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Delegate statements – ENS Organizational Registry
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Delegate Statements

The Problem

Delegates in a DAO governance system often publish a statement — a summary of their philosophy and why others should delegate voting power to them. Because many delegates participate in multiple DAOs, their statement often varies from one community to the next.

Right now, every governance platform — Agora, Tally, Karma — stores delegate statements independently. Delegates update their statement in one place and it doesn't propagate anywhere else. There is no on-chain source of truth.

Proposed Solution

ENS metadata allows delegates to publish statements directly on their ENS name, with a unique version scoped to each DAO they are active in — using the DAO's ENS name as the parameter.

delegate.alice.eth
  └── statement[uniswap.eth] = "I prioritise..."   # Uniswap statement
  └── statement[ens.eth]    = "My focus is..."     # ENS statement
  └── statement             = "I am a delegate..."  # default fallback

Because ENS records are public and permissionlessly readable, any governance tool can resolve the statement without a proprietary API or platform-specific submission flow. One update propagates everywhere.

Discovering delegates

For DAOs with permissionless delegation systems, delegates can be discovered automatically:

  1. Look at on-chain token balances to generate a list of accounts that have been delegated to.
  2. For each account, perform a reverse ENS lookup to find their associated ENS name.
  3. Check whether they have a statement[your-dao.eth] record set.
  4. If found, surface their statement directly — no manual curation needed.

If no DAO-specific statement is found, consumers can fall back to the default statement value.

Real-World Context

This problem is visible in ENS's own governance. The official ENS delegation guide notes that statements entered via the Agora UI "are stored off-chain and are NOT pulled from eth.ens.delegate" — meaning a delegate who updates their ENS record sees no change in Agora or Tally. Platforms have diverged from the on-chain record entirely.

The parametrized statement key solves this by making the ENS name the single source of truth, with governance UIs as readers rather than stores.

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