ENS: Funding Public Goods, DAO Governance, L2 Scaling

Transcript

if we're going to build the next version of the internet uh it needs to be open and a public good and you know not a closed for-profit system uh you know the the success of the internet comes in large part because although many of the components of it are operating for profit by companies the internet itself the protocols and the structure limits it all together is not in an AOL it's not some centrally operated Network where a single operator gets to choose who commutes and how it's used and so on and so forth and so I think that's an absolutely crucial aspect of why the internet succeeded and if we want to build a successful successor or even just successful additional

infrastructure we have to follow on its footsteps all right everyone welcome back to another episode of zero X research before we dive into today's episode I do want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor hexins one of the most hardcore security teams in web3 pioneering ZK and novel cryptography hexins is trusted by two one projects like polygon including the work on their new zkavm mantle risk zero Lido one-inch new bake and others today September 20th and we have an awesome interview lined up with Nick Johnson the founder of ens Labs uh Nick thanks so much for joining us good to be here thanks for having me on yeah so you're definitely an OG in the space you've been uh working at ens for

what six years now so I would love to just get a start of you know what you guys have uh accomplished and some of the challenges you've run into and maybe a little uh peek into what you're building going forward yeah I'd love to uh so as you sort of hinted I joined Leslie year after the launch of ethereum which at the time felt late but uh doesn't now and uh I've been building me in this almost since that point it was uh one of the first projects I started working on at the ethereum foundation and then spun out into its own organization and we've been building it ever since and I think in terms of what we've accomplished the main thing is of course that ens is the preeminent decentralized naming service and I think the fact that we've done

that and that we're clearly neutral that we're going by a vowel that we're minimizing the amount of human governance uh you know necessary and that we're building it as a public good rather than a for-profit company uh I think just an answers that accomplishment so I'm incredibly impressed with what we've achieved saying speaking for myself obviously biased um but you know it's only the beginning of what we're working on and so you know as we roll out and into L2 support and better ux and more functionality it'll become even more useful for our users I want to get a little bit dive a little deeper on exactly what the roadmap is for the future uh what are the biggest problems that are still kind of being at

that pain point for the ens style and how are you looking to tackle those so for ens more broadly we've always had sort of a three-stage vision every app should use EMS to the point where it's the Assumption you know when a user comes to it that they can enter in this name anywhere they can enter an address and they're being learning address might show up at any stable chart instead and that'd be surprised when it isn't supported rather than you know having to check whether it is and I think we're close but not there yet for that our second Vision has always been that um every asset can have an EMS name um and that it can be done transparently and cost free and that's our big focus

at the moment that's you know what we're working on mostly and that involves and rolling off out on l2s for low-cost registrations making it easier for people to achieve subnauts making it possible for organizations like coinbase to use either an L2 or just host names entirely off chain and basically giving name owners sort of control over the trust model of how their name times and managed in their sub domains are managed and so forth and so we're focusing on that mostly at the moment by building tooling that makes it easier for people to work on L2 and it's been possible to host things on L2 since we launched a ccip read over a year ago but what's been missing is the the easy Plug and Play tooling that makes it trivial for

someone to do that you don't have to be coinbase in order to set it up whereas at the moment the the integration overheads a bit higher so that's our main focus on the back end and then on the front end it's all you know corresponding work to make the the usability uh meet the the feature set on the back end so how does that work from a more technical level if a user mints a name on an L2 does the ownership reside on the L2 or is it ever settled back down to L1 at any point so that's a really good question and it's one of the biggest uh things that we have to tackle so the initial version of our L2 support is you can create a name on our one and then you can update it and set its

records and so forth on L2 so the name still lives on L1 and as an extension of that you can issue subdomains and you can give those supplements to people and they can that can all happen on the L2 without touching L1 at all the caveat for that for that first iteration is that it won't be trustless in the same way you're still trusting the owner of the the parent name the second middle name not to run you basically um you know that that uh person has no additional trust assumptions they can use the LT without compromising their security but as a user your dependent on them to to maintain your subdomain and that's kind of you know that's an

acceptable trade-off maybe when your counterparty is coinbase for instance because you're already trusting them with a lot of other stuff at least so when it's some random dgn who bought wallet.eth and wants to issue subdomains so the next step is providing their functionality for locking things in so that that person can credibly say I don't have the ability to take your name off you because in the same way that enes can say that about names in general and the way we're handling that is by building out this general purpose infrastructure that makes it easy to put your names on l2s and then we can set it up in a way so that people can effectively commit the power to upgrade things to to the Dow so the tower would manage our brains across the whole

ecosystem for anyone that agrees to do that and therefore you know remove that that mode of trust of the owner of the actual name and of course you could have other organizations the degree to manage the names as well but it just needs to be made clear in the interface that you know who it is that you're trusting to maintain your name you know ideally that's nobody but the next step down from that is at least it's a large well-known organization that administers all the VMS anyway okay really interesting there and and so you also mentioned uh subdomains in that of course coinbase launched coinbase ID are there any other groups or entities that you're really showing interest and you don't have to name names with maybe

just like the types of groups and entities uh that kind of like hey that's a really cool idea you know if we had that that would like really enable this new feature line for us yeah uh yeah we've we've been speaking to to wallets uh who want to trade Us in order to issue soft domains for all the users which has always been a long-term vision of mine you know the wallet sign up flow should include naming the wallet and you shouldn't have to even know or care what your ethereum address is any more than YouTube what your um your IP addresses uh and with uh we've changed my other exchanges that are interested in following in coinbase issues uh we're also not at the subdomain level but at the top level domain level we've had interest for various tlds who want to

either launch on EMS or area and its functionalities of the existing DNS names interesting okay so zooming out a little bit too like you say you know one of the primary goals what you want to achieve is to be able to name any asset you give any asset a you know any NS domain name so what are the actual benefits for the users on that front like why should I care that that's possible I mean I think that the primary one is usability like if I asked you what Google's IP address was you couldn't tell me because there's no reason you would know that and there's no reason you would want to know that and IP addresses are a lot shorter than the theory of addresses they're a lot easier to memorize

um and so really the same degree of usability want to apply to to ethereum to crypto in general and so when you sign up for a wallet you ought to be able to pick a name ideally it should be you know that it could be pseudonymous and disconnected from all your other wallets too so the fact you're naming it doesn't mean you're doxing yourself it just means you're providing some sort of handle to identify it and ultimately recreate accounts because we want to transact with them and so at some point that involves giving that address to someone else or some you know third-party or site or whatever and this just makes that an order of things easier right so you mentioned the wallet piece there as well and just like really

simplifying the user experience but please click correct me if this is wrong but my current understanding is that uh the resolving an es and ens name has to actually happen at the wallet level it's not actually happening at the protocol level right so if I like pulled up the CLI interface I couldn't just like send eth to nick.heath um what are the kind of issues around that and you know do you think like ens has maybe grown to a size where it's actually worse ux for the application to not support the the names rather than the other way around you're right uh Ellis resolution does take place at the application layer uh which isn't to say you couldn't hear the command line interface that does it of course but you know it does happen in

the apps and we've worked with uh ethers and web3.js and so on to push that down the stack as much as possible so you know if you're building an app on top of ethers and you use uh you know ether's address Fields anywhere they'll accept DNS names anywhere they accept addresses so often if an app doesn't support ens it's actually more because they were ignorant of the ability to do so than because they had to expend any particular effort to to add support for it um a protocol with naming built in at the base layer would look quite different from ethereum and so ultimately you know having made the choice that ethereum is the system to build on and is is the platform um building is on top of ethereum rather

than and ethereum was was the best bit uh it's I I'm a little ambivalent about whether it would be a better system if you know whether ethereum would be a better protocol if it had naming the base layer there are sort of pros and cons and introduces a lot of you know protocol layer complexity um and again drawing the parallel to IP addresses you know the internet does pretty well with naming being an add-on it's just so Universal that it looks like part of the basic infrastructure yeah I love I love that perspective there I think I think that makes a ton of sense and I I really like your approach as well of saying okay well let's not push it down the uh the protocol stack itself but rather the

development stack and just getting it in the hands of making it easier for developers to use it and as a result it kind of is This widely adopted um platform which is just really exciting to see and so I want to talk a little bit about the Dow itself and kind of how you think about Dows as a whole so after working in and out for six years are you bullish on Dows and their format and the ability to be decentralized and have everybody have these like active opinions or does a decentralization aspect stagnate growth too much or create too many roadblocks all right so first I guess I should subscribe I've only been working in a down for about two years because winning in East launched it was uh administered by multisig and you know the sort of gradual decentralization has always been

the road map uh I'm sort of I have two lines about it like I think the initial has done a pretty damn good job um but also the there is the inevitable sort of decentralization effect I guess friction uh that it generates uh in in terms of making decisions and so forth I think Downs are a lot better at reactive stuff so somebody comes to them with a protocol upgrade or whatnot and they just you know they discuss the merits and decide to implement than they are a proactive stuff like planning roadmaps and things like that and so for that reason I think it makes a you know sort of the division we've got makes a lot of sense where you have

a Dao and then you have one or more development dogs who basically come to the down and say Here's the cool stuff we can do fund us and you know as long as they're credible they they get funded and the the fact that you don't just have to have one of those and that the dowel can can independently decide which organizations they're going to fund makes it a lot more meaningfully you decentralized than just having the company run things directly it also means that any actual changes still have to go by the Dow which again is the the reactive aspect where I think dowels are quite good at sort of assessing changes and and approving them and acting as a safety valve effectively interesting okay yeah I love to hear your

perspectives on on Dows I feel like you know no one really has a silver bullet for the right way to operate one and I'm glad to see that you guys are doing some kind of innovative attempts at being more efficient but in the same van I'm curious what are your thoughts on public goods funding I feel like that's been a pretty hot topic as of late especially with the rise of like the op stack uh you know coinbase contributing sequence of Revenue or profit to public goods funding do you have a strong opinion there if we're going to build the next version of the internet uh it needs to be open and public good and you know not a closed for-profit system uh you know the the success of the internet comes in large part because although many of the components of it are operated for profit by companies the

internet itself the protocols and the structure limits it all together is not in an AOL it's not some centrally operated Network where a single operator gets to choose who commutes and how it's used and so on and so forth and so I think that's an absolutely crucial aspect of why the internet succeeded and if we want to build a successful uh successor or even just successful additional infrastructure we have to follow on its footsteps and so I think having well-funded public goods is essential I think having a route to actually like funding the public goods in the first place to be able to say here is this really important thing everyone agrees we need it uh will somebody pay for it and actually the

answer being yes rather than just sitting on your friends sitting on their hands is crucial and EMS is in a particularly good position to help push this forward because we have registration fees there necessary as part of the protocol if we didn't have registration fees you'd expect every name would be stamped up instantaneously and any you know anyone coming along after would be out of luck um and so we we have to charge fees and then we have a treasury and what do we do with the treasury well part of what we do is pay for development and operation of the Dow on the development org and so forth but that leaves are either a lot left over and I think the most responsible thing is to contribute it back to other public goods that maybe

don't have that same funding stream or a earlier in their life cycle and still building up I want to give a quick shout out to hexins as we explore today's blockchain landscape let's take a moment to recognize them as a premier cyber security provider in web 3. hexins is trusted by tier one projects like polygon including a Security review on their new Polly on ZK evm mantle risk zero Lido one inch new bank and more get a deep dive into your technology stack with the most comprehensive analysis in cyber security Consulting hexins not only uses widely known methodologies and flows but discovers and introduces new ones on a day-to-day basis with over 55 billion dollars secured they cover everything from Smart contracts to blockchain to web 2 pen tests

yeah there's been nearly seven billion dollars of total value hacked in crypto's nascent history so it's safe to say your team has a lot on the line don't skimp out take your security seriously and reach out to hexins don't forget to mention Xerox research for a free web 2 pen test with your partnership and reach out to hexins at hexins.io find them in the links in the show notes or reach out to them at permissionless they'll be at Booth 832 but without further Ado let's get back to today's episode glad you brought up the registration fees there because they if you amortize the registration fees over the life of the uh the registration period right so if you know someone paid let's just make up a number here a hundred dollars for a five-year registration and you take that and divide it evenly across uh the

registration period on a monthly basis so if you use that calculation across all of the registrations to date uh you actually are still like the the revenue fees are not small right there's a couple million dollars a month and so if you do have a lot of Firepower to kind of make those changes the other side of the camp would probably come in and say hey you guys are making a ton of money this should be a business let's turn on the revenue switch like what is your mindset around that discussion uh I mean ens was was built explicitly as a public good and not as a business and when we launched it out we set some really strong Norms about that you know we we asked people to vote on our constitution there's enshrined that it's effectively non-profit status uh over 95 of people I think agreed to to those

causes in the Constitution and you know we made we did our best to make it very clear like you can claim your ear drop regardless of how you vote on this we want your honest opinion you know sugarness continuing Spain um I think there is a very very strong social and governance Norm towards DNS continuing to be a public good um I certainly would be would be strongly opposed to any attempt to sort of extract value and partly that's because of my beliefs that public goods are essential and partly because it's it's part of my down to my belief that once you start extracting value from systems like this you look for ways to make them more profitable but not necessarily more useful you know but they're only more useful in service of

the profit uh and so sometimes that works you know with some things that's where we'll make a bit a more popular product with other things that's well everyone's locked in we can double fees and so I'm really concerned about the sort of incentives that pop up once you start doing that and I'd rather move in the other direction of abstracting away human control where it's not necessary and limiting it to the upgrades and the levers and so on that are absolutely crucial to have than going the other way interesting okay so I remember vitalik dropped a blog post about a year ago on ens's pricing model and revenue model if you will and he wanted to incorporate like a demand based pricing aspect if I'm recalling correctly it's been a

while since I read it um did anything come of that and I'm a little bit surprised because it does sound like you're like very much in the same ethos as vitalik was in that article but maybe you just think about Revenue differently I think the Jack and I see eye to eye and a lot of stuff including you know public goods and and a lot about enes the the discussion was all about like you say demand-based pricing and the the issue there is how do you implement that in a way that isn't easily abused um that actually you know honestly reflects it uh and it's usefulness and so forth um and by Sorry by it I mean the domain um and it's really tough I haven't seen a proposal yet including the Telex that I

believe is robust enough so it would be a viable alternative to just something called Flat Rate pricing because you can easily think of scenarios where uh you know the the value of the name to the owner is actually or the you know the value they accrued by actually owning it is much lower than the sort of value it has to other people so you can imagine a scenario where say uh you know you imagine evil coinbase and they own cv.e and uh you know they give out subdomains for free to all their users and so the value to them is is the value of their reputation effectively on on continuing to act honestly but the values of

someone else of earning cv.eath might be now we can rug every single coinbase user uh or say evil coinbase user um and so evil coinbase might go well hey here's how we can get a really good great Q3 earnings report will you know it will sell this the subdomain and that requires almost like a cartoonishly evil organization but in a situation where you have hard merger-based tax pricing and so forth you almost automate that because the people who could make a huge amount of profit off uh you know defrauding every coinbase user can now effectively bid up the cost of maintaining cb.eth and if they bid it up to the point where coinbase can't

afford it because they don't make Revenue relative to you know the number of users using it and the amount of uh you know affords you could conduct if you took the name then they lose it and the people who lose out the most aren't evil coinbase there the people who actually you know were using those subdomains so I think the big problem with all of these schemes is They Don't Really account for the fact that the value of the name to its users might not be the same as the values of the name to being an arbitrary others so it's kind of getting hitting home at the point of like uh you know squatters or snipers as they're kind of commonly referred to and so I think you push forward the idea of like ens Ferry can you talk to us a little bit about what

that is and kind of how that would attempt to mitigate some of these issues sure the Enos theory is basically just a um a cooperation to try and give names to the people that they make sense for you know I think one of the best ways to measure the success of the naming system is sort of the principle of least surprise if you pick a popular name of some kind and enter it does it resolve to The Entity you expect it to and the more often that's true the better the naming services and so short of some like automatic way to do that which is you know hugely problematic uh Ian in theory is kind of just doing that on an individual volunteer basis you know by doing their best to acquire names that clearly represent one organization and

then getting their names to that organization or person or you know whatever it would be um and just effectively yeah they're donating them to the people that would use them for their intended purpose so that kind of opens up Pandora's Box in some regard right because it's like how do you define the rightful owner um so talk to a little about like the challenges of that like okay maybe there's you know let's say they a company in or a Big Brand in America was also a Big Brand in the you know some Eastern country and there was no relation between the two brands at all like how do you define who's the rightful owner of this term I I think that gets right to the heart of why you can't easily automate or or enforce a

system like this you know it really only works in the context of UNS Theory because it's being done on a voluntary basis and because um they're doing it for you know names that are fairly unambiguous and really getting it to any one of the people that it reasonably represents as a win over it being unused whereas if you tried to build some sort of system that arbitrates who should own each name then you get into that Target that you just described where you know if you have apple.eth does it go to Apple music or apple records or your local Orchard you know there's there's really no perfect answer and you kind of need a perfect answer otherwise at old music or

apple um you know computers are going to come after you and Sue you've forgive against the wrong person and I feel like uh that kind of also wraps in with the idea of like unlimited registrations because these uh squatters or snipers will come in and just like grab a you know an S tier name if you will like let's keep using any Apple example you grab that register it for 500 years which is you know effectively forever then they kind of can have the ability to be like all right well either you never get it or you pay me and that's is how do you think about the idea of like limiting or shortening uh registration periods or something along that nature it's yeah the sort of two reasons that I think in different registration is a

problem uh one is what you described effectively yes it reduces the cost to squatters because they know they can acquire a portfolio and it's on forever there's no incentive for them to uh you know to relinquish names that aren't performing that are you know that nobody wants they they can just sit on it there's there's really no cost to them uh and I should distinguish here you know squatters versus speculators because you know in in my mind a squatter is buying a name that they clearly know represents one other person or you know that is not a generic name uh and attempting to effectively extort the the you know the owner of that name for you know to purchase off them a Speculator is buying up say John Dolly

prepares like well does the power of doing the ten thousand John's out there one of them want it um and I feel personally a lot better about stipulation I do about squatting because I feel like squatting is it's basically a tax on being late um and you know in a in an entirely anarchistic system that may be okay but I I'd much rather our system as I say the least surprising so I I think it's a problem for that reason it's also a problem because names get lost you know that people will acquire names and then lose their credentials and eventually you know a big part of your name space just becomes permanently inaccessible and you can get around that by having you know regular pings or whatever to retain the name but it's kind of just

discount renewals you know it doesn't really feel like a big difference I think regular registration fees are a good trade-off because they impose a cost on holding a name that isn't hugely significant if you have your name but is if you have 20 000 names that you're hoping to profit off you know it seems a lower bound on how much of the namespace you can afford to sit on um I don't think necessarily like limiting an excellent duration is is useful because for it to be meaningful than the maximum duration would have to be fairly High call it like a decade and at that point it's long enough that I think it's it's difficult to say that it's having a big effect on the availability of names you know in the short term

um I quite like the fact there's a yes you can effectively you know make a name Immortal or close to a mortal because there's no fixed limit on registrations uh I've even mooted in the past on the Dow um what if we discounted longer registrations you know on the theory that a speculators like you're only want to retain the name for a couple of years while they try and sell it and if it hasn't sold after that long they probably don't want it um the remaining registration duration on a name doesn't seem to have a big effect on how much it sells for so if we made it like really cheap to register you know for 100 years compared to registering for two you know like maybe only five times as much then uh people

who actually want to keep the name would be incentivized to do that and the speculators have still paid the same price so you'd get a more useful system um I say safe to say I'm not that opinion isn't University held so it wasn't uncontentious enough that I felt it was worth like really fighting for and just to kind of like Hammer home on that point what is the current pricing model so if I wanted to register a name for one year or 100 years is the 100 year option just like actually 100 x more expensive than the one year yeah so it's uh five bucks a year for uh five plus character names uh 160 a year for

four characters names and 640 a year for three character names and those prices for shorter names are kind of a bit of a Brute Force solution to the fact that there's just not very many of those names and if there were five bucks each that'd all be set on forever and you all were thinking about adding and maybe you already have so forgive me if I'm off here but one in two characters we haven't uh it's it's always a possibility you know just like it's a contract upgrade it's definitely doable I think that one and two character names are so rare that we can't just be like oh okay you know they're a thousand bucks a year or whatever you know either something or something outrageous amount

we probably need a distinctly different approach to administering those names that recognizes that like particularly single character names are always going to be extremely extremely short supply yeah that makes a lot of sense you're pretty much just kind of promoting speculation under that scenario most likely but uh I mean that's part of the game right you know I don't want a situation where like coinbase can afford the five figure fee to have cb.e but nobody else can have something distinctive because it's just way too expensive for them either you know or the flip side where they're cheap enough that they're all instantly on the secondary Market yeah I know that that makes a ton of sense to me um I'm also

curious I want your opinion I feel like airdrops have been a pretty controversial topic like no one really knows how effective they are in hindsight the way you guys distributed ens would you double down on that same exact strategy or would you go about it a different way knowing what you know today if I could repeat what we did when we did it I would do the same thing more or less you know with some minor tweaks um if we were doing it today I wouldn't I think ens was really fortunate and that we actually got in right at the tail end of when it was practical to do this without it being completely bottled and farmed uh you know we were starting to see speculative ear drop Farmers you know right as we were getting ready to launch

um and if we'd launched a year later even without any like hints that we were going to launch it out beforehand I think it would have been much more gained and much less practical um I do think if you can identify meaningful metrics uh you know that represent actual users of your your service and then being able to airdrop to them gives you a massive leg up as opposed to just like a basic usage metric and sort of the less expected the metric is the better so I think we did quite well for instance in that a large part of the airdrop was determined by how long you've held uh sorry how many days you had held at least money in its name for and so it's extremely difficult

to sort of Bop that because you'd have to go back in time and register you know right from the launch of units and at the same time it doesn't like reward people for all before owning 10 or 100 or a thousand names it's just how long have you been part of the ecosystem so it's a difficult measure to forge it's also not necessarily when people would have expected to be measured on and therefore I think it worked pretty well at targeting people who actually use DNS and one of the core messages around the airdrop was hey we're Distributing responsibility in the form of governance over this public good um is that still really the the core thesis behind the ens token itself is to like hey this is ownership over this public good and the distribution of the

treasury yeah very much so and so you know if somebody does uh you know something that's worthy of a grant in in the ESL they'll often be granted uh some amount of ether or fiat currency you know usdc or whatnot uh for the work and then also some number of EMS tokens basically saying you know now you have more of a voice in the ecosystem and we treat those quite differently and we uh you know we try and assist them on their their merits you know what sort of what was this worth in terms of governance voice and also how much we shouldn't pay them you know those are two different variables and going over to like kind of

user metrics and adoption uh you may not know this off the top of your head but how many ens domains you know are out there in in user wallets and have you seen a specific um I guess downfall in activity as a result of the bear Market or do you think it's people losing interest in the domain kind of narrative like what would you chalk up the decline in usage to um no we're up over the two million but I don't know what the the actual number is right now um we've seen like we've seen a tapering off an interest but not as much as I would have expected I guess you know it's it's it reflects the general downtrend and activity on crypto you know in recent times but there's still a great deal of activity like as you alluded to the the registration and

renewal Revenue continues to be pretty strong um yeah I think you know mostly it reflects the market as a whole rather than you know any specifically um there's also just a tendency for people to glom on to whatever's new and shiny here at any given time um and while we continue to release new and shiny things as a whole is generally viewed as like fairly stable and well known and speaking of new and shiny things the V3 name manager was recently highly discussed and so I'd love to get your take on what that enables and how that powers like the next generation of users using ens names I think the the main thing the main way

to think about it is it's it's just the ux is a lot better for end users and really in general you know we we step back and we look to Target users and looked at like all the things we wanted to enable and and really rebuilt it from the ground up with those sort of flows in mind you know and so the main thing it enables is just actually doing the things you could technically do previously but were you know maybe quite fiddly to do or just it was unclear to end users how that works um the app is in a difficult spot really because we have a lot of users who are very goal focused you know all they really want to do uh you know understandably is go in set their name

up and leave you know and then maybe come back in a year to update their profile or something you know or six months or whatever um at the same time though the app really needs to support all the functionality that ens enables you know it's I've always been quite adamant that that we need to do that because we don't look particularly credible if we build a system with Advanced functionality that you have to go to some third-party app in order to actually use you know there are limits to this if you're writing your own you know code and deploying it and so on then we naturally we can't provide a complete interface for it but we're still trying to serve those two user groups and so I think um you know our fronting team has done a

pretty astonishing job of enabling all of that without cluttering up the interface and making it difficult to understand for people who just want to accomplish that one thing and is the goal of the app really to kind of be like uh I don't know if like Rolodex is the right term but I guess that's better questions what is the vision for the app like how do you want users to ultimately interact with this um I think it's it's less like a Rolodex and more like your decentralized profile page so you know if it's you editing your card and someone else's roll the dates in a way uh you can use a Unis to look up other names of course and to view their profiles and so on but that's more or less a secondary aspect of it

you know we expect that most people will be viewing other people's uni details via the expert integrated whereas when you're visiting the app it's mostly you're there to to update something that you own and uh also following up here how do you think about building a UI that's mobile first versus desktop first that's like kind of a lot of apps in crypto today our desktop first but a lot of users want to be mobile first is what it kind of seems like the narrative is so I'm curious is that the same realization that you guys are thinking about yeah I think wait you know when we rebuilt this we built it with mobiles first class citizen I'm not sure whether I'd say

mobile first or desktop first but rather but you know we recognize we have a large user base in both camps um and there is a reasonable mapping between mobile users are mostly just wanting to achieve the thing and desktop that users are mostly wanting to do something more sophisticated but I I don't know about you but I get incredibly frustrated when I go to the mobile version of some site and half the functionality is missing so we really wanted to to avoid that as much as possible um in large part like uh our astonishing fronting team did most of us and they didn't ask me like whether it should be mobile or desktop first because they had a bunch better handle on it than me is

you know that's their expertise I'm very much a backhand guy yeah sometimes you just gotta let the people who know what they're talking about do it so I totally feel that I do that every day that's testing one of the hardest things to cope with growing you know that like for the longest time we were four or five people and you know although I wasn't doing the French and development I was talking daily with the people that do and we were all you know working with each other very closely and as Labs have grown you know that's no longer the case where we're still not a huge organization by any means but we're no longer small enough but that's the case and it's been it's been of a jarring at times to to realize oh hey this entire initiative happened uh and it's great

but I like I had no involvement with it you know it's weird it probably feels like magic honestly like wow that thing actually yeah no especially when that is stuff that I previously did myself you know and now somebody who is actually an expert at there is doing it rather than me that actually feels like a like a superpower of a dow right so you know enslabs is now not the sole developing team of the ens Dow they're just a core contributor to or a service provider of the larger Dao and we've actually seen a number of dows kind of Trend in this direction right if you think about uh Ave for example like bgd Labs um Gauntlet chaos Labs there's all these different service providers that are all

using their expertise to help better the Dao is that kind of the way you see daus as a whole progressing is not necessarily like individuals coming in and helping but I don't even know if I want to say professionalized groups of service providers I yeah I think that is the best way to structure it down I I think trying to pretend to Dow as a company with a reporting hierarchy and individuals doing work and working closely together is a recipe for sort of a more ass you know where nothing really gets done because you've got those decentralized hierarchy tried to pretend to be management um this approach with with development orgs and so forth is is much better um but I also think it's worth

emphasizing that you know doesn't have to be some large company it can literally be a guy who is like here is a cool thing I mean you know I think he's building here is my like one pager of like why it's worth building and why I'm the guy to do it and how about some funding to get started and I'll come back in a week and show you the MVP you know they do enable that sort of thing and at their best we should be really in encouraging that sort of thing by making sure it's very easy to get started you know it's easy to get a little bit of money and a little bit of time to show that what you've got to do is valuable instead of a lot of bureaucracy that has really only can only be overcome by larger organizations I've got a question

for you kind of out of left field um friend Tech has gotten like a ton of attention and obviously it's in a very different category than ens but I'm just curious your general thoughts on on that primitive so I initially had really sort of squeaky vibes from it because of its predecessor whose name I can't remember now but the other one that was trading on people's big cloud bit cloudy I think a bit cloudy sorry thank you um and so my initial reaction was like haven't we done this before and didn't we all hate it um and so for that reason I didn't really like look at it right at the start and now I feel like it's too late to really you know spend a lot of time on it uh the feedback I've seen on crypto Twitter has generally been you

know positive uh it does seem mostly like a kind of a fun speculative game rather than a perhaps a lasting thing but we'll see and keep in the the left field questions uh coming to you so I wanna I'm curious on your thoughts and like the identity layer of crypto and really what I mean by that is the layer that Bridges the gap between say your physical world identities like me as Dan Smith versus me as a hexadecimal address on chain and like what do we need from that layer because it's kind of got to thread the needle between privacy and accountability so how do you think about that as a whole I think uh you know the whole street in the middle conversation is it's largely

a matter of we need to make pseudonymous identity and separating uh you know different uh facets of your identity from each other easier in general you know that's not unique to naming but naming does make it much more obvious you know all of the the crypto analysis stuff that goes on to link accounts together and so on doesn't rely on any of these names to make it you know to make it possible it's it all works in a world without means but when you throw a name on something it immediately tells some people this is each part of it is this you know somebody thought of this account as nick.heath you know and and sort of immediately sort of provides an identity

which is in that sense as a double-edged sword but in a world where we can more easily um maintain separate identities and you know have software that enables that by making it possible to make Anonymous transfers between patients of arid entities uh makes it possible for us to to keep track of you know who we're interacting as and that we're not exiting police sort of cross-contaminating and it becomes much more sort of uh voluntary and consent based I guess and that you can decide who to present you know which uh you know which identity you're presenting um which really isn't that much different to say how you know social

media logins like Twitter work you know with the exception of Twitter nobody knows when I'm logged in as my old but it's the because it's my old thing somehow when we do that on chain it's like it's suddenly contentious you know you the Netherlands arrests people for trying to build equivalent privacy to Twitter you know um so ultimately I think yeah you usernames and and profiles and naming systems have to work hand in hand with with better on-chain privacy in order to enable any of that I don't think it's possible to build it just a remaining layer because there's so many more you know levels to it would ens ever want to expand deeper

into those levels or just let's focus on the naming layer let's kind of like own that space and try to be the best there I think that yeah that pretty much sums it up uh you know I would enthusiastically support these are premises for financial privacy um and and build functionality that supports the many NES but I don't think it's our job to be do to be pioneering that okay that's super interesting right because I can see why a large entity or whoever it may be would be like really interested in owning that stack it could be fairly profitable if you were like a more of a corporation or it could be a very beneficial thing if you were more of a Publix good focused service right and so my initial guess would be like oh

like that could be something coinbase would be interested in doing but the fact that they're actually leveraging ens uh is is kind of nice right because you don't have to worry about oh you know these guys might actually kind of like eat our service because they can they're a large corporation that's well funded they might be able to just go do it um so how do you think about expanding the Partnerships around that and like being like okay if someone else is going to build this like let us be your name layer like don't go bother trying to rebuild that like only go focus and like drive that attention towards the other pieces of the stack I think what you've hit on is is pretty much our strategy when it comes to talking to all of these other protocols and platforms you know we you really don't want to be naming from

scratch you know we've spent six years doing it what we've built is is independent it's not like tied to one you know one platform or application it's not you know you don't have to pay for Access um you know integrate integrate that and focus on your you know your key strength um and so I think that applies for things like you know social decentralized social media and things like that um I I forget what your initial question was because I was so enthusiastic about agreeing with that statement that I mean that was basically it as if you agreed was ultimately the question there and so um when it comes to like privacy as a whole that's like such an unopened can of worms I think Wade die actually recently

gave a talk at this uh around ecc's time frame where he was like we need first of all before you can even like go do these things we need to better understand what we want from privacy because maybe like a country in the west might want something very different from what a country in the East might want and how do you build an open source blockchain that both countries are interacting with to kind of get that balance so I guess ultimately my question here is how do you think about privacy concerns related to around like segregating your identity to do to do two different pieces on chain like how do you how do you think about that I think ultimately it's it's I'm probably wrong about this but I feel like ultimately it's relatively straightforward in that we just we need systems and tools that make it easy for

us to create multiple pseudonymous identities and to choose how they interact with the world and with each other and right now there's a vastly lacking partly because of you know the lack of privacy and unchain transactions but also partly because our wallets and apps don't make it obvious to us when we're about to you know link to a rare identities together by accident by you know sending transactions that are that make that obvious um I don't think it's an unreasonable request to be able to have you know multiple wallets in the ethereum sense any more than here you have multiple wallets and in the cash sense you know or that I can show up to a Dairy where they know me is bold because I told them

I'm bold you know you do that and nobody like comes after you to arrest you for fraud because it's just you know we all interact differently in different different different environments and I think uh you know in a system like this doesn't have to be intrinsically hostile to to law enforcement to you know to reasonable uh you know Provisions for for investigation and things like that you know the the ironic thing about the wholeness around tornado cash is the tornado cash actually built Provisions into their base layer protocol to allow people to voluntarily link their their inputs and outputs you know so you could still kyc yourself to an organization if you'd use tornado cash you could present

a cryptographic proof that says yes that money that came out to another cash it came from this other account of mine here's the proof um and if you know if only those things have actually been adopted like they that's actually a really legitimate way to provide online on-chain privacy and so on without you know the three sort of you know enable enabling money laundering and all that sort of stuff you know you can just say probably the people I want to know the connection know the connection that is incredibly interesting I did not know that fact about tornado cash I'm glad you you shared that one practically Nobody Does it saves including law enforcement and yeah as I say it's frustrating because it means that you know when you need to prove that

connection you can you know which is exactly the scenario you want and it's the same scenario you get with like a bank account except that it's the bank that you know the cops go to to ask for their connection whereas in this case it's you who you know can provide that as necessary yeah that makes a ton of sense uh looking over the situation in hindsight and yeah that was a key piece of info I feel like everyone on crypto Twitter was missing but uh putting a bow on this conversation and kind of uh tying it up as we're coming up on an hour I want to be respectful of your time but are there any specific projects that are leveraging everything that ianis has built to date or maybe some that you guys have funded through public goods that you're particularly excited about uh I mean there's a lot uh the

first ones that come to mind immediately are name base which has been doing an amazing job uh you know making it easier for people to issue soft names and building Tech on top of that um you know the various other uh marketplaces and stuff like the Unix vision and so on that have basically taken DNS functionality and made it the core of their product um I think things like dn3 which is you know on chain notification notification and messaging system that have integrated against the core layer that demonstrates how useful it is to have a decentralized naming service that can be the foundation of other bits of infrastructure um and then of course there's

organizations like coinbase and so on who have decided to make a use the core of their their digital identity um those are the ones that come and you get written around at any rate I also have one last question and then I'll kick it over to you in case you do too but like I feel like when ens around the time that you guys dropped a token it was like a huge wave I feel like every week I was getting spam and Twitter for like a new like ens rip-off essentially um do you think you guys are at the point now like would you say that you've established enough Network effects that you know you're kind of the go-to naming service or I know it's the open source nature of crypto but just how do you feel about you know 18 different aiming services on every single chain yeah I

think um I I think that's uh that is a a pretty accurate recap of history and I do think that yes now we are the uh you know the one that people compare everything else to an effect and that doesn't mean that those claims have stopped popping up but they seem increasingly obvious as cash grabs rather than actual honest attempts to build an aiding system and I'm not saying that you can't build a better name consistently an EMS or if it's too late or that it has to be a cash Grant but um it's mostly what I've seen have been attempts to to marry any success by just owning it rather than building on top of

it uh and I kind of wish that wasn't true because um you know while I hope DNA succeeds I hope we succeed by by innovating and building the best tick and getting the best ideas not just by virtue of being the only one yeah I I I love that approach as well and Nick I just want to thank you for taking the time to come out on the show this was a great conversation really awesome to hear kind of your Thoughts From The Trenches of how you've been building this product and why you're building it and what's to come next so thanks again Nick and also as a user of of blockchains I would like to thank you for your product because improving the ux is something we desperately need to continue building so thank you sir and if you could just leave the audience uh

with where they can find more about ens and and follow more follow you hear more about your thoughts as well yeah it was a it was a pleasure to talk with you um you can find me on Twitter at Nikki Steve Johnson and you can find the Eunice at ens domains um and at e s dot domains um just before I go I should apologize to the name sis team because the appos thing here was his name so it's not name Bates um it's uh it's been a real pleasure talking to you thanks a ton Nicky we'll include all those links in the description but thanks again cheers thank you