ENS Draft Would Freeze New v1 .eth Registrations for Good

A draft proposal in front of the ENS DAO would activate ENSv2 on Ethereum mainnet and close the original .eth registrar to new names permanently. Nick Johnson, the naming protocol's founder, posted it to the governance forum on 11 October as "[Executable] Activate ENSv2". It bundles 15 calls into a single transaction from the DAO timelock, stripping the five controllers that can register names on v1 and authorising two that cannot. "No v1 registrations, ever," the post says of the result. Nothing has been scheduled: as of Tuesday the proposal is still a draft, with no on-chain vote and no Tally or Snapshot link.

Fifteen calls in one transaction

The calls run in order. Numbers seven through eleven remove the registrar controllers currently authorised on the v1 BaseRegistrar; twelve through fourteen authorise a Graveyard contract and ETHRenewerV1, then hand BaseRegistrar ownership to the latter; the fifteenth upgrades the Universal Resolver proxy, the contract through which applications look names up. ETHRenewerV1 handles renewals for names already reserved on v2 and, by the post's account, has no function for registering a name or adding a controller. That is the lock. Reopening v1 would take another executable proposal reclaiming ownership.

Activation runs in five stages with one vote in it. Labs has already deployed the v2 contracts and reserved existing names; the DAO transaction is stage two; Labs then re-syncs, enables the new registrar and hands its admin roles to the DAO timelock. The post describes the endpoint as Labs holding "no privileged role in either" version.

Nothing for existing holders to do

Owners are not being asked to move. "If you own a .eth name and do nothing, it keeps working," Johnson wrote, and the post adds that "there's no deadline to migrate". Every active or in-grace second-level .eth name has been reserved on v2 for its current owner, and reserved names resolve against their existing v1 records. Renewing one extends its reservation. Names already past their grace period are the exception: they do not carry over and become available to anyone on v2.

The grace period itself changes, from 90 days on v1 to 28 on v2, so each migrated name gets 62 extra days of expiry to land on the same calendar day it would have anyway. Wrapped names with locked permissions keep them. Applications have to resolve through the Universal Resolver to work with v2, and the post says most integrations are ready. That is a claim about other people's code, not a commitment the DAO can vote on.

A few hours nobody has priced

Between execution and v2 going live, no new .eth name can be registered on either version. The post calls that gap "a few hours"; crypto.news renders the same estimate as several hours. What happens to renewals in the window is unresolved in the source itself. The proposal's "what changes" section says existing names cannot be renewed during the gap, while its timeline says renewals of unmigrated names work after execution through the new renewer contract. Those two passages do not reconcile, and the post does not address the conflict. Ethereum's own upgrade track is no more precise about dates, with Glamsterdam heading to the Hoodi testnet on 26 October without a mainnet date.

Where the quorum sits

The threshold is reported two ways. Cointelegraph has the bar at 1% voter participation or a million ENS votes; crypto.news has a quorum of 1% of voting supply equal to a million affirmative votes. Those are different tests, and neither page quotes the governance parameter. Both agree on seven days of voting, a two-day timelock and a simple majority.

"The v1 freeze is reversible; migrating a name is not," the proposal says.

That asymmetry is what delegates have to weigh, along with the loss of an emergency path that let a designated controller disable a v1 controller without a vote. Governance has moved core infrastructure before, as ZetaChain's token holders did in retiring their layer 1. Here the vote has not been called. Until it is, every name registered is one more on a registrar scheduled to take no others.