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Imagine being able to communicate with any device from anywhere in the world. You can control your TV, lights, washing machine, dishwasher, toaster, coffee machine — anything you want — just for a few bucks.

You can do it with Arduino. I have a lot of these lying around in my room, ready to automate another device of mine.

In one of my previous articles, I covered how you can use Arduino as a switch to turn any device on or off.

Today, I will discuss the pros and cons of various wireless methods used to create communication between Arduino and smartphones. This would not only allow you to use your phone as a switch, but it would also enable it to send specific commands for operations and get the state from Arduino.

Various Ways to Send and Receive Data

There are multiple ways to set up communication between Arduino and a smartphone, and each one of them is useful in certain cases. Here are a few of them.

HTTP requests

You can send and receive data using the HTTP protocol. HTTP POST and GET requests are used to establish communication. For this, you can use an ESP8266-NodeMCU module. This module can facilitate the connection and even has GPIO ports.

HTTP (advantages)

• It is a stateless platform (i.e. the communication between devices is closed when the message is received by the receiver). HTTP is best for scenarios where the data does not need to be fetched frequently.

• It requires less computational power.

HTTP (disadvantages)

• HTTP is comparatively slower than web sockets. A new connection has to be made every time you need to send or receive data.

A good analogy would be chatting: You send a message and wait for the reply to send another message.

Bluetooth (advantages)

• You can buy Bluetooth modules for Arduino for very cheap on Amazon or eBay and connect them to your smartphone, PC, or smartwatch.

• Bluetooth consumes less energy than most wireless communication technologies (2.5 mW).

• It is less prone to the interference of data, which can be the case with other wireless methods. It is best for short-range wireless communication.

Bluetooth (disadvantages)

• Bluetooth is short-range communication technology and cannot function properly sometimes — even outside a room.

• It does not allow internet connection. This defeats the purpose of true anytime-anywhere communication.

• If you have a nerdy group of friends, it is the worst option, as it is prone to interceptions and attacks.

Online services

You can also use services such as Blynk, which has a mobile app for smartphones and a library for Arduino to set up communication.

Online services (advantages)

• Online services usually won’t require much coding and hard work. Everything is done for you. You just need to connect the dots.

• Paid services will regularly update and bring more features with time.

• Allows you to control devices from anywhere in the world, anytime you want.

Online services (disadvantages)

• These services are often not free or have restrictions or friction.

• The service may not have certain features you need.

• You are at the mercy of a third-party service, which may not be good if you are looking for commercial applications.

WebSocket (advantages)

• WebSocket is a stateful protocol (i.e. the connection is open until one of the devices disconnects). Unlike HTTP, web sockets do not need to make a new connection every time they want to send some data.

• It the best choice for real-time applications such as gaming and trading, where there is a continuous flow of data.

A good analogy would be a phone call: Until a party disconnects, both the parties can talk and communicate.

WebSocket (disadvantages)

• It is computationally expensive compared to the HTTP protocol and thus is only used when a real-time connection is necessary.

Conclusion

To use these technologies, you can either create a mobile app or use ESP8266 as a web server (for HTTP and WebSockets).

Let me know if you need any help.

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Apple stands out when it comes to privacy and security in smartphones. In fact, many people buy iPhones, only because they feel it's more secure than android.

To some extent it is true, but most of the headlines are exaggerated. iPhone is more secure because of sandboxing, which prevents apps from accessing other apps and operating system beyond a certain threshold. However, it’s not hack-proof as some headlines try to brag.

IOS 14 has already been pwned.

This hype around the security of an iPhone has created an enormous advantage for Apple, so much so that WWDC never ends without Tim talking about the privacy and security of Apple devices.

While corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Snapchat are struggling to cope up with privacy concerns, Apple is embracing it and VPN can be their ace card.

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. A trusted VPN service allows you to browse the internet anonymously.

Apple Does Not Care About the Digital Oil

While other giants such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are competing to extract every bit of digital oil, Apple is playing the two-faced game to outrun all of them. Apple is embracing user privacy, which awards them with the customer’s trust and money. On the flip side, they make billions from these giants. Google reportedly paid $12 Billion to Apple to make google as a default search engine on the iPhone.

Apple often criticizes Facebook for its malpractices for consumer data privacy. Last year, Apple revoked Facebook’s enterprise developer certificate for distributing a data-collecting enterprise app with its consumers. According to the enterprise developer certificate conditions, it is not allowed. Apple just enforced the licensing agreements, gaining publicity for privacy in the process.

This kind of publicity over privacy has made Apple billions over the years. It allowed Apple to bag a 64% margin on its iPhone X, even though it lagged far behind in spec sheet than other flagship smartphones. Apple has made the iPhone and MacBook a closed system, so independent repair shops cannot fix your device, forcing you to pay for unnecessary hundreds of dollars for Apple service. Apple keeps removing the things we love: the Headphone jack, USB ports, home button, and it still maintains its position in the market.

You are not our product. Our products are iPhones and iPads. We treasure your data. We want to help you keep it safe.

— Tim Cook

If Apple really cared about privacy, they could have blocked these apps and supported alternatives such as DuckDuckGo and Telegram. Apple can invest money in its mapping service and compete with Google; it can use its iMessage app to compete with What’s App. That would be the real flex. Instead, Apple distributes data hogging apps in its App Store.

Apple Prison Needs a VPN

Photo by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash

It's no secret, Apple Prison is real and is here to “save” you from other platforms. The seamless ecosystem of Apple hardware is great, but that’s not what you call a true prison, right? You need to control the software too. That’s where the VPN would help.

Here’s a good read by Priya Reddy, if you want to learn more about VPNs

Apple can’t stay on top with just the hardware, it knows that real money is in the digital service market. They are already trying hard to compete with Netflix, Prime, and Disney in digital media with its Apple Tv +. Apple’s website homepage, which was once reserved to showcase the latest hardware, as of this writing, is now being used to grow Apple TV + audience.

In 2015, Apple released its iPhone upgrade program: Get a new iPhone every year for a monthly fee. You can call it ‘iPhone as a service’ plan. Then there is a suite of Apple subscription-based services such as Apple Music, Apple TV, iCloud, Apple Care, Apple News, and Apple Arcade.

This suite is missing a product that can tie all of Apple together and maintain the public privacy concern face of Apple’s is Apple VPN.

After people boycotting Facebook and switching to alternatives, no issue is more important than user privacy. Apple can use the leverage to maintain its status and give a comeback to articles like this one. Plus, there is no competition. Google and Facebook can’t do it because of their reputation in the matters of privacy and the fact that they rely on data to function. Amazon and Microsoft are not the best options because they don’t have as much control as Apple unless Amazon includes it in their Prime subscription — That could be a game-changer.

It confuses people when it comes to VPN; They don’t know which ones to trust, how to set it up, is it worth it, and how much bandwidth you are allowed. There is a gap in the market that Apple can easily fill. Apple is known for making things simple, people trust Apple, and billions of devices are out there waiting for the service.

In a world where privacy has become a human right, it makes more sense to protect it rather than to use it. Unlike Google and Facebook, Apple does not rely on consumer data for its operations, gaining an unfair advantage. VPN would give Apple the ultimate power to use this unfair advantage to gain more customers, trust, and in the end, a ton of money.

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

The cryptocurrency that challenged bitcoin. A founder who set out to rewrite the philosophy of cryptocurrency. Here is the story of a woman who scammed the world and then ran away.

One of the biggest scams in history — The Times

Before the unprecedented crypto boom of 2017, there were only a few people who knew about cryptocurrency and blockchain. Bitcoin which was and still is the biggest and best-known cryptocurrency was rising in value every day. From a few cents, it had grown to thousands of dollars per coin.

Investors from all over the world wanted a piece of the pie, no one wanted to miss this once in a lifetime opportunity. During that time, altcoins were being developed mostly on top of Bitcoin. Very few people in the world knew about blockchain in technical terms, the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies. Everyone else looked at it as ‘get rich quick’ scheme.

It was 90s all over again. No one knew what was happening, what they were investing in, and if at all it was real.

Most altcoins were fake. They just had a cool-looking website and a motto of destroying bitcoin. These coins were breathing off the success of bitcoin and had no underlying technology such as blockchain. Their creators wanted to raise money quickly and ‘fake it till you make it’ was the norm.

One such altcoin that gained a lot of attention was One Coin.

Here is a good post by Renee Yang to understand blockchain in simple terms-

For a little technical introduction to blockchain, here is a good post by Jun Wu-

One Coin

One Coin was founded in 2015 by Dr. Ruja Ignatova. Dr. Ruja claimed One Coin to be better than Bitcoin. In one of her conferences, she shouted, “In two years, nobody will speak about Bitcoin any more!”. Because of her high profile, intelligence, knowledge, and network, people believed in One Coin.

By now you must have realized that all these were lies made in public conferences. In fact, One Coin had no underlying technology, there was no blockchain.

In early October 2016, almost 2 years after One Coin was released, Bjorn Bjercke was offered a job as a CTO of One Coin. He was shocked to know that a so-called cryptocurrency company has been running for 2 years without blockchain.

Now, let’s talk about numbers.

Source: BBC

As I said earlier, most of the investors had no idea what they were investing in, they just cared about the numbers on their screens go up.

Investors who bought One Coin could see its value growing with time on One Coin’s website. One such investor was Jen McAdam, who invested €10,000 of her own and persuaded her friends and family members to invest €250,000 in total. She was excited to see her €10,000 turning into €100,000 in no time.

Many investors like her, 3 million to be more precise, invested in One Coin hoping to see good returns. Within 3 years, according to the graph above, more than €4 Billion was invested from countries all over the world. Some people say, in reality, it was €15 Billion.

The Founder

Source: BBC

To everybody who tells me, did I violate the cryptocurrency philosophy, guys, we are the biggest cryptocurrency community. We decide on the philosophy of cryptocurrency. — Dr. Ruja Ignatova.

Dr. Ruja Ignatova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. She emigrated to Germany with her family when she was 10. In 2005, she earned a Ph.D. in European private law from the University of Constance. She also claims to have studied at Oxford University. She previously worked in the McKinsey group, which is a very exclusive global consulting group.

In 2012, Dr. Ruja was convicted of fraud in Germany in connection with her father Plamen Ignatov’s acquisition of a company that was later declared bankrupt in doubtful circumstances.

Dr. Ruja was considered extremely knowledgeable and intelligent. She believed that banks and governments have too much power in terms of controlling currencies. She blamed large banks for the financial crisis of 2008, which by the way is correct. Thus people believed in her and were willing to follow her. Dr. Ruja proclaimed that old systems and institutions were outdated and One Coin will be the future.

In October 2017, after One Coin accumulated around €15 billion, Dr. Ruja goes missing. She was supposed to speak at a conference in Lisbon, but she didn’t show up. Some believed large banks kidnapped or killed her, or she was hiding from them.

After her disappearance, her brother took over the One Coin empire. In 2019, the FBI arrested him for money laundering and fraud.

How €15 Billion Was Generated

One Coin was not a cryptocurrency, there was no blockchain. So how it generated so much money?

One Coin was a multi-level marketing scheme.

Here is a good post by Lindy on MLMs-

One Coin utilized MLM to grow its network. They sold educational packages that contained tokens to allow you to mine One Coin. These educational packages would teach you how to become financially free. There were courses related to IPO, investing, etc, but obviously they were plagiarized.

One Coin Products

People were recruited to join the network using MLM marketing. People at the top would recruit their relatives or friends, and then they would recruit others, and so on. For each recruitment, a cut of the purchase would go up the ladder to each person. The problem is, this sort of marketing creates no value. As we know, One Coin used educational packages to hook people, so if you convinced your friends to purchase one package, you would get a commission and this is how people made money.

Money that was used to make these educational purchases would get converted into One Coin, and later the cryptocurrency could be converted to Euro.

But there was no exchange. One Coin always delayed the release of their exchange, and investors got more and more concerned. This issue was to be resolved at a conference in Lisbon, but Dr. Ruja didn’t show up.

Some people sold their houses as One Coin seemed promising. They didn’t want to lose another opportunity they had lost with Bitcoin.

One Coin had become a cult. People were so optimistic about it, they wouldn’t listen to anyone’s opinion. It gave them a promise of a better, financially free, and democratized future.

The charismatic personality and qualifications of Dr. Ruja made her unquestionable. People refused to believe in any other opinion, they thought it to be tricks played by the government and big banks.

Timothy Curry, a Bitcoin enthusiast, and cryptocurrency advocate tried to warn people about One Coin. He told Jen McAdam that it was a scam. She refused to believe at first, to the point that she started screaming at him for interfering with her decisions. After three months, when McAdam checked all the facts and questioned leaders at One Coin, it was clear. It was a scam!

Below is the video of Jen McAdam and Timothy Curry

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Yes! You can earn over 100,000 APY by just staking cryptocurrencies. The crazier part is that this number was around 200k APY just a few months ago. Before you think that I am just spitting random crazy numbers at you, I am going to explain to you how all this is possible, how you can earn these crazy rates, and obviously, what could go wrong.

When I first found out about this, I was very skeptical and simply ignored the project for weeks. My friend told me about it and he himself didn’t understand how it properly functions, so it seemed to me like a Ponzi scheme. But Olympus stood for months and many of its forks like Time wonderland were becoming popular. So, I thought of putting some money into these projects and then started learning about them.

What’s a better motivator to learn than your own money.

Before we go ahead, I would like to disclose that I have personally used these platforms but I am not affiliated or sponsored by any of them in any form. This article is based on my understanding of Olympus and how it works, please share your thought so that I can refine mine.

Here’s what you will learn from this article -

• What is DeFi

• DeFi 1.0 (Liquidity Mining)

• Problems with DeFi 1.0

• Enter DeFi 2.0

• How Olympus works

• APY is an illusion

What is DeFi

In case you haven’t heard of DeFi, it stands for Decentralized Finance.

DeFi is an attempt to replicate and enhance the current system of finance and the way we interact and use our money

DeFi, unlike traditional finance, is trying to create a platform that is more accessible to anyone. This accessibility includes not only basic financial services such as lending, borrowing, investing, etc but provides anyone with the ability to create their own financial products and solutions.

In theory, DeFi would provide anyone with an internet connection, access to lending, borrowing, investing, plus the ability to create financial products, and improve/contribute to existing financial solutions, regardless of their demographics, income, or other factors.

Contrary to this definition, most of the DeFi protocols are controlled by a few individuals and are not actually Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). However, most of these protocols aspire to be DAOs in the future. Initially, it is hard for any organization to become DAOs because of management, incentivization, and logistic difficulties.** **In my opinion, a true DeFi protocol should be a DAO.

DeFi 1.0 (Liquidity Mining)

One of the most basic functions of an asset is to be able to trade for another asset. To facilitate this trade, we need a middleman or a protocol that oversees and executes this transaction.

In a traditional setting, this is done by Centralized Exchanges (CEXs) which is an organization registered in a nation, controlled by a few board members and lives on a central server. Centralized exchanges maintain liquidity of certain assets they want their users to be able to trade and charge a transaction fee to the user to make this trade.

I won’t go into details about how centralized exchanges work but if you are interested in it, you can check out an article written by Sukhad Anand—

Let’s head over to the decentralized world again, shall we?

In the decentralized world, there is no central authority with liquidity. To access liquidity, these platforms provide users with incentives in the form of transaction fees and free tokens proportional to the provided liquidity. This is also known as liquidity mining or farming. The liquidity is usually provided in the pairs of two tokens ex ETH/USDT in a 50/50 ratio. The received tokens are called LP tokens.

Here’s a more detailed article on how to make money with DeFi 1.0 —

Problems with DeFi 1.0

To incentivize people to provide liquidity, DeXs introduced the concept of farming but there are several problems with that concept.

• If the platform stops providing lucrative LP tokens, the protocols might lose a lot of their liquidity.

• Liquidity providers often sell the LP tokens thus influencing the price of the token and making the platform less lucrative.

• Sudden price movements of assets can reduce the platform’s inventory value.

• When the users deposit a pair of assets, they are exposed to the price volatility of both of them. Thus, price movements can lead to impermanent loss and this loss is realized when users take out their stake.

• Smart contract bugs can lead to huge losses. (True for any Dapp)

Impermanent loss is the unrealized loss that a liquidity provider incurs. Let’s say I provide liquidity to a pool and my stake is 1%. When I take out my stake i.e. 1%, I would receive that share of the pool split into the two tokens. Now if the price of both tokens goes down, I would incur a loss! So I wouldn’t want to take out my share when the price is low, this is my Impermanent Loss since I have not yet incurred it, and I have an option to do so.

In short, DeFi 1.0 attracts yield farmers who just want high APY, and once that APY is not sustainable, they dump the tokens for profit. Thus the whole protocol has a time limit and is therefore not sustainable. Let’s look at what DeFi 2.0 brings to the table.

Enter DeFi 2.0

Just to be clear there is no textbook distinction between DeFi 1.0 and DeFi 2.0, people on twitter just started referring to Oympus DAO and it’s alternatives as DeFi 2.0.

DeFi 2.0 introduced the concept of protocols owning their own liquidity. Let’s break it down.

So in the DeFi 1.0 mechanism, protocols needed a way to distribute their LP tokens thus they would offer high APYs initially and attract liquidity providers who would stick as long as that APYs last. In the DeFi 2.0 system, there are incentive mechanisms that allow the protocol to own its liquidity and thus never run out of it like DeFi 1.0 protocols.

First, let’s start with what is Olympus and what it is trying to achieve.

Olympus is a algorithmic decentralized protocol that wishes to become a reserve currency of the world. To achieve this, it created a token called OHM which in the long term should be a stable floating currency backed by other assets, much like money was backed by gold.

How does it do it?

How Olympus works

There are 3 key components that make all this possible- Bonding, Treasury, and Staking.

Treasury

OHM is backed by assets such as Ethereum, DAI, Frax, etc in its treasury. This treasury consists of stable coin and non-stable coin assets which makes the** risk-free value of treasury assets**. The current treasury market values/market cap is 0.25 or 25%. The minimum value of an OHM is the value of treasury/supply of OHM. The current prize of OHM is $326.76 and backing per OHM is $96.02, thus OHM is currently valued at 3.4x its backed value.

But the new OHM is minted and backed by stable coins thus the reserve treasury backing per OHM is currently $64.4. If the value of OHM goes below this price, the protocol will burn OHM or buy more treasury assets. Thus OHM will always be ≥ value in reserve treasury assets.

Bonding

Bonding is essentially similar to the bonds you get from the federal reserve. Olympus provides you OHM tokens for cheaper than the market price, i.e what it is selling on DEXs. Currently, there are two bonds available- Frax bond (5.97%) and OHM-Frax LP (0.47%) So over the lockup period of 5 days, you will unlock certain OHM tokens, proportional to your position.

In Time Wonderland, you can even claim and stake the minted tokens every 8 hours to attain the highest yield possible.

The amount of OHM that would be received by the bonder is determined by a simple equation. Bond payout = mkt value of an asset or LP token / bond price

You can think of bond price as the value that the protocol thinks OHM is worth. Use the link below for details.

This bonding mechanism works as a profit mechanism for the protocol and allows it to buy its own liquidity from the market. Thus, the protocol makes money from the sale of these bonds and through transaction fees accumulated through transactions. Olympus DAO has made over $28.8M in LP fees alone.

But there is a catch. The supply of OHM is not capped! What does this mean, you ask?

When you purchase OHM bonds, you are getting OHM for a cheaper price than market value but the lockup period is 5 days. If the price of OHM increases or remains the same you are at no loss but if it decreases, you incur a loss. If you hold the token, you again incur the loss as the supply just increases because other participants are minting new tokens. So to be profitable you can either sell the tokens as soon as you mint them or stake them.

Staking

In staking, users stake the OHM token which removes those tokens from the circulation, and in return, the platform awards these users with staking rewards. Rebase is the amount of sOHM you receive after an epoch (8hrs) As of this writing, TIME is currently offering 0.5928% reward per epoch and Olympus is offering 0.3771%. This means that 5 day reward i.e 15 epochs is around 8.892% and 5.65% respectively. The APY number is the annualized return rate that is derived from this rebase reward.

So far in the history of Olympus DAO, the average OHM staked has been over 90%. This is the case because it does not matter how many OHM tokens you have, but the percent of the market cap you own. This is because the market cap of OHM might keep increasing with the circulating supply but the tokens you own will be constant if you don’t stake them.

APY is an illusion

Remember that there are two groups involved — bonders and stakers, and they both are trying to capture as much market cap of Olympus as possible.

Let’s say that the size of the pie is 1000 and you enter here and own around 100 units of this pie with a random guy who has the same amount. Now to grow your share of the pie, you either stake or bond. Looking at the crazy 85,000% APY, you decide to stake and the other guy is bonding.

If the bonding rate is higher than staking, bonders are growing their piece of the pie faster than the stakers and vice versa. So in this situation, one party would benefit more than the other. For a 100k APY, the 5 day ROI would be

x⁷³=1000 , where x is the 5 day ROI, 73 is the number of 5-day epochs.

Bonding vs Staking

This means x = 1.09925 or 9.92%. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that 5 day ROI is 6% i.e 7k APY for staking, and the bonding rate is 9%. It’s a no-brainer that Bonders would capture more of the growing pie. This means that the high APY that these protocols including Olympus or Time Wonderland offer does not mean much because of dilution.

Now you might be saying- but Bonding doesn’t always offer a higher APY! It’s usually less than staking.

This is true. It’s very rare for the bonding rate to be higher than staking but it’s not that it’s not possible. But even if the bonding rate is lower, you can make more money by bonding! Here’s how-

Let’s say that the bonding rate is 5% and staking is 6% for 5 days. At each epoch, you would get 5/15 = 0.33% for bonding and 6/15 = 0.4% for staking. The vesting period for bonding is 5 days but you can claim the rewards every epoch i.e 8 hours, and you can stake these back! Let’s say you claim these rewards every day and stake them back, if we do the calculation, we get —

When you do both bonding and staking

As you can see we get an 8.57% return which is greater than both staking and bonding individually! Now claiming and re-staking involves a gas fee so if you do this in Olympus, it might not be feasible because of the Ethereum gas fee. But you can do this in Time Wonderland and earn more rewards.

Resources and References

I was learning about applications of blockchain technology, how smart contracts, third-gen cryptos, and IPFS work, then I came across the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). The idea of ENS seemed pretty obvious to me, but I found that only a few people actually use it. So, I took it upon myself to share it with the world and save them some money and time.

What is Ethereum Name Service

In the early days of the internet, users had to type a long string of characters just to visit a webpage. This IP address looked something like this 142.250.183.46 Can you recognize which website it is?

That’s google. Copy that address and paste it in a browser to confirm.

Domain Name Service (DNS) provided a way to convert the human-readable address to a long, unreadable string of IP address that is readable by the computer. These services keep a track of all the domain names and provide the right IP address when requested.

Where does ENS come in?

The same problem which plagued the early web haunts web 3.0 now. To transfer crypto from one account to another requires a relatively long and cryptic address, which is impossible to remember and easy to mess up.

Unlike visiting websites, where if you mess up the IP address you can retype it again with no consequences; if you mess up the crypto address, you can lose the transferred amount. What’s worse is that now the recipient is angry because he did not receive the payment, and now the sender is broke.

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain.

ENS is a lookup system that converts the long unreadable address to something like shubhpatni.eth (you can actually send some eth there 😉). So, you can send ETH or any other cryptocurrency registered by the recipient to this address, and it will automatically send the money to the desired crypto account.

Note: Make sure to check if the recipient has registered the address for the cryptocurrency you want to send. You can check it by visiting https://app.ens.domains/name/{reciepient_name.eth}

How ENS works

ENS has a registry smart contract that keeps track of all domain names, sub-domains, owners, resolvers, etc, and allows the owner to change this data. The registry is the backbone of ENS.

The other key component of ENS is the resolver. Resolvers are responsible for translating names into addresses. So, a resolver must handle different types of data such as cryptocurrency addresses, IPFS content hash, user profile, avatar, etc. If need be, we can also add other data types through the EIP standardization process, with no changes in the ENS registry or any other resolvers.

How do resolver and registry work together?

Getting data from ENS is a two-step process. First, we need to find the correct resolver from the registry. To do this, we pass the ENS domain name to the register, which returns the address of the resolver. Now, we ask for the desired data from this resolver.

Benefits of ENS

Enough with the technical details. Now let’s see what you can actually do with an ENS domain and how it is much more than just a DNS for the decentralized web.

Host IPFS sites

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) with ENS allows you to host any website in a truly decentralized way. This means your website will be censorship-resistant, immutable, and in a decentralized network. If you don't want your website to end with .eth or want to connect your existing domain name to your IPFS hosted site, you can do so.

Here’s a good guide by Lucas Kohorst on how to host your site-

https://towardsdatascience.com/decentralizing-your-website-f5bca765f9ed

Store your E-Mail, profile, bio, and other info

ENS allows you to store more than just your cryptocurrency addresses or IPFS site. You can add addresses of other ENS-supported blockchains, your Twitter profile, bio, avatar, E-mail, and a lot of other things. People can find all these details by just visiting your .eth domain.

Here’s a guide by Brantly Millegan on how to set it up-

https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/guide-for-soulja-boy-to-setting-up-his-eth-name-and-beyond-b382717bdc71

Receive blockchain-based assets

You can use your one ENS domain to receive native assets of over 100 blockchains. This means you can receive tokens of those cryptocurrencies and any other asset, such as an NFT that lives on that blockchain. So, let’s say you added a BNB address to your domain, you can now receive any BEP20 token. The same is true for any other supported blockchain for which you have registered on ENS.

Below is the list of all the supported blockchains

https://github.com/ensdomains/address-encoder

ENS as an NFT

All ENS domains are registered under the ERC-721 standard, so they are an NFT, which means you can treat these domains as you treat an NFT. You can buy and sell it, transfer it to another account, or use it as collateral on projects which provide that service.

Don’t worry if you enter the wrong address

Another small but useful feature of an ENS domain is that it would tell you if you have entered an unregistered domain name. What does it mean?

Let’s say you wanted to send some ether to your friend or employee. If you enter the long string of hash, the application does not tell you if that address exists or is correct or not. But if you enter an ENS domain name, it will tell you if that address exists or not, and it will throw an error if the address is not owned by anyone.

One more thing! Storing any data on the Ethereum blockchain costs gas. So, I would recommend you to add your cryptocurrency addresses, bio, etc in one go to save on the gas fee.

This is all you need to know about ENS before creating your own domain. Below is a step-by-step guide by Brantly Millegan on how to set it up.

https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/step-by-step-guide-to-registering-a-eth-name-on-the-new-ens-registrar-c07d3ab9d6a6

You can check out my free curated list of resources on Gumroad to learn more about cryptocurrencies, or visit my socials.