If you spend a good part of your day browsing Twitter, surely you have come across another user at least once whose account name is accompanied by an “.eth”. This is something more common every day, especially among those related to the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. If you wonder what it means or what function it fulfills, in the next few lines we will try to give you the answers you need; and the first thing you should know is that they are ENS domains.
ENS means Ethereum Name Service, or Ethereum Name Service. It is a platform that allows us to buy our own .eth domain in order to, for example, connect it to our wallet of cryptocurrencies to make it easier to share your public address. Basically, ENS domains have arrived to make the experience of sending and receiving crypto assets as friendly as possible.
And so that it is better understood, we are going to explain it in a practical way. Suppose that in our digital wallet we have Dai, a stable cryptocurrency tied to the value of the dollar, and we want to send 100 Dai to another person as payment for a service provided. That other individual will have to share with us the public address of wallet of Dai so that we can finalize the transaction.
So far, nothing too complicated. Dai is an ERC-20 token; that is, it works on the Ethereum network. This means that when the other person shares the address of their wallet with us, we will find that it is made up for more than 40 hexadecimal characters which may look like this: “0x2a40f142…”. clearly not the most user friendly that we can find, but it is not something exclusive to Dai or Ethereum, but it happens with all cryptocurrencies and networks. So, what ENS domains allow is to save us the hassle of copying, pasting or sharing those endless strings of numbers and letters, and replace them with something more readable and simpler.
So, if we need to pay José 100 Dai, and he already has his own ENS domain purchased and configured, we can send the cryptocurrencies to jose.eth and not “0x2a40f142…”.
ENS domains are intended to be the gateway to the web3
It is clear that the main use given to ENS domains is link them to public addresses in cryptocurrency wallets; however, he is not the only one. They can also be used to create decentralized websites, and it is even possible to set up subdomains. And as if that were not enough, it is possible to configure them with already existing DNS; so, for example, you can import your .com domain to Ethereum Name Service.
Basically, ENS domains are intended to be the gateway to web3. In other words, people can have a kind of “user name” with the .eth extension that they can implement in different services.
ENS domains are already compatible with a large number of utilities in the crypto world. We talk about wallets What Trust and meta maskapplications like uniswap and etherscanand web browsers like Opera and brave, just to mention a few. The list is very extensive in each category and promises to expand even more.
How to register an .eth domain?
Before I give you an overview of how to get your own .eth domain, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, you need a wallet of Ethereum —Metamask, for example— with available balance, since the procedure has a cost and it is not very cheap to say. Second, ENS domains are limited, so you may find that one you try to buy is already registered.
Having said all this, we can enter the application from Ethereum Name Service. Once there, we will find a search engine where we must enter the domain name that we are trying to register, in order to check its availability.
If he is free, we can move forward with the procedure. The screen will show us the registration price for one year, but we can do it for a longer time if we deem it convenient.
Registering the domain itself is not outrageously expensive. After all, a not too extensive .eth costs about 5 dollars per year. The real issue here is the price of gas, which is the fee that is paid for transactions on the Ethereum network. The price of gas has been very high for a long time, and in this particular case it is not convenient to proceed with the transaction if we intend to buy the ENS domains for only one year.
At the time of writing, domain registration cost 0.002 ETH ($5.02), and gas 0.023 ETH ($66.01). This means that we will end up paying around 71 dollarsbeing that most of that amount goes to the fee of the transaction. Has no sense.
Things change if we decide to buy the .eth domain for a longer time, because any registration greater than one year will avoid us having to pay for gas annually. So if we choose to hold our ENS domains for two years, the price will be 0.003 ETH ($10.04), and the gas to pay will continue to be 0.023 ETH; that is to say that in total we will pay approximately 76 dollars. And if we acquire it for more years, we will not see a change in the price of the fee for using the Ethereum network either.
Once you have the name to register confirmed, connect the Metamask wallet and follow the steps on the screen.
ENS domains are more than a Twitter ‘fad’
The development of Ethereum Name Service It started in 2017 within the Ethereum Foundation, although it became independent in 2018. Today the structure behind the ENS domain platform has two faces; on the one hand, a DAO called ENS DAOwhich is governed by the governance token $ENSand on the other, the administration is carried out by a non-profit company called True Names LTD.
The project is open source and decentralized, although for now it is the only one that exists in the quest to standardize ENS domains. Undoubtedly, the technology behind this proposal is very interesting, and seeks an impact beyond being a “fashion” among Twitter users.
Yes Ethereum Name Service manages to expand its reach, it will forever change the way of transacting with cryptocurrencies. If sending and receiving these types of assets is friendlier, less experienced users will adapt faster and have less fear of making an irreversible mistake.