The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) DAO is weighing a proposal to activate ENSv2 on Ethereum mainnet, a foundational redesign that would freeze new v1 .eth registrations while preserving existing owners' rights. The executable proposal, dated Oct. 11 and listed as pending in the Oct. 12 governance bulletin, does not mandate immediate migration; existing .eth names would remain functional and renewable through a dedicated contract as long as holders keep renewing them.
ENSv2 replaces the flat registry introduced in 2017 with a hierarchical system in which each name can run its own registry for subnames. Owners gain fine-grained permissions, custom registry and resolver implementations, and more flexible subname management compared with the existing NameWrapper and irreversible fuses. Migration, however, is permanent: an ENSv1 token moved to v2 is sent to a smart contract called the Graveyard, which cannot return or transfer it.
The transition also changes costs and payment rails. Annual fees for names with five or more characters would rise 60% from $5 to $8, while three- and four-character names stay unchanged. Registrations and renewals would switch from ETH to stablecoins such as USDC and DAI, and discounts for six or more years would cut annual costs by roughly 44%. For migrated names, the 90-day expiration grace period shrinks to 28 days, with expiry dates extended by 62 days to preserve original availability timing. Names remaining on v1 keep the 90-day grace period.
If the DAO approves the proposal, activation proceeds in five stages. ENS Labs has already deployed v2 contracts and reserved active or in-grace v1 names. The v1 registrar would stop accepting new registrations, final synchronization would occur, and the v2 registrar and Universal Resolver would go live after a temporary multi-hour suspension. ENS Labs would then transfer all remaining v2 administrative roles to the DAO timelock, with the ENS Security Council playing a key role during irreversible migration steps. No launch date has been announced.
