Ethereum Name Service (ENS) director Brantly Millegan remains in his position following a vote to remove him over a number of controversial tweets. A snapshot of the vote shows 1.6 million governance tokens pledged against his removal, with 1.4 million for it, a margin of 5.88 percent.
ENS is a blockchain protocol used by over 300,000 people. It converts convoluted crypto wallet addresses into a single username of the user’s choosing. The addresses are formatted as “username.eth” and have become widely used across the Web3 community.
One of Millegan’s old tweets resurfaced last month, in which he said, “Homosexual acts are evil. Transgenderism doesn’t exist. Abortion is murder. Contraception is a perversion. So is masturbation and porn.” Some of his other offensive tweets have been dug up as well. Millegan was fired from True Names Limited, the nonprofit behind ENS, due to his comments. But he’s still one of the directors of the ENS decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which is controlled by token holders themselves.
Millegan is one of the most important decision-makers of the ENS community. He’s taken on the role of a delegate, or a community representative that DAO members vote for by allocating their ENS tokens. Delegates vote on decisions for the members of the DAO; the more tokens pledged to a delegate, the more voting power they possess.
At this time of writing, there are currently around 354,000 tokens pledged to Millegan — the most of any other delegate in the ENS DAO — even after some users urged other members to shift their tokens elsewhere. As ENS co-founder Alex Van de Sande points out on Twitter, only 1,600 of the tokens Millegan pledged belong to his own wallet; the rest belong to the roughly 5,600 addresses delegating their tokens to him.
The vote for Millegan’s removal, which ended on Saturday, included his own (heavily weighted) vote against it. Nick Johnson, the founder of ENS, abstained from voting. If Millegan also abstained from voting, he would’ve been removed as director — the tokens put towards removing him would’ve outweighed the tokens pledged towards keeping him.