Web3 domain name services have been increasing their level of interest and adoption for many years. But recently, there have been several news items that have brought them back to the top of the most searched for domain names on the Internet.
As its initials indicate, ENS stands for Ethereum Name Service, which refers to Ethereum’s domain name services.
ENS is the world’s most widespread and integrated blockchain naming standard, as stated in the official website, with more than 2.17 million names generated, and more than 541 thousand owners. It is an Ethereum-based project launched on May 4, 2017 by the Ethereum Foundation.
ENS also launched its governance token, as part of its transition to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). $ENSas part of its transition to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). To those who registered their domain between certain dates, they conducted token airdrops in 2021, and early 2022, as a way to encourage their use and to reward those early investors of ENS domains.
These domains have aroused the interest of both individual investors and companies. Time is of the essence, where whoever registers their domain name first becomes the owner, and it must be renewed every year.
On the one hand, we have the ENS domainswhich have become the main Ethereum project in the NFT OpenSea marketplace, in terms of transaction volume in just 7 days, thus surpassing the numbers registered by blue chip collections such as BAYC, Moonbirds, among others. And on the other side, there are the unstoppable domainswhich we will also analyze.
Another feature that raises the interest of investors and companies is the sale value that certain popular domain names can achieve. One of the most significant cases is that of an anonymous buyer who made an offer of 1 million dollars for the ENS domain“amazon.eth“. Cases prior to amazon were samsung.eth and starbucks.eth, which were sold for 60 ETH.
ENS is the largest decentralized domain name registration service to date, and interacts with other Ethereum-based decentralized applications (dApps). It is a name designation service for wallet addresses, hashes and other identifiers.
At the beginning ENS used to auction domain names, but nowadays domains can be purchased easily and without the need to attend auctions. The increase in domain name trading is notorious, with ENS monthly registrations increasing by 465% from January to July 2022.
HOW DOES ENS WORK?
An ENS domain name uses an ERC-721 standard NFT to represent a unique address. This domain can be bought or sold by transferring the NFT that represents it. Wallet addresses, like all other information, are linked to this NFT, which is editable by the token owner. By using the ERC-721 standard, these domains can be traded as NFTs in marketplaces such as OpenSea or LooksRare.
DIFFERENT USES OF ENS DOMAINS
Let’s review some of the main functionalities of ENS domains, namely:
a) One of the best known is to buy our own .eth domain, in order to connect it to our wallet to make it easier to share our public address. This makes it more user-friendly and improves the experience in the transfer of digital assets, avoiding sending the wallet’s public address composed of 40 alphanumeric characters. You can store all your addresses, and receive payments with any cryptocurrency.
b) Another of its functionalities is to create decentralized websites, and even subdomains can be generated. The website must be uploaded to IPFS in the administrator’s section, and accessed with the ENS name. The best known example is that of Vitalik Buterin, who owns his domain vitalik.eth, or the recent incorporation of PUMA with its domain puma.eth.
c) In addition to this, you can also configure them as existing DNS, and thus import the .com domain to the ENS, for example. You can also use ENS with DNS names such as .org, .io, .app, .art, among many others (similar to the case of unstoppable domains).
Currently, ENS domains are supported by a large number of wallets, such as Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, and Metamask, decentralized exchange (DEX) such as Uniswap, NFT DeFi platforms such as. NFTFiNFTscan, Etherscan, Blockscan, web browsers such as Opera and Brave, and even metaverses such as Decentraland.
UNSTOPPABLE DOMAINS
Not only are there domains on the Ethereum network, we also have the so-called unstoppable domains that work in a similar way to ENS, but offers support for additional top-level domain nameservers, and unlike those, they do not have a term. Thus, they allow you to buy domain names such as .nft, .dao, .bitcoin .wallet, among others.
The platform was launched in 2019 and the community has been registering more than 2.5 million domains and 31 million users.
Likewise, one of the benefits is the savings in commission expenses for using networks other than Ethereum, as is the case with Polygon, one of the most widely used networks for these domains.
Once we have seen the functionalities and benefits that ENS domains bring, they prove to be a gateway to the web3 for all those people who are not so familiar with it.
ENS domains are set to become a key channel to facilitate access for people to generate their digital identity, offer stronger and more secure property rights, and generate exposure with the possibility of buying top-level domains that can be very valuable in the future.
Written by Luciano Garriga (TW:@luchogarriga) for NFT Express