Ethereum Name Service (ENS)

Offers a secure and decentralised way to address resources both on and off the blockchain using simple, human-readable names on Ethereum.

Basics

• Founded in: 3-5-2017
• Mainnet release:
• Based in:
• From this blog guide to ENS:

"The core functionality of the ENS is registering .eth domains. There are a few important rules to keep in mind when it comes to registering domains on the ENS:

1. Minimum domain length is 3 characters.
2. Annual renewal fees. 3 characters: $640/year, 4 characters: $160/year, 5+ characters $5/year.
3. Emojis are valid. 👍🏼"

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here]. None according to Blockchain Security DB (29-6-2020), which does show 1 audit(3-2019).

Bugs/Exploits

• From Blockthreat (28-4-2022):

"ENS Domain Spoofing Vulnerability reported by Hackxyk.

ENS patched a null byte injection vulnerability reported by lcfr.eth."

• Sam Sun found a bug in their project. This required a complete migration (3-3-2020) to new contracts.

Governance

Admin Keys

• From a commissioned Messari report (28-10-2022):

"ENS is operated by a DAO that is governed by the holders of the native ERC-20 token — ENS. Tokenholders are able to submit and vote on proposals. An early proposal to transfer ownership of treasury funds from multisig.ens.eth to the DAO contract at wallet.ensdao.eth resulted in ENS token holders being transferred governance rights over the protocol treasury.

There are three working groups within the ENS DAO: meta-governance, ecosystem, and public goods. The Q3/Q4 draft budget overview describes the budget for each group as follows:

1. Meta-Governance: $632,000, with an allocation of $200,000 to support ENS DAO tooling, governance partnerships, and gas-fee reimbursement. A full description of the Meta-Governance budget can be found here.
2. Ecosystem: $2,254,300, with the largest allocation of $1.5 million to support bug bounties, hackathons, gitcoin grants, and more. A breakdown of the Ecosystem budget can be found here.
3. Public Goods: $430,650, with $173,000 allocated to the ENS DAO small grants program. The full breakdown can be found here."

DAO

• From Cointelegraph (3-2023):

"Toward the end of 2021, Johnson launched the ENS DAO, which rallied to a $1 billion market capitalization the very next day. ENS names were in high demand in 2022, with Paradigm.eth selling for 420 ETH. Ethereum Name Service also became popular with NFT collectors, with three- and four-digit ENS addresses hitting record-high sales on platforms like OpenSea. ENS NFT volumes in December stood at 116,000 ETH, with a market cap of 57 ETH and nearly 623,000 holders

The ENS DAO was one of the most active decentralized autonomous organizations in the Web3 world in 2022, with tokenholders voting on 23 governance proposals. The DAO also created “small grants,” which gave grants to the top five projects (as voted on by ENS tokenholders) to work on their proposal."

• Has Flipside and Llama as some of their professional delegates (30-11-2022).

Treasury

• ENS DAO has selected Karpatkey as treasury manager (23-11-2022).
• From a commissioned Messari report (28-10-2022):

"ENS treasury holds $185 million in unlocked funds and over $1 billion in locked tokens.

In Q3’22, the overall revenue from both domain name registrations and renewals went down 17% in USD terms (up 30% in ETH terms). This was driven by a 27% decrease in registration revenue in USD terms from $18.6 million in Q2’22 to $13.6 million in Q3’22 (up 18% in ETH terms). In contrast, revenue from renewals went up 66% in USD terms from $2.13 million in Q2’22 to $3.6 million in Q3’22 (up 127% in ETH terms). Given the two revenue streams, analyzing the revenue in Q3’22 at a more granular level yielded a clearer picture. Over the past two quarters, ENS domain renewals have grown into a substantial percentage of total revenue. From a Q2’22 low of 6% in May, the relative share of ENS domain renewal has quadrupled to account for 24% of revenues as of October."

Token

Launch

• Announced their ENS token on 2-11-2021. Airdrop on 8-11-2021.

Token allocation

• From their blog (3-11-2021):

"There will be 100 million total $ENS tokens, and the distribution is as follows:

1. 25% airdrop to .ETH holders (>137k accounts)
2. 25% to ENS contributors (>100 individuals and groups, plus hundreds of Discord users)
3. 50% to the DAO community treasury"

Coin Distribution

• From Our Network (13-11-2021):

"The airdrop was interesting due to how equitable the drop was for smaller players. 14,302 wallets received between 50 to 100 tokens each. Only 16 wallets received more than 1000 tokens from the airdrop."

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on: Ethereum

How it works

• From a commissioned Messari report (28-10-2022):

"ENS domains can be registered and owned on a multi-yearly basis, and the number of years is chosen by the user (the minimum is one year, the maximum is eight years). Price and time period share a positive relationship: price increases as the period of registration increases. To retain the domain ownership, users must renew within 90 days of expiry. Domains unrenewed after a 90-day renewal period are available for registration."

Fees

• ENS revenue is generated by charging two separate fees: registration fees and renewal fees.

Upgrades

• From EthHub (31-8-2021):

"This integration enables a DNS domain owner to import it for use on ENS - for example, Google can now attach their Ethereum address to google.com and have it work exactly like google.eth would."

Scaling

• This proposal (9-9-2020) goes into a possible L2 solution for ENS names. Announced officially (11-2024).

Oracle Method

• Got Chainlink integrated (26-7-2020).

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].
• From their post (7-4-2020); they want to have manager improvements, a homepage revamp and some unclear future governance improvements.

• From their State of the ENS (22-9-2020):

"Our focus is mostly on rolling out DNSSEC integration as well as bug fixing and improving our ENS manager app.

For more long term goals, we will be discussing at our up and coming ENS workshop."

Usage

• From a commissioned Messari report (28-10-2022):

"Despite market weakness, ENS monthly active addresses remain robust. While down 33% from the May 2022 peak, monthly active addresses are still 2.5x higher YoY.

ENS domain name registrations reached an all-time-high of 1.12 million in Q3’22, up 71% QoQ. Simultaneously, renewals grew 3x QoQ to over 100,000 in Q3’22.

Revenue from ENS name registrations and renewals decreased 17% QoQ in USD terms (up 30% in ETH terms), due to a 27% decrease in registration revenue in USD terms."

• From Week in Ethereum (20-8-2022):

"Two million names created, one million in 3.5 months."

• From Kerman Kohli (4-8-2022):

"ENS currently totalling $60m in revenue till date with decent growth as well. It’s great to see that they’re a profitable business with sound economics and a product that people want/use. Main issue here is that there is no way in which value accrued from fees goes back to ENS holders. Given they have a presence in the US this is going to be a regulatory issue holding them back."

• From The Defiant (3-5-2022):

"ENS surpassed the milestone of one million created names. A record 63,723 names were registered on May 2, and10,000 to 20,000 were registered daily over the past seven days according to Dune Analytics. Prior to the surge, the daily record for new ENS registrations was 7,125 on Nov. 10, 2021."

• Had an uptick after the airdrop (13-11-2021):

"North of 7000 domains were registered in the days following release of the tokens, compared to less than 1000 on an average day in the weeks before."

• From their State of the ENS (22-9-2020):

"The overall number of names has decreased quite drastically from 310k to 190k. This is due to expired names after ENS transitioned into an annual fee model. We hit the 150 integrations milestone"

• From this blog (11-12-2019):

"The average Ethereum Name Service owner purchased 1–2 domain names while some “whales” own hundreds. And (while this data point is no longer accurate) at one point there were over 600k auctions of ENS domains."

Projects that use or built on it

• Omen uses their tech (1-7-2020).
• Snapshot

Competition

• Handshake, IOV Name Service (on Cosmos).
• From a commissioned Messari report (28-10-2022):

"In contrast to a normal Web domain, an ENS domain name:

1. can be used as a payment gateway — for example, one can send money to sassal.eth instead of typing out or copy-pasting Sassal’s hexadecimal address.
2. cannot be ceased and their content cannot be deleted."

• On it's value and competition as this tweet (19-1-2020) puts it:

"Allows anyone to substitute a hex address to a resource on the network for a human-readable name. ENS is a uniform resource identifier service on ETH and now has a 4-year head start on any other platform service at the time of this tweet."

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Nick Johnson
• Has Flipside and Llama as some of their professional delegates (30-11-2022).
• Lucas Campbell; disclosed himself to be an advisor (28-4-2023)

Funding

• From a commissioned Messari report (28-10-2022):

"Coinbase & ENS: Coinbase announced a partnership with ENS to create cb.id usernames. Users can connect their existing .eth addresses or their new cb.id to build their Web3 profiles. The usernames are available through Coinbase Wallet Extension."

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