current ENS governance crisis. Getting so much input and buy-in from the ENS community about potential next steps for ENS DAO isn’t just a signal about ENS, it’s a precedent setting signal around governance more generally: people are still willing and ready to engage with each other in order to find new solutions, but we need better tooling and coordination to do so.
Unlocking and leveraging this type of collective knowledge through a set of high context AI Sims is one of many new paths being discussed within DAOs today. Given the governance momentum the sims were able to achieve in comparison to the ENS forum, we believe that ENS Labs could have gained more trust by actively participating in the discussions rather than ignoring them. For more information on the ideas see the interactive summary.
Reflecting on this experiment and the wide range of different proposals that were submitted; There’s clearly appetite for communities to engage in the reform and improvement of these DAOs. The reason we stood up and funded this experiment (alongside Protocol Labs) is to encourage more of this type of governance experimentation, seeing more DAOs use platforms like Simocracy to discuss issues, using contextualised AI agents to sense make across large groups of contributors without nearly the time and brainpower sink required to do this directly.
If you are part of a digital, DAO or token community, thinking about how Simocracy and similar experimental platforms could be used to sense make across large groups is a fantastic next step for the wider Ethereum governance community. We clearly need new ideas for tokens, for DAOs and for decentralised coordination. This experiment netted ENS DAO over 100 new ideas/proposals that could be considered by the DAO and we’re excited to see more of this type of work flow across the ecosystem!
Check out the graphic below to see all of the proposals and the funding each was assigned!
