ENS is one of the only projects in the crypto ecosystem to not take any outside funding which puts them in a very unique position. The project has also been able to distribute the token in a healthier way with more of it going to the community and treasury which should lead to a more sustainable development process for the project over the long run.

jefflau.eth @_jefflau

ENS is in the unique position where we have no investors to please, whilst building a credibly neutral protocol. We have decades of runway and an organic community that is stronger and more resilient than any I’ve seen since the OG Ethereum community. Things are looking up 🔥

May 4th 2022

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Just because ENS doesn’t have to appease professional investors, doesn’t mean that they don’t have token holders who will be expecting return. Though this is distinctly different because the ENS team has not promised a return to people who buy the token - they specifically call it a “governance token”. Obviously they call it this for regulatory reasons but in reality this framing won’t stop retail investors from expecting a return. So I would argue that ENS does technically have “investors” to please - just not in the same way they would have if the investors were VCs and funds. I mean, they’re also not legally obligated to please any of the ENS holders like a publicly traded company would be.

To another one of Jeff’s points, and I’ve discussed extensively before, community is everything in crypto. You can have the best token design in the world and a killer product but if there’s no community to back it up then it will slowly (or sometimes quickly) fade into irrelevancy. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but community is so powerful because it is normally a projects best marketing department. Also, just because a token design is considered “good”, doesn’t mean that it’ll accrue value (I know, it’s a weird statement, but it’s true).

I think the ENS project itself has a great future ahead of it and a strong foundation to keep building upon. Though it’s arguable whether the token added a significant amount of value to the project and I would even wager that the project would’ve succeeded just fine without a token. But, like most things in crypto, it’s very hard to quantify this point so I won’t even try to - though I do think we’ll have some nice answers to this eventually.

All in all, it’s still very impressive that ENS has gotten this far without any outside funding - they are a 5 year old project after all! I do think it’s a good thing that they now have a massive treasury to pull from in order to both attract new contributors and continue paying existing ones - the future is very bright for ENS!

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.