Kriptoks

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a decentralized and extensible naming system built on the Ethereum blockchain. It allows users to convert human-readable names like "alice.eth" into machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, content hashes, and other cryptocurrency addresses. ENS also supports reverse resolution, which allows users to associate metadata like interface descriptions or canonical names with Ethereum addresses.

ENS serves a similar purpose to the internet's Domain Name System (DNS), but the architecture is different due to the capabilities and constraints provided by the Ethereum blockchain. Like DNS, ENS uses a hierarchical naming system with dot-separated domains (e.g. .com and .org) where the owner of a domain has complete control over subdomains.

The ENS architecture has two main components: the registry and the resolvers. The ENS registry is a single smart contract that maintains a list of all domains and subdomains, as well as important information such as the owner of the domain, the resolver of the domain, and the caching time-to-live for all records under the domain. Smart contracts, which are similar to traditional contracts but run as protocols on the blockchain, own the top-level domains (like .eth and .test) and set the rules for allocating subdomains.

Anyone can get ownership of a domain by following the rules set by these registrar contracts. ENS also allows users to import names that are already owned in DNS for use on ENS. The domain owner can be an external account (a user) or a smart contract, while a registrar is a smart contract that owns a domain and issues subdomains to users according to rules set in the contract. In 2018, the .eth registrar migrated and became an ERC721-compliant non-fungible token (NFT) contract, which means that .eth registrations can be transferred like other NFTs.

Resolvers are responsible for translating names into addresses. Any contract that follows the relevant standards can act as a resolver in ENS. This hierarchical structure of ENS enables anyone who owns a domain at any level to configure subdomains as they wish. For example, if someone owns alice.eth, they can create pay.alice.eth and configure it to their liking.

The ENS ecosystem is governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called the ENS DAO. The Ethereum Name Service token (ENS) is the standard ERC20 governance token of the ecosystem. Three governance forums have been created to govern the ecosystem: Venues, discuss.ens.domains, is a Discourse forum for governance-related discussion; Snapshot is a simple voting interface that lets users signal sentiment off-chain; and Governance Portals, Tally and Sybil are governance portals that allow token holders to delegate their votes and create and vote on binding proposals.

ENS was started at the Ethereum Foundation in early 2017, and later spun off into a separate organization in 2018. Development is driven by Singaporean nonprofit True Names Ltd, and the founder, Nick Johnson, has also served as a software engineer at several companies such as Ethereum, Google, and Lumi.