Nick Johnson: ENS – An Update on the Global Naming System for Ethereum #445

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution i'm friedrich ans and today i'm speaking with nick johnson who is the founder of ens um the ethereum name service which is a service that lets you um register um a an ethereum top level domain but before we talk with nick about ens um let me tell you about our sponsors this week so our first one says paraswap pariswap is a multi-chain dex aggregator so this means that through paraswap you can easily access the liquidity of various different decentralized exchanges the protocol automatically finds the cheapest liquidity for you so you can trade knowing that you're getting the best

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earns rewards without this needing to be energy intensive or complicated and by staking your assets with course one you contribute to network security and rewards too chorus one has has been a pioneer in this space since 2018 and secures billions of dollars in assets on over 25 decentralized networks including solana cosmos and ethereum so if you're an institution um or want to run your own branded node you can also use chorus 1's white label service and their battle proven infrastructure to participate in proof of stake network works in an easy and direct manner head over to chorus.one and start your staking journey today so hi nick thanks for joining us again hello it's a pleasure to be here and and

shocking to realize it's been so long yeah so just before the show um we actually looked it up and it was just over five years ago so five years five years in normal time is a long time five years in crypto was like two eternities here two eternities ago so um five years ago you were still at the ethereum foundation but you were already working on ens and we actually already talked about ens um back then um so i think first of all an update is an order but maybe let's rehash what ens is first so ens is kind of it it's an equivalent or to to the domain name service um that

the internet has um so maybe talk let's talk about the domain name service um first so what what what does the domain name service do and what are the responsibilities and duties so the the primary reason most people interact with dns the domain name service is to resolve websites these days but of course it was developed before websites even existed and the basic mean the basic purpose of it was to name servers name machines out in the world and it was there to replace you know the original solution when the internet was very small indeed which was just having everyone had a file listing all the computers on the internet and what their

names were which worked well enough when there were 20 of them and they were all universities and not so well as it grew so the dns was uh the internet's first scaling solution for names uh and its goal was in many respects very much the same as ens's which is to ensure that end users don't have to deal with long and difficult to memorize numerical identifiers like ib addresses or in the case of ens like ethereum addresses but can instead use a simple human readable name to identify whatever resource it is that they're trying to look up so so how is dns administered it's uh is it a non-profit

uh so ens has adele the creatively named ens dao and the dow administers most of the sort of levers and switches that control ens so it controls how name registrations for dot eth names happen uh it controls the reverse registrar it controls pricing and so on and so forth uh there are there is one thing that it still doesn't control which is what's known as the uh the ens route which gives the power to create new top level domains and replace existing ones and so on uh and for now that is still under the control of the key holders uh who are a group of seven individuals from the ecosystem who are sort of entrusted with the route uh in the the short to medium term

that will also shift over to the control of the ens dow once you know we're confident that everyone's confident that the dow's been functioning well and is uh able to take on that responsibility other than the dow uh there's the organization i had called true names limited and we basically we develop ens so we build the infrastructure we write smart contracts and so on uh to keep things running and improve things cool so um the web 2 equivalent or web one equivalent even the dns how does that function um is it is it a similar setup uh administratively the the route is controlled or

managed by an organization called iana the internet association for names and numbers i may be fudging that and the majority of top level domains are controlled by an organization called icann the internet corporation corporation for names and numbers and they are the ones that control uh you know that sort of handout contracts to the owners of dot com and dot org and dot domains and every other top level domain you can think of with the exception of the country code ones and then those are all managed individually but under icann's oversight and then finally you have the country code domains like dot nz dot u s and uh you know dot uk and so forth and

they're all administered by their individual countries so the dns is actually fairly decentralized as well it's fairly decentralized okay um so i i've always wondered and i mean you've got first-hand experience with this how do you register a top-level domain with um the dns because i mean you guys have dot eth right yes uh so it's a it's not a simple process um the the internet started off with just three general purpose top level domains.com.net.org and then all the country code domains and there wasn't really a process for registering new ones uh some time ago and i

i think it was around 2005 uh icann decided they were going to auction off a whole lot of new top-level domains uh which was a controversial move at the time and they basically people could apply to the auction and then if multiple people wanted the same top level domain they all bid against each other and if not then there was some minimum fee you had to pay in order to get it and you had to sign up to their terms of service effectively and agree to administer it the way they think domains should be administered and so on and so forth and that's what led to the current explosion of top level domains that we see today you know they haven't actually run another one of those since then so there's no generalized process for getting a new icann top level domain

the whole the route in general is is controlled by ayana but generally they've handed off responsibility to icann into the countries so if you want to get a domain your top level domain your options are basically i can or somehow convince lyanna that your case is so exceptional that it should you know bypass all of these steps um which you know it may be the the right solution if we want to try and get dot eth into the root but you know will will prove to be a long and complicated process if we do pursue that and just to complicate things further the three-letter country codes uh such as usa and nzl and i don't know what uh britain's is um are

uh also reserved they're not actually given out to the countries unlike the two letter codes but they're sort of held back and weren't available to to bid on in icann's auction and so forth uh and ethiopia's three-letter country coders eth uh so you know that the further complicating factor there is that ethiopia has some sort of uh implied claim to or at least write a first refusal to that and that's sort of a double-edged sword i guess on the one hand you know you might see that as a threat but no country has expressed any interest in using their three-letter country code on the other hand it practically guarantees that nobody's going to try and register dot eth with icann

you know or if they do that it will be rejected so we have a reasonable assurance that it's going to stay the way it is so basically because it's not registered with icann so basically if i put your nik.if into my browser it will only resolve if i have certain plugins installed like metamask right yeah if you have metamask or a couple of others or if you your browser directly supports it like brave does but otherwise no it won't resolve okay and um there's uh there's this trick um to kind of put link behind the eth right east.link how does that work uh so we originally developed that in

association with ipfs uh and the basically we registered ethe.link just a standard second level domain um and then we set up a service so that when you that all the sub domains map to ens basically so if you enter uh next.eth.link uh then you're querying our service at each dot link and it looks up nic.eth and then it uses that to resolve it and serves up the content from there so it's a gateway that anyone can use and since we launched it cloudflare has taken over responsibility for that so they now host that and a second service has sprung up from the community eth.limo and similarly you can replay you can add limo at the end or a play stop link with

stop limo and you get the same result uh you get a distributed gateway oh cool i will try the limo one i didn't know that yet fantastic they are often faster than cloudflare which is a pretty big tick in their book nice super nice at the technical level ens at the essence of it it maintains a big smart contract that has a registry of other registered ens domains right yes so what kind of content can ens domains point to so the the central registry that you mentioned only has two records for each domain it has the owner and it has the resolver and the resolver is another

contract and its job is to to actually answer queries about that domain uh and that means the system is very flexible so at the moment uh our public resolver which is sort of the default implementation that everyone can use uh supports a large number of things including ethereum addresses addresses for other blockchains uh content on ipfs are weave swarm etc profile fields such as an avatar a background image uh email address twitter handle etc etc um and just arbitrary text records so it's been used for a number of other things as a result and uh the nice thing is that it's permissionless so anyone can add a new field to their own resolver and deploy

it and use it without needing to upgrade the entire ens system or you know come to agreement with everyone obviously it's helpful if people standardize on their things because standards make it more widely usable but there's no obligation to do so so it's very uh you know it's decentralized in that sense and it's a very uh easily extended system ah okay interesting um so what what what are the use cases that people use it for most i mean so basically if you look at the total number of registered domains what what um yeah what what's kind of the distribution across these use cases do people actually make use of these

yes uh so i'd say that probably the the primary use case is of course resolving to ens names to ethereum addresses um followed by people using lima's as personal profiles these days so in addition to resolving to an address it also has a profile picture and it has uh information about their social media handles and so forth and there's a lot of a lot of d websites now where you can log in and it will use that profile information um secondary to that would be people using addresses for other blockchains embedding those in their nes profile and then distributed content primarily on ipfs so there's a lot of d websites that rely on uh you know rely on a um an ethereum e s name uh for instance uh

gnosis hosts some of their sites via rest.link we do we do fantastic so this has been functional for a number of years right how many how many uh domains are currently registered we just crossed the mark of a million active domains uh if i load up the console now it is showing me we're now 1.1 million active names so the terms have actually registered you know since if some of them expired it's it's more like 1.2 1.3 um and uh if you're if you're curious in the last seven days people registered uh 400 000 years worth of registrations uh which always boggles my mind to think

of like you know the equivalent of putting them in to end to go to the moon sort of thing you know cool so um the the the main um challenge for ens today is i see it currently is the level of fees so i mean basically if i think back um back in the day registering an els domain basically there's a fee um so basically it's it's not so it's nominal so basically for for um five or more letters it's something like five dollars a year or something it's it's it's pretty low um it goes up for four and three letter uh domains but i mean so basically the especially the five dollars um they

uh pale in contrast um to the ethereum gas fees and of course this was not always the case right so how how do you guys think about um existing on any an incredibly expensive um if your main net at the moment yeah well i mean i guess uh you know silver lining everything the the past week or so has made it a lot cheaper but uh in terms of a long-term solution um it is definitely an issue and it is as you observe an awful lot more expensive than it used to be the uh the short term like the easy solution is uh just register for more years like you

know don't renew it every year because you'll say it costs no more in gas to register for 10 as it does for one but obviously that is only you know a mitigation not a solution um the real solution we're working on is uh enabling ens records to be stored off chain but still verified uh by the the main ens infrastructure uh and so that's uh something called eep3668 or ccip read and the way it works is effectively you you go to resolve the name and the resolver tells you oh in order to answer that question i need you to fetch some data for me and it asks you to go off and fetch it from a gateway to some other chain so that can be an l2 like optimism it could be another l1 like polygon it could even be a permission

database with an http api which then returns the information needed to resolve the name along with whatever is needed to prove the accuracy of that so if you're hosting your the data for your name on an l2 like optimism it can return a complete state proof to prove that the value is is correct and then the original resolver gets that data back and can verify it's correct and return the result to you and all of this happens in a call not a transaction so the end result is uh once you you have a one-time fee to set it up on a name but then after that you could manage your records elsewhere without any l1 gas fees at all and you can do all of this for sub domains too so you can buy a domain you can set it up using this and then you

can issue sub domains and set their records all without any l1 guest fees uh either so does the regis so the person registers um do they have to decide um which infrastructure they want to use to register so can i decide whether i wanna do this an optimism or polygon or is that something you guys um kind of set for everyone so for now the registration will still take place on mainnet um but when you do so you can you'll be able to select a gateway to use so that all further management takes place on uh the external system of your choice basically um in the longer term we may be able to move the registration itself onto an l2

um but unlike this solution we would have to pick just one l2 or off chain system as the solution uh and given how nascent this this whole environment is we're very hesitant to sort of pick one and anoint it as the ens chain you know um and we also anticipate that a lot of end users will uh not register their own secondary names they will use sub domains uh from wallets or from other providers or people who have set them up for free or cheap sub domains and so forth in which case they never need to pay an l1 guest fee at all oh yeah that makes a lot of sense so how do you guys decide which layer tools and other networks to support in this

well so the nice thing is that like the resolver system itself this is permissionless anyone can write a gateway uh obviously not everyone has the skills all the time to write a gateway so we've already released the initial support for this with uh libraries and server side code and so on for doing this yourself but our next step is to start to build this out uh for you know certain l2s initially and we're doing that in conjunction with chain link and the the initial target is optimism uh followed probably by arbitrary and then we'll start looking at like non-evm l2s uh such as zk sync and also non-l2 such as polygon potentially uh things get a little more complicated when you move away from uh you know l2s that are evm based and

and trustless i mean i understand that that's technically a lot more challenging but so basically um are there plans to kind of expand out um into the wider blockchain ecosystem so for instance um like cosmos or polkadot i mean how do they feel about having an eth domain that's a good question um i guess uh you know i'd point out that we also have dns integration so they're welcome to use any of the other uh top level domains if they don't like dot eth um and and when the next option comes around they could always bid for bitcoin or dot uh dot solana or whatnot um

i think uh you know we're gonna keep working on new sort of officially supported gateways with chain link for the foreseeable future you know as long as there's demand um but i don't want to downplay how you know how flexible the system is and that this doesn't all have to come from us you know people can build their own gateways whether they're trusted or trustless uh and i sort of expect that to see a to see that happen a lot with wallets and so forth where they host their users uh name records and serve them up for their own infrastructure so they can offer entirely free sub domains and and records which i think is is really cool that you could just you could sign up for a trustless wallet on your phone you know you can hold the keys yourself and you can

instantly without having to send any transactions or get any crypto to start you can have an ens name that allows people to to identify your new wallet which is not something that's really been doable until now because we've had a bit of a chicken and egg problem there are there any wallets that currently already support this uh no but we're working with a couple of major ones to integrate it soon we only launched the the l2 support uh you know earlier this year so there it's still a work in progress but hopefully we'll have some some things to announce soon the flip side of the medal is that uh everything is open right so basically so i i mean your your top level domain is nick.e my my mine is

fans.etha and i mean so basically um everything you do on that address um is instantly attributable to you right do you guys have thoughts on um kind of integrating some zero knowledge services where basically i can show um to certain people that i own some assets but not to the world i i sort of view it as a wider problem for the ecosystem and the chain rather than ins specific i think rather than exacerbating it ens amplifies like how obvious it is you know when you look at your address on etherscan without a name associated you have this false sense of security that it looks obscure and how would anyone know it's mine

but it is depressingly easy to link names to people's people's identities so it's certainly it just makes a lot more obvious we we definitely support and encourage systems that use enes to provide better uh you know anonymity and so forth so for instance uh umbra uh is a uh it's not a mixer it's more a way to send anonymously so you can send to an address without a to it you can send funds in a way that the recipient can claim them but without sending it directly to their address so that nobody can see exactly who it was sent to um and they have built their system around dns names as the the way you address people's

uh wallets and so forth so that allows that sort of financial privacy that i think is very important and yeah i guess i i like to see more uh systems like that spring up and with the ns support and we we really want to support that and help them out uh it's definitely more of a challenge with non-fungible tokens like names because if you could imagine a e s name mixer it it wouldn't really work you know you put your name in and a while later you pull it out somewhere else and it doesn't take a genius to realize that those two that it's probably the same person you know yeah uh that is uh that is totally true and so

the the other uh big topic for ens currently is the governance process so right so basically so you guys did a super well designed ens token airdrop thank you tell us about the token air drop first how did you go about it sure so we uh you know we wanted to give governance power to uh the people who had the biggest impact on ens and so part of that was was simply identifying projects people you know manually but most of it was the community as a whole and we could have done something like you know x tokens per year registered per domain or something like that but i think there's a much like the the fact that somebody has

registered uh 200 domains for for a year each or or for five years each or whatever doesn't make them 200 more times more useful a participant than somebody who's registered one or two and so what we wanted to do was try and recognize people who had been part of the the ecosystem in the community for a long time so like they joined us early and they've stuck with us or people who have a long-term commitment to the ecosystem who anticipates sticking around for a long time and and gives those people the governance power to have a say in the future of it and so the way we did it was we sort of split the airdrop in half and we gave out half the tokens on the basis of how long you've owned a name for

um so you know if you've owned it from day one you've got the maximum amount if you've owned it for two years you've got half the maximum amount and so on and then the other half we gave out in proportion to uh how far in the future your longest name is registered for um and that was capped out at eight years because uh there's one person who's registered the the name their name until the year 4772 or something and if we've done it linearly he would have just gotten all the tokens but you know we felt that those two factors reflected both you know past commitment and future commitment and then in addition to that uh you can set a primary name for your ens

for your ethereum address which which is you know this is the name that represents this address and we doubled all of those amounts if you'd done that because we believed that represented a strong commitment to the ecosystem as well so when people actually claim their airdrop um you you you made an interesting design decision so you actually made people choose a delicate delegate in the process of claiming so i think in principle you could bypass it if you had interacted with the smart contracts directly but um basically in the interface it basically forced you to delegate your tokens to someone who had previously signed up for the job why did you go about it that way i think like the purpose of the ens

token is to be a governance token is to like meaningfully vote on the future of ens and decide what technical improvements we should make what uh you know how the funds should be used to advance the ecosystem and for that participation is really crucial and we know from looking at other projects that delegation is is necessary because it's simply not practical for most users to keep up to date on most things you know the same reason we have represented democracy instead of direct democracy nobody can be an expert on everything you just don't have the time um so we believed it was really important to have delegates and we also believe that it was really important that everybody

delegate as part of claiming because the whole point is to be representative and and you're only doing that if you're actually like making sure your tokens take part in this process you could actually delegate to yourself and there was a button to do that in the ui but we made the conscious choice to sort of de-emphasize that to encourage people to think of somebody else who represents them first because you know we believe most people itself delegate without a real commitment will sort of wander off effectively um that wasn't the only unusual thing we did we also uh we had a constitution uh we still have a constitution which represents sort of core principles driving ens and the ns dow and if you claimed during the first week

it presented all four clauses to you and asked you to vote yay or nay on each of them and the constitution was only passed if each one was voted yes by a super majority uh and after the first week you were still shown the clauses but the the voting was over but you were at least you know inducted into what it meant for ens to be a public good how did delegates become delegates and how do you think most of the people actually chose their delegate so there was a real temptation to to do a big bang launch of like you know you didn't know this was coming but now the air drop is today um but in the end we decided it made a lot more sense to talk about it before we did it because amongst other things that gave us an

opportunity to to put out a call for delegates and to give people an opportunity to step forward so we did that we announced the airdrop we we asked for people to come forward as delegates on our forum uh and each person basically to be considered as a delegate you had to write a short profile of yourself you know why you wanted to be a delegate how you believed you'd govern uh you know why people should delegate to you and then you link to that profile from your ens name using a text record because you know eat our own dog food along with a profile picture and a primary name and then when it came to the clay map we dynamically pulled in the list of delegates from a subgraph and from the chain directly

to show everybody's ins name their profile picture and a link to their position statement basically we got far more delegates than we expected we got over 500 uh submissions that actually followed through on the entire process and far more who just you know started with the profile and never completed it so you know initially we were thinking of a ui around like 50 you know and and like well that's a real challenge how do we reasonably present as many as 50 candidates to people so that they can make an informed decision and suddenly it was 10 times that um so we knew realistically that a lot of people wouldn't like they're not going to read

everybody's position statement they may not even read many or any um so there were a few things we tried to do to combat that one is we gave people delegate links you could give somebody a link that would select you as the default choice uh if they claimed through you uh and so then delegates could sort of go out and campaign for their own delegation and it would it would clearly state to you you know this is the delegate that's been you know picked by by the link but you could override it the second thing we did was we tried to get a little bit clever with how we sorted the delegates so we didn't want to just sort things randomly because you might get a lot of people you've never heard of and just you know pick somebody just to get through that step uh we didn't want to

sort it top down by most votes because then you end up with a very strong feedback loop of this person has the most votes therefore at the top therefore they get the most votes so we tried to sort of um thumb on the scales a little bit in that we uh we shuffled it semi-randomly where the more votes you had the more likely you were to come up to the top but if you had more than a certain number of votes then you would actually get down weighted so the idea was that we wanted you know we decided like it would be healthy if we had sort of 20-ish really active delegates so if you had more than one-twentieth of the votes you actually started getting bumped down the list and less likely to show up um

you know and the idea was we wanted delegates who could meaningfully represent a group of people but not be just an overwhelming voice who could overrule everyone else and nothing worked perfectly but i think this worked reasonably well uh at sort of distributing the voting power and still giving people uh you know the executive choice to decide what they wanted yeah absolutely i uh i saw it and uh i didn't read all the 500 statements but i just throw it down to the first passing way so why i thought uh yeah this guy uh he'll probably make decisions similar to the decisions i would make if i were asked personally so i'll delegate to him sort of thing um

so what's in it for the delegates not a lot to be honest um you know i think people may have some of those 500 people may have put themselves forward because they sort of thought they would be richly rewarded for their participation but uh you know mostly where it's it's a more or less volunteer position uh you know we we have stewards inside the dow who are also appointed by the delegates and they get compensation for the work they do for the most part delegates are are acting voluntarily out of a desire to to improve the ecosystem and i personally am supportive of compensating them for their time because i think it's unreasonable to expect people to put a lot of effort into knowing all the ins and outs of

something uh in their spare time if nothing else that privileges people who have that time to spare and and can afford to do so um but it's kind of problematic like you don't it's very very easy to set up a perverse incentive here where you know you get professional delegates whose job it is to just you know know things uh but but not actually contribute to the governance process you know or that you have you know bot delegates who just vote on everything in order to get rewarded you know it's uh it's a tricky situation but i would like to that's something i hope the tao evolves on as time goes by because i think it's necessary for sustainability so if i'm a delegate and i kind of i made this commitment to do it but then

kind of my life circumstances change so i can no longer afford to afford the time or um it just doesn't make sense for me how how do i step down on what happens to the people who delegate it to me this is a this is kind of a big problem with the compound based governance model that we adopted in that it doesn't have a a great way to do that if you thought ahead and your governance account you know your your delegate account was a multi-sig or something you could hand the multisec off to your successor um but if it's an eoa if it's an external account uh there's no way to like redelegate on mass uh to someone else you simply have to publicize to your delegates that you're no longer

acting actively um and then wait for them to reassign but of course we have the whole inactivity issue and so a lot of those people may not do that and so you may be uh you know you could sit down and you could say uh i'm just gonna vote how ex votes as time goes on but then you've still got at least the commitment to be there and and present for those votes so that is definitely something that you know more work is needed on in future we need better uh governance systems that can handle this sort of succession problem yeah i mean this is yeah totally true it's uh yeah it's one of the the governance is still so early right

very much so yeah so tell us about the kinds of decisions that the delegates have made so far sure uh so we uh the very first decision uh besides ratifying the constitution uh was to formally petition the multi-sig uh which you know previously controlled all of the uh all of the funds and all of the important levers to hand them over to the dao so that was a purely social vote there was no like execution on chain by the dao but it was a you know basically a formal letter saying hey hand it over it's time to decentralize uh and that of course passed with almost unanimous consent um

since then uh i'm i'm glancing through the list myself to remind me we either the second uh proposal was there were a few people who got smaller air drops than they should have because of basically an error on my part in calculating whether they had a primary name set or not uh and the community was motivated to to give them what they missed out on uh which i thought was was actually a really good litmus test of of how the community is going to act around this sort of thing because the selfish impulse might have been to keep it for the dao then there was uh creating working groups and sort of getting the whole dao started um and that's you know been very successful so far we now have a system for sort of getting work done individually beyond like polling

everybody in the entire dow for every decision which just isn't practical um and uh there has been a bunch of stuff around um the price premium uh these are the sort of the first on-chain governance activities that the uh the dow has had to do um when a name expires uh it goes to a dutch auction so it starts at a high price and and diminishes over was originally 28 days basically to ensure one person can't snap up the name the moment it becomes available originally that was set at like the 95th percentile of all the short name auction values which was two thousand dollars which seemed like lots at the time um but around the time it's our launch

it became really apparent that this was nowhere near enough uh so we you know we were seeing gas auctions going on we were seeing mev and stuff to snap up names as soon as they became available so the first thing the dao voted to do was to replace that with a new version that started it a hundred thousand dollars which seemed more than enough um that had two problems one is occasionally a hundred thousand dollars believe it or not isn't enough and people are willing to pay more than that for a name that just expired uh the second is that even over 28 days if you're going from 100 000 to zero the last day or so covers like the entire two thousand dollar range in a bit um which means that if you just want if you're willing to pay a hundred bucks for the name you have like a 30 minute

window in which you have to be at your computer in order to do this um so one of the most recent things the dow did was to uh agree uh to replace it with a new version that's exponential so now it starts at the completely absurd price of 100 million dollars um not in the expectation that anyone values a name at that but the expectation that that's too much you know we have to start at a price that's higher than anyone will pay and then it halves every day for three weeks um by which point it gets down to six bucks or something and that's so far been really successful and then the most recent thing the uh dow voted was to end the ear drops uh because the initial planned period for the airdrop was six months and that's now we just passed that uh mark

super interesting um so the dow also has um some treasury right from the from the fees uh from the registrations so how does it how does it spend that money um i mean so far not a lot um so you know we recently with the the recent popularity of of numbered names and other sort of ena social clubs the income has been really substantial um the sort of two main ways it's it's intended to spend it all three i guess one is funding the the ens ecosystem directly um and so that includes you know funding projects directly associated with the ns

such as true names the company i run that that does dns development and other efforts such as sign in with ethereum through spruce and so on and so forth and you know just sort of wider ecosystem projects and the other is uh so it is two the other is public goods more generally so you know things outside uh ens but still within ethereum or even sort of you know wider space public goods um and so so far the the dow has funded the assignment ethereum server to the tune of 250k uh it's requested budgets for the individual working groups which they've used to do things like uh pay for stuart's time and put through proposals for for other work to do um

and it's funded a couple of bug bounties for some some you know small to moderate bugs that were found in ens um it hasn't really processed any really large scale grants yet but i kind of expect that to change uh in the near future especially given uh the the returned funds you know the unclaimed airdrop funds that were returned to the dow i think it's really there's a lot of legitimacy there to spend some of that on on helping ens community efforts and even you know wider public goods so ens is very much it posits itself as a public goods project right so basically it's not for profit but if you look at ens tokens i mean you can buy them for money right i mean so basically it's i mean it's a governance token um

but i mean if you look at the past couple of years in this ecosystem i mean there have been a lot of governance tokens and somehow they give you um an implied ownership of the project and often there's an expectation of a profit so kind of how do you reconcile the implied valuation of um dns now at many hundreds of millions of dollars um with you know it's very much it's publicly stated non-profit nature um i mean i guess we've been you know we were always aware that people would want to trade them you know no matter what you do um you know somebody is going to want to swap it for something else um but our emphasis has always been that these are

governance tokens and so we've been really clear about a few things we uh you know it is intended to be a public good uh and it's actually even stated in the ns constitution that it's not legitimate to pay out profits to to token holders you know that is explicitly not the intention of the funds it's to be used for improving the ecosystem and so forth um so you know we've done our best to disabuse anyone of the notion that owning tokens is a route to dividends or profits or whatnot that's just not what it's for and you know in addition to that like true names and the dow haven't taken part in any you know offering liquidity or listing on exchanges or if anything like that all of that's been

purely organic um but it is you know it is inevitable people want to swap it and even purely as a governance token it's clear that it should have some value because uh you know if you are a project seeking a grant from the dao then you have a financial interest in getting that grant and therefore you know the tokens would have some value to you and it's healthy for the dow if it's not trivial for somebody to buy enough tokens to grant themselves all the funds inside the dow um but financial motivations for for the tokens to have value are very much you know bottom of the list and i think i i've also really tried to establish a norm that you know the dow has a lot of tokens itself in fact it

has over 50 of the the token supply and personally i've really tried to set a norm that those aren't used as monetary payment but they're used as recognition for work improving ens so uh you know if somebody like uh sign in with ethereum runs a server then their costs and so forth ought to be paid for in in ether or or usd um and further they can be given some some tokens as you know a sign of sort of like the responsibility they've taken on and the fact that they should then have a voice in the future of the tower yeah no that makes that makes a lot of sense so basically i think this is it's kind of an area that we as an ecosystem kind of have to

learn to navigate better i mean obviously direct democracy doesn't really work because there's no way to be to be to be uh knowledgeable about anything that kind of need about everything that needs to be decided um but on the other hand um how professional do you want your politicians to become right so basically how how do you want them to kind of go out and campaign and make campaign promises and say if this happens i i promise to give you guys whatever so basically um where how do you see the future of that i mean so basically in in five years how do you think um i mean from aside i mean the technical implications and everything

aside how do you see this working i i guess i would rather a future where we have protocol politicians who go out and campaign for votes than one where the powerful people who want something done simply go out and buy those votes and use them to enact their will but i hope that we can i hope that we can build like i think it comes as much down to social norms as it does to technical measures and that's why the constitute why i wanted a constitution as a founding document and not just some sort of unwritten rules i hope that we can use that foundation to establish a sort of new governance norms

uh where those where the sort of more mercenary end of things or the more political end of things is rejected in favor of sort of technical collaboration and and sort of uh you know generally all pushing in the same direction and i know that sounds kind of techno-utopian um but i i do believe that we can build stable sort of if not democratic at least accountable systems uh that do have that sort of longevity of vision um and the way you do it is you know starting on the right route and explicitly stating your goals in a way that anyone who comes along later understands that to be so um so that you don't drift off course effectively okay so basically culture over technology yeah yeah okay so

i mean basically if you look at the ethereum ecosystem over the last couple of years um there's been a very market shift in kind of um the mind space um of the ecosystem right um what what do you think are the major challenges facing us right now uh i think like increasingly i think backlash from people outside crypto is is a bigger and bigger issue and it's one that i sort of you know had worried about a bit even back when i joined but never anticipated it would reach the sort of volume that it has today and it's frustrating because there are legitimate issues with

the wider crypto ecosystem uh you know both around uh legitimate concerns around sustainability because of proof of work currencies and also legitimate concerns around the sort of scams and schemes that an a completely unregulated ecosystem attracts um but those get you know that seed of reasonableness gets sort of exploited to for hyperbole and it's kind of depressing to see people i otherwise like and respect throwing out the baby with the bath water and saying the whole thing is rotten to its core and awful and so on because they don't like this particular problem du jour you know i think reaching out to those people and convincing them that we are trying to

build something valuable here something useful to people something that isn't just to get rich quick scheme or you know a platform for scammers or whatnot is going to be one of the biggest challenges in making sure that crypto has real longevity um and and that also includes things like ethereum transitioning to proof of stake to demonstrate that yes it is actually possible to move to a secure system that doesn't rely on proof of work and therefore has you know it doesn't have significant environmental sustainability issues yeah i i think the the switch to the proof-of-stake i mean this is in terms of narrative it's uh so important and in terms of technology is also so important but i think basically the narrative to me

currently seems even more important um there's a very distinct culture of money and mercenary dom that kind of has invaded um the ecosystem somewhat so basically five years ago when you were when you were last on i mean this was uh during the first ico craze so i'm i mean i'm not going to say that money wasn't uh wasn't an issue back then but at least in my perception um the nature of people who come in and the reasons they come in for has changed substantially um and it's not always the best people

do you think it's a threat i think it's a significant issue yeah and i think it's self-reinforcing in the sense that as long as crypto's image is as the way it is it will attract more people who see that as attractive and then that will make it more true you know over time uh and and you know like i was talking about with with how i want enes to proceed forward the same sort of inertia applies here that it gets more and more difficult to change your course and you know i have this sort of axiom myself that any anything you don't come to agreement on ahead of time you know anything you don't sit down as a principal uh if you try you it will be just effectively impossible to set later because you'll

find people on every side of the argument if you try and do it because you'll attract to your community people who have every possible view on it and that can make this sort of shift extremely difficult like it's the reason that i think transitioning to proof of stake is actually going to be relatively uncontentious because it was set right from day one that this would be the thing that would happen so most people have joined the community have joined that accepting this but you know it's much more difficult to set that sort of norm and it hasn't been set around things like uh you know sort of self-serving uh attitudes to to money into the ecosystem and you know sort of desire to get rich quick and ignore the community and not build

something useful for everyone and to be honest yeah i do see it as a problem i don't see an easy solution to it except you know continuing to make ourselves heard which feels futile at times yeah no i mean ens is definitely um i mean i think it can be said uncontentiously that it's a force for good and basically that it i mean you guys are seen as unser unself-serving so i think you're in a good position to kind of set this moral compass um when you think about when you zoom out and think about ethereum and the future of ethereum with respect to um other blockchain ecosystems so basically ecosystems that have been there a long

time so basically cosmos and parker dot and so on and then basically the self-proclaimed ethereum challenges the whole solana avalanche phantom and so on how do you see those working together i mean i guess you know some degree of of uh you know collaboration is inevitable and useful and we have you know message bridges and we have token bridges and so forth that facilitate all of that i do kind of think that if ethereum delivers on its goal to uh you know to support uh scalability via layer 2s and so forth that there is less appetite and interest for competing l1s and i think competing l1s are aware of that too and i'm not an ethereum

maximalist and that i think ethereum has a lot to learn from innovations on other chains and i also think that there's nothing that means that ethereum has to be the winner um except that uh it's been around for a long time it's very mature and it has people working on it who are adaptable to change and in fact the ecosystem is itself is adaptable to change um it could be some other chain but i do think that on in the long run one chain will come to dominate as sort of the l1 because you have those strong network factors around both just you know interchangeability but also around security um and

yeah i guess that's my my overall perspective um i don't i think a lot of the chains are trying to distinguish themselves on things that uh you know effectively they're not actually making an innovation they're just picking a different point on the trade-off curve between centralization and scalability you know or decentralization scalability you know they're saying we can run 10 times as fast but our nodes require 10 times as many resources you haven't actually scaled it you've just picked a different spot and i'm not saying ethereum necessarily has picked the perfect spot but i think if it's all the way over on that end where you need a whole data center to run a node uh that's not a future i'd want to see

for for the cryptocurrencies and blockchains because i don't feel it's meaningfully improved over just running closed systems to be honest kind of focusing back on on ens so we've already talked about your layer 2 strategies and and kind of making it uh cheaper for people to interact with ens domains again um what else is on the roadmap for you guys uh so we've got a big suite of contract updates that are due out very soon now which will add new capabilities so the primary one is called the name wrapper and the idea is that we'll add new functionality to every name

um it'll uh you know mean that names at all levels will become nfts not just second level names uh it also makes it easier for people to issue sub domains trustlessly so i could give you you know nic. you know the wallet.eth or you know whatever name you would like and you could be sure that uh nobody you know that i couldn't take it back or reassign it or whatnot and that makes a lot more practical for people to to use sub-domains as a as a real-life tool um it also you know we're rolling in a suite of other upgrades uh to the uh the registrar and uh to the uh reverse registrar and various other bits

of functionality uh that that allow um doing a lot more in one transaction which also reduces the gas fees there so you'll be able to register a name you'll be able to set it up and you'll be able to set your primary name all in just a single transaction which improves the ux and also reduces the gas fees there and then the other thing big thing we're working on is a complete redesign in the manager uh the you know our main app and you can see a preview of that at preview dotty and stock domains um we're working on you know really soon getting out a feature parity version that will replace the current version um but with much much better ux than the current one and then from there we you know we obviously want to add a lot more

functionality that we previously haven't had and then i guess finally we've got you know integrations for this l2 support coming from some major wallet providers nice it sounds like you have quite a roadmap there um do you guys um plan on building um a notification service that lets you know that your name is about to expire because i i accidentally let epicenter.eve lapse and i had to buy it back it was really expensive oh wow yeah that's that's not great uh yeah it's it's been an ongoing problem um and we've got you know in in the app now you can click to set a calendar reminder which has probably been the most reliable one so far because it relies on services people already use uh and you can set to you can click to

set an email reminder via a third party service um the problem with that is you know your domain expires in 10 years how sure are we that that service will still be around in 10 years um it's an area where like we we definitely want to improve but we kind of view building our own notification services like a last resort because it's something that should be a useful tool for much more than just us and i'd love to see it built as a reliable decentralized service rather than us having to build it ourselves but we will if we have to okay so basically if if someone were to go to the ens dao and say look i need a grant to build this this is 100 please do so where do people go to find out more

about ens or maybe even participate in governance yeah so uh ens doctor mains is is the best place for just learning about enes in general uh and if you add slash governance to the end it will give you a landing page that will take you to uh you know learning about governance learning how to delegate you can claim your tokens uh and and participating in governance by joining our discord chat and also our forum perfect thank you nick as always it's been a pleasure to have you on and i hope we have you back on in fewer than five years