Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) founded a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for the ENS community.

Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who were vying for the opportunity to represent the community and participate in the decision-making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, one Decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers.

Zhang shared his experience as an ENS external contributor and early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially tried to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool. Easy to use to resolve .eth names and crypto wallet addresses. Basically, when the user enters the name .eth in AlphaWallet, the wallet address and vice versa are displayed with reverse resolution. AlphaWallet also supports ENS avatars.

Zhang, also known as @ Victor928, was among the 30 delegates with the most votes. When asked about his plans to continue contributing to the DAO, Zhang said:

My biggest concern right now is voting rights. The second largest voting power is Coinbase, a large company. We have to ensure that ENS is always a public group, always a neutral service that is not influenced or controlled by any party for its own sake. “

Related: The operations director of ENS says that DAO-based governance is “always the plan”

A total of 100 million ENS tokens were distributed during the ENS Token Airdrop. While 25% go to users with .eth dom, another 25% of the tokens are given to people who “have contributed significantly to ENS in the past four years”. The remaining 50% remain in the tills of the DAO community.

As an external contributor, Zhang received 46,296.3 tokens. At the time of publication, these tokens are valued at $ 3,320,311.15. Zhang was one of 27 donors who received this exact amount.

Zhang confirmed that he “holds everything. I am not paying out tokens. As long as ENS is growing in the right direction, I don’t see any competition. So that means a much higher value than the current market capitalization if we look at it as an investment. “

On the day of the drop, Brantly Millegan, AKA “Brantly.eth, ENS Operations Manager, tweeted about the “responsibility” given to the users and added how the ENS community uses the decentralized identity “wisely”.

You don’t have free money via airdrop, you are responsible for the airdrop

– brantly.eth (@BrantlyMillegan) November 9, 2021

Spruce’s Gregory Rocco discussed this concept of decentralized identity with Cointelegraph. He developed Spruce, a secure login using Ethereum or SIWE software, to help users own and control their digital identities instead of sharing that information with large companies.

It refers to large centralized companies like Google, Twitter or Fb that give website users the option of logging into third-party apps and services using their Gmail or Fb data.

According to Rocco, these traditional logins have “ultimate control” over user IDs, because “if Google pulls the rug over you, you will not only lose access to our services.” are to use Gmail. ”

The Ethereum Foundation and ENS have recognized this problem and published a Request for Proposal to create an Ethereum login package with Oauth. Fichte was selected in September to offer a decentralized identity alternative.

The goal of SIWE is to give users control over their public identifiers by having their private key or, as Rocco put it: “‘Your key, your crypto”, but also “Your key, your identifier”. “Spruce’s toolkit not only creates a blockchain-based identity, but also provides verifiable evidence of identity, ownership of assets and DAO membership. This is very important for users to prove their worth to the ENS ecosystem and gain rights to upcoming airdrops.

When asked what it feels like to be a delegate, Rocco said:

“I think this is the motivation for ENS to keep track of things and to conclude and establish this social contract. I believe in the future of ENS and support participation in user-controlled systems. This model is the first step in giving users more control over their identity and data. “

The decentralization of identity will eventually strengthen the ENS DAO and build its credibility as a truly decentralized organization. Both Zhang and Rocco are advocates of collective property and hope to further promote the use of ENS in the World Wide Web3 ecosystem.