Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/ens/inflation
Ethereum Name Service has a fixed 100M ENS supply, its 4-year vesting schedule completed in November 2025, and it runs no buyback and no burn. The Pressure Framework reads 0.00% net to market over the next 90 days. The inflation monitor reads +5.33% over the trailing window — a 5.33pp gap that is the tail of expired vesting, not new ENS, so a monitor-gap flag ships with the primary kept.
The verdict, in one paragraph
For the 90-day window beginning June 21 2026, the framework reads ENS at 0.00% net inflation: no sell-side mechanism is firing and no buy-side mechanism is removing supply. The inflation monitor reads +5.33% over the trailing 90 days, a 5.33pp gap that triggers a monitor-gap flag. That gap is not new ENS — on-chain totalSupply held at 100,000,000 throughout, and the monitor's circulating denominator simply caught up as the final linear-vesting tranche unlocked into already-allocated buckets. The honest label for ENS in mid-2026 is a structurally quiet, fully-vested governance token whose only live supply question is a large but dormant DAO treasury.
Sell pressure: where new ENS comes from
The short answer for ENS is: nowhere, right now. Sell #1 protocol inflation is zero — the ENS ERC-20 has a fixed 100M supply, and the on-chain totalSupply() call returns 100,000,000 exactly. The ENS DAO holds the right to mint up to 2% of supply per year, but that power has never been exercised and is gated behind a governance vote plus a 365-day minimum interval; no mint is scheduled in the window, so it scores 0 with the capacity noted as an overhang.
Sell #2 vesting unlocks is zero because the schedule has physically expired. The 4-year linear vesting that began on November 8 2021 — covering both the DAO community treasury and the core-contributor allocation — reached completion in November 2025. There is no remaining cliff to fire. Sell #3 foundation and unscheduled unlocks is zero on flow, though it carries the one real overhang ENS has (covered below). Sell #4 long-term locked or bankruptcy is zero — there is no bankruptcy estate holding ENS.
Buy pressure: where new ENS goes
ENS has no active buy-side mechanism, so all four rows are zero. Buy #1 programmatic buyback is zero — ENS runs no repurchase programme; the protocol's revenue, earned from .eth registration and renewal fees, is collected in ETH and flows to the DAO treasury and the endowment, never into open-market ENS buys. Buy #2 protocol fee burn is zero — there is no EIP-1559-style ENS burn, and no mechanism that destroys ENS supply. Buy #3 foundation buy is zero — neither the ENS Foundation nor the DAO accumulates ENS from the market. Buy #4 new long-term lock is zero — no staking or lock-up programme for ENS has been announced.
Foundation and overhang
The one live supply question for ENS is the DAO treasury overhang. Of the original 50M ENS allocated to the community treasury, the bulk remains DAO-controlled, with roughly 9.70M ENS sitting directly in the on-chain governance timelock as of June 21 2026. This is a large balance relative to the ~40.41M circulating, so it is enumerated and watched. Crucially, it is dormant: the ENS DAO funds its operations by selling ETH earned from registration revenue, not by selling ENS, and the endowment manager explicitly holds only ETH and USDC — never the native token. Because no ENS sale from the treasury has been observed, the framework scores this overhang at 0 flow. The trigger is mechanical: if the DAO timelock or treasury ENS balance falls between refreshes, that outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.
How ENS compares to other fixed-cap governance tokens
ENS belongs to the class of fixed-cap, fully-vested governance tokens with a treasury-heavy float — its closest structural analogues are tokens like UNI and, before its buyback era, AAVE. Like UNI, ENS has a hard 100M cap and a DAO that holds an enormous share of supply; unlike post-UNIfication UNI or Aavenomics-era AAVE, ENS routes none of its protocol revenue into ENS burns or buybacks, so it has no deflationary counter-pressure. That makes ENS structurally flatter than buyback tokens — neither inflating nor shrinking.
The distinction that matters against continuous-emission L1s (uncapped chains that mint validator rewards every block) is that ENS cannot dilute holders through issuance: the only path to new ENS is the discretionary 2% governance mint, which has never been used. Against a chain like Solana or a staking-reward token, ENS looks far more supply-disciplined on paper — but it trades that discipline for a concentration risk, since the DAO treasury could in principle distribute or sell ENS if governance ever chose to. The framework reads what is happening, not what could: today, ENS is quiet.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, any ENS DAO governance proposal that distributes, sells, or mints ENS — the 2% annual mint or a treasury diversification vote would move the reading immediately. Second, the DAO timelock ENS balance (~9.70M today); a drop signals a treasury outflow that enters Sell #3. Third, the recurring ENS DAO community update and newsletter for any endowment policy change that touches ENS rather than ETH. Fourth, any first-ever activation of a buyback or burn — none is on the table as of June 21 2026, but it would flip the buy side from zero. None of these has a fixed date; they are governance-driven watch lines, not scheduled cliffs.
Summary
ENS is a fixed-100M, ~40%-circulating governance token whose 4-year vesting completed in November 2025 and which runs no buyback and no burn, leaving the framework at 0.00% net to market. The inflation monitor's +5.33% is the tail of that expired vesting reclassifying already-minted ENS into the circulating count, not new issuance — hence the flag with the primary kept. The structural risk is the large dormant DAO treasury, which has never sold ENS; the structural ceiling is the 100M hard cap plus the unused 2% annual mint. For a governance token, ENS is about as supply-quiet as the framework reads.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated June 21, 2026.
