ENSv2 Heads to a Vote, and New .eth Names Will Stop on v1
ENS Labs has posted a draft proposal that would flip the Ethereum Name Service over to ENSv2 — and close the door on new .eth registrations under the old system.
The plan went up on the ENS DAO governance forum on October 11, 2026. Once it executes, the current v1 registrar stops accepting fresh .eth names.
What changes
Existing .eth owners keep their names and can renew them on v1 with no deadline to migrate. Renewals would run through a new contract called ETHRenewerV1.
There is no forced migration and no cutoff date. If a v1 name expires, it becomes available for registration on v2.
Only one vote is needed to fire the switch. Activation runs in five stages, and the other four have already happened or are commitments Labs makes once the proposal executes.
Why the registry gets rebuilt
The registry in use today is a single flat mapping deployed back in 2017. Everything built since — the permanent registrar, NameWrapper, fuses, wildcard resolution — got layered on top rather than built in.
ENSv2 swaps that flat map for a hierarchy of registries. Every name can have its own registry for its subnames, and owners can bring their own implementations rather than relying on the standard ones.
Permissions become fine-grained roles on each name instead of irreversible fuses. You could hand a subname owner exactly the rights you intend — set a resolver but not transfer — without wrapping anything.
The DAO takes the keys
After activation, ENS Labs transfers every admin role it holds over the v2 contracts to the DAO and renounces its own. The end state is a DAO controlling ENSv2 the same way it controls v1 today.
There is one window worth watching. Between the vote passing and v2 going live, registrations freeze on both ENSv1 and ENSv2, and existing names cannot be renewed.
The freeze is reversible, though. Migrating a name is not — once owners start moving, their v1 tokens land in a contract with no way back.
Why this matters if you hold a .eth
If you already own a .eth name, nothing breaks tomorrow. The proposal is still a draft, and until the vote passes, v1 registrations continue as usual.
For builders the signal is bigger. Every new name and the fees attached to it shift toward v2, so integrations need to resolve against the Universal Resolver.