Ethereum Name Service Removes Brantly Millegan as Steward Over 2016 Tweet

February 6, 2022

Over the weekend the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) community voted to remove Brantly Millegan as a steward over a tweet he posted in 2016 that recently resurfaced. While he will be removed as a steward, he will maintain the director of operations role in the non-profit corporation that maintains ENS’ legal entity.

In the Tweet, Millegan wrote “homosexual acts are evil. Transgenderism doesn’t exist. Abortion is murder. Contraception is perversion. So is masturbation and porn.”
ENS gives the ability to point a domain name to a wallet. Users would be able to go to a .eth domain name as opposed to a complex wallet address. Domains can be traded as NFTs. There are over 675,000 registered names, according to ENS.
“Practically, it means that you can have a name that you own, that has all the decentralization and censorship-resistance and programmability of Ethereum,” Millegan told CoinDesk in 2020 in describing the project.
Millegan hasn’t apologized for the tweet, citing his religious beliefs.
In a post on Discord, he reaffirmed his beliefs and said that he’s open to working with and being friends with a wide range of people. He also said that traditionally-minded Christians, Muslims and Jews should not be excluded from Web 3 — and he has received messages of support from those who self-identify as being traditional followers of these religious groups.
As of late Sunday Pacific time, community delegates from the ENS DAO voted to remove Millegan from his position with a majority voting in favor.
But the vote wasn’t unanimous, with some delegates warning about the dangers of cancel culture or the irony of a decentralized service centralizing around the voice of one person.
“Brantly contributed to ENS success and deserves to be here. I respect the fact that he stands by his words and doesn’t pull the usual “It was four years ago, I’m different now, blablabla”,” wrote ‘victorstark’ in the discussion thread. “Woke and cancel people are more toxic than Brantly ever could be, pure herd mentality at work.”
The ENS token was down down 1% 10 $20.42 at the time of this writing, according to CoinMarketCap.