I’ll also look at the factors behind ENS’s success so far. By analyzing development choices, growth strategies, successful partnerships, ecosystem initiatives, and emerging narratives, we can see how each factor has contributed to the growth of ENS and will continue to shape its future.

I’ll also highlight which integrations and verticals hold the most potential for further adoption, how they align with ENS’s growth objectives, which strategic partnerships could propel ENS forward the most and solidify its #1 spot in the market, and how Namespace contributes.

This includes all industries we engaged with in 2024, finding product market fit for ENS in different verticles, figuring out key value propositions for each, and how to best communicate it. It’s worth understanding how ENS is being adopted across different sectors, where its use can be expanded, simplified, and replicated to drive even more adoption.

This article can be called many names and can serve multiple purposes. It could be a Guide for new Service Providers, Roadmap for ENS growth, Focus areas for go-to-market strategy, What worked best for ENS, All-encompassing ENS knowledge base, or Lessons from the Service Provider in the trenches.

That said, you should look at this article as a stream of thoughts based on real-world experience of 2 years working with ENS.

I’m going for raw value here.

Areas covered

1. Offchain subnames

2. L2 Subnames

   1. Rollups, RaaS, App chains

3. Integrations

   1. Dev tooling support

   2. Public web3 libraries

   3. Blockchain tools and service companies

   4. Projects, Dapps, Companies

   5. Institutions

4. Partnerships

   1. Wallets

   2. Wallet-as-a-Service providers (AA service: smart accounts)

   3. Social networks

   4. Games

   5. CEXes (mention trends here that they are launching their own wallets)

   6. Crypto payments

   7. Identity-related products

   8. Web3 browsers

   9. Brands

   10. Other consumer apps

5. AI: autonomous identity

6. Domain Tokenization

7. ENS Labs

8. ENS developers (ecosystem, talent (acquisition and retention))

9. ENS Community (trust, loyalty, retention)

10. Degen-friendly strategies

Offchain Subnames

For those who don’t know - Offchain subnames refer to a concept related to allowing gas-free offchain-stored Subnames AKA ENS-based identity for wallets and addresses. Considering their massive success I think they deserve to take the number one spot in terms of being mentioned as one of the best growth strategies for ENS.

It’s estimated there are currently between 15-20M offchain subnames. The biggest issuers are cb.id (issued through Coinbase wallet), then uni.eth (issued through Uniswap wallet), and many other wallets either considering or already building using Offchain subname infrastructure (usually our Namespace or Namestone subnames).

Advantages of ENS Offchain Subnames and the reasons for their success:

• Gasless & Cost-Efficient: No expensive transactions are required for subname issuance or updates.

• Easy to implement: you can run your own subname infra or use existing third-party solutions for faster implementation (E.g. Namespace Dev)

• Scalable: Can support millions of subnames without overwhelming the Ethereum network.

• Permissioned Issuance: Allow fine-grained control over who can create and manage subnames.

• Flexible Storage Options: Subname data can be stored on IPFS, Arweave, databases, or even a DAO-governed registry.

• Better for Web2-style UX: Makes ENS more accessible for onboarding users without crypto knowledge.

• Smoother wallet onboarding: first-time wallet users are not required to have money to pay for gas to claim subnames.

Namespace’s Role in Offchain ENS Subnames

We’ve been deeply involved in building tooling and infrastructure to simplify ENS subname issuance, including:

• Namespace SDK – Allows developers to easily integrate ENS subnames into apps, wallets, and services.

• Namespace Dev – Allows developers to create and manage Offchain Subnames, generate API key, use Namespace hybrid resolver, and implement Subname registration in your app in minutes.

• Custom Subname Services – Assisting projects with setting up ENS-based identity and naming systems.

Namespace’s goal is to make ENS subnames the default identity standard across crypto apps and AI agents, but more on that later.

Why we should keep doing offchain subnames

Once we build the necessary standards and technology to seamlessly support all cross-chain actions, and everything runs smoothly across all Web3 chains and services, and especially since we’re anticipating the launch of Namechain, migrating Offchain subnames will be the easiest to do to Namechain, hopefully, their final residential address.

Building in Web3 is tough. Constant changes, upgrades, breaking points, outdated libraries, and often-times poor support make the tech stack far less mature than Web2. And rightfully so, compared to Web3, the Web2 world has existed for decades and is a lot more robust.

Offchain subnames offer a gradual transition from Web2 to a fully onchain, decentralized, and permissionless Web3. They serve as the first (pain-free) step toward moving operations onchain.

Once we build the necessary standards and technology for seamless cross-chain interactions, and everything runs smoothly across all Web3 chains and services, and as Web3 infrastructure matures, especially with the launch of Namechain, migrating Offchain subnames to Namechain will be the easiest and sweetest step.

And plus, companies love offchain subnames due to 1) ease of implementation, 2) flexibility in ownership structures, and 3) no gas costs for their users.

L2 Subnames

Pioneering a New (human-readable) Era

L2 chains are pioneering a human-readable revolution by natively integrating and offering ENS as a service, allowing their users to get onchain identity and their ecosystem projects to leverage its utility by using it in their apps.

Linea started minting subnames from linea.eth and minted a whopping 350k subnames in a month for free for their entire community.

Base did the same thing from base.eth and minted over 400k subnames in about 10 days and recently reported a profit of 300 ETH from registrations and renewals and are at 750k base.eth subnames - mindblowing!

We’re also seeing more efforts and interest from other chains such as ZKsync, led by the team behind Clave Wallet that started issuing ZKsync subnames from clv.eth to their users.

There’s an emerging interest and close collaboration with other L2 chains such as Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and as seen in the works of the official ENS Service Providers such as Namespace, Namestone, and Blockful, and other ecosystem builders that are dipping their toes in the Subname business, or as Variant would call it - namespace-as-a-service.

Leading by Example

Considering the massive success of Base and Linea naming service launches, hopefully, this inspires all of their ecosystem projects that build on those L2 chains, to do the same, integrate ENS into their dapps, and start offering subname registrations to their community and users. I cannot stress hard enough how important it is that Linea and Base did this and laid a blueprint that others can follow! With ENS moving to its own L2, and with the help of Service Providers, I see a lot more L2s adopting this.

Why I’m Bullish?

L2 chains function like self-contained economies, each with its own ecosystem, currency, and economic focus. They create independent environments (dapps, protocols, networks) where value is generated, exchanged, and accumulated, much like in traditional economies. Smart contracts + transactions are the unit of economic measure in these L2s and foster economic activity through various services and apps.

Therefore, L2 chains are striving to increase onchain activity by bringing more builders on their chains. Bringing the entire protocol such as ENS, which perfectly does a one job for these economies–naming–and is interoperable, modular, multichain, and extendible by design, therefore it can be used for almost any use case, and primarily for solving a cold-start problem for onchain identity, gives more reason to have it natively embedded on these L2s.

Furthermore, enabling all users onchain to have an identity where all of their addresses, socials, and profile information converge in a single standardized and widely accepted ENS profile, making their onchain interaction more user-friendly, intuitive, and human-like, is a strong argument for integrating ENS.

L2 subs = Trust-Minimized subs

The transition from fully trustful offchain subnames (e.g., thecap.cb.id) to trust-minimized L2 subnames (e.g., thecap.base.eth) is the first step towards self-sovereign identity. Solutions such as having ENS names on the L1 chain and subnames minted and secured on the L2 chains are a step in the right direction. However, to have a fully decentralized, permissionless, trustless, and unruggable subnames, it would involve burning certain fuses which adds a layer of complexity.

Making L2 subnames completely unruggable enforces some permanent modifications to the ENS name (until it expires and resets all fuses). Therefore, we highly suggest to owners not to make L2 subnames fully unruggable unless it’s absolutely 100% necessary. Even then, I would urge anyone doing it to test it on Sepolia first.

“Ecosystem”-chains

I can’t help but wonder, what would happen if all L2 chains whose tech stack is used to launch an ‘ecosystem’ chain, what would happen if all of them had namespace-as-a-service and were able to implement chain-wide naming service for all their users and ecosystem builders, similar to what Base did with Basenames. What if Optimism did it for its Superchains ecosystem (Zora, Mode, Worldchain…), what if Arbitrum did it for its Orbit ecosystem (One, Stylus, Nitro), what if ZKsync did it for its Elastic chains (Treasure, Zero, Lens, etc.)…

All natively supporting ENS!

This brings us to the next gigantic opportunity for ENS growth.

Rollup-as-a-Service

There was a time when I could keep up with everything in crypto - every new chain and its design, every new protocol and its features, every new DEX and its AMM innovation, etc. But our space moves at lightning speed, and it’s impossible to track it all. I may not know exactly how rollups will be used en masse, but one thing is clear: they’re gaining massive traction! That’s why ENS needs to be there from day one - natively integrated with every new rollup, providing easy-to-setup naming services from the ground up.

Let me get you bullish - what if every new rollup, the moment it launched, automatically supported ENS name resolution and subname registrations across all its apps? Or at the very least, made ENS integration so simple that enabling it was as easy as flipping a switch? App chains are coming, and we need to ensure ENS is positioned adequately for that shift.

I also expect we’ll see many rollups built using the Namechain tech stack, and we should make it effortless for them to integrate subname registration. But now we’re getting into speculation territory and that’s a discussion for another time.

Trend Vibes

They say that if something happens once, it might be a coincidence, but if it happens twice, the third time is inevitable. With ENS already integrated into Base and Linea (and great support for Base, Optimism, and ZKsync), it’s only a matter of time before other chains follow suit. And there’s plenty we can do to make that adoption smoother, faster, and more seamless for them.

This can be a job for one service provider, for example, to exclusively focus on bizdev and integrations in L2 chains + protocols. We could also have a case study of how Base and Linea did it, an implementation process overview, tools used, and custom solutions built around naming such as reputation, identity, etc. distribution mechanisms for subnames, monetization strategies, and so on. All of this should contribute to making it easier for others to do it.

One approach could be dedicating a service provider solely to business development and integrations with L2 chains, rollups, dev tooling providers, and protocols. Another would be creating a detailed case study on how Base and Linea implemented ENS, covering the integration process, tools used, and any custom solutions built around naming, such as reputation systems, identity frameworks, subname distribution mechanisms, and monetization strategies.

By providing these resources, we can lower the barrier for other chains to adopt ENS and accelerate its expansion across the ecosystem.

What got me bullish AF

We recently met with a very prominent RaaS provider that manages over 2,000 active rollups, most of which are thriving in their own right. And by “thriving,” I mean they’re building apps and tools tailored to specific industries, solving real problems in niche markets, and attracting millions of users.

The idea of offering Namespace-as-a-Service to every one of them, giving each rollup its own dedicated namespace to issue ENS-based identities to its users, is seriously exciting. The potential for insane: rollup-wide identity systems built on ENS is massive.

Namespace’s positioning

We aim to establish ourselves as the leading Subname Service Provider, or Namespace-as-a-Service provider, for RaaS platforms. Every RaaS provider already offers complementary services alongside their core offerings—such as RPCs, SDKs, hosting, indexing, DA support, etc. Our goal is to become their official naming service partner, providing a Rollup Naming Service that seamlessly integrates with their ecosystems. We’re incredibly excited about this opportunity, as we see it as one of the most high-impact, high-potential plays in the space.

Integrations

Embedding ENS into the Web3 Ecosystem

Integrations refer to companies or products that incorporate ENS as part of their technology stack or offering. Integrations are primarily about technology adoption and building ENS into the product or service itself as a feature or utility that improves its overall user experience.

Enhancing Accessibility Through Developer Tools

Integrations can serve to increase ENS accessibility - i.e. adding ENS to developer libraries like web3js, Viem, Ethers.js, WAGMI, etc. Other blockchain tools and services companies would benefit from offering their clients (developers/teams) a seamless ENS integration with its basic (resolution) and extended (subname issuance) utility.

The value proposition and the entire business model of these companies and public goods depend on the quality of the dev services they offer, and having ENS support natively embedded in their offering certainly adds to their appeal. Their business model revolves around getting more developers to use their services. As more developers come there, by having ENS supported, we’ll be directly onboarding more people on ENS. More integrations allow other developers to more easily discover and add ENS support in their apps.

The key to ENS success so far is ~1000 integrations making it one of the most popular protocols and making it the naming standard of Web3. The power of all these integrations enables ENS to claim the title of “Web3 universal username” for its .eth names and subnames, which are resolvable in all apps.

Dev Tooling Support

As ENS adoption grows across various projects and applications, distinct patterns emerge in what developers and users specifically need. By identifying these needs, we can build tailored features and tools that make ENS integration seamless.

For example, we see the emergence of Subnames on L2s and the spark in their interest in L2s and other L2-based projects. Therefore, we can build tools for developers and non-tech users that would allow them to easily start issuing subnames on those L2s, thus streamlining the adoption of ENS with one use-case-specific application (subname issuance).

For instance, with the rise of subnames on L2s and the increasing interest from L2-based projects, there’s a clear opportunity to develop tools that simplify subname issuance there. By creating solutions for both developers and non-technical users, we can accelerate ENS adoption with a dedicated, use-case-specific application - subname issuance on L2s. This mental model allowed me personally to discover and recognize the opportunity with rollup-as-a-service providers and I think the argument to pursue this opportunity has a lot of merit.

This is the primary thesis for building our platform and the Namespace SDK – easy L2 subname registrations and management for your apps. And I assume this is the primary thesis for building Durin that does the same thing. Another team that did a great job here is Unruggable team with Unrrugable Gateways.

Public and Private Web3 Libraries

It’s of utmost importance that ENS is readily available in some of the most popular and most used Web3 libraries such as Web3js, Viem, Ethers.js, etc. The reason this is very important is that these libraries depend on new their users (developers) being happy. And how do they make them happy? By providing the most comprehensive suite of tools they need to build their apps in the blockchain space. The business model of these companies relies on attracting and nurturing their developer community. As more developers join, ENS will directly be exposed to more developers. And as ENS awareness gradually rises through marketing, BizDev, educational, promotional, and other efforts, it will be increasingly requested in these dev environments with all its features and capabilities.

Blockchain Tools and Service Providers/Companies

Insight and a tip: Blockchain tools and service (usually private) companies that offer best-in-class tools for developers to build their dapps, have started launching external ‘marketplaces’ for others to promote their products by enabling them to work with their marketplace. This way, new and existing projects and protocols gain immediate exposure to thousands or hundreds of thousands of developers in some cases, and these blockchain tools and service companies are increasing their service offering by essentially outsourcing it and opening it to the public so that anyone can build and deploy them there on their marketplace that their developers can use.

Projects, Dapps, and Companies

To be clear: anyone who needs blockchain naming can (and should) integrate ENS. And if someone thinks they don’t need a blockchain naming system, they simply haven’t learned about ENS yet. Because once they do, they’ll realize they do need it.

ENS’s success is no secret, mainly attributed to its extensive integrations across Web3. Over 1,000+ projects and companies support ENS resolution, allowing users to see their ENS name, avatar, and records displayed across countless apps and websites. This widespread adoption is what gives ENS its power.

Given how important integrations have been to ENS’s success, we must double down on expanding them. Every project, dapp, protocol, and chain - anywhere ENS can enhance user experience, even slightly - should have an easy path to integration. I strongly support establishing a dedicated DevRel + BizDev team focused solely on driving new ENS integrations, helping companies of all sizes onboard ENS, and even building custom solutions when mutually beneficial.

I believe a future is coming where wallet addresses are replaced entirely by .eth names and subnames. Naming services will be a default feature for every app, and ENS will resolve automatically, everywhere. When that happens, we’ll no longer need to actively pursue integrations and partnerships, and I’ll be happy to see it.

Institutional Adoption

One very interesting and important thing about institutional adoption, whether it’s governments, banks, or large enterprises, is that once a system is adopted at this level, it tends to stay in place for decades. These institutions are slow to change, making adoption a challenge, but once ENS is integrated, it becomes a long-term fixture. This is more of a strategic move than anything else.

There should be an effort from the ENS Labs BD team but also Namespace and other service providers, to try and get integrated with any of these institutional types of clients. Once we have one, let’s say a bank for example, we can use them to create a case study, or a blueprint of how others can do it, what are the benefits ENS brought to them, increase in customer satisfaction, user acquisition and retention, and whatever other KPIs they track to measure their success and how ENS had a (hopefully) positive impact on it.

There should be an active effort by ENS Labs BD team, Namespace’s BD team, and other service providers to actively pursue integrations with institutional-level clients. The key is securing one major integration, for example, a bank, and then leveraging it as a case study. This blueprint could outline:

• How the institution integrated ENS (implementation details)

• Benefits ENS brought (e.g., improved customer satisfaction, strengthened security, increased user acquisition and retention, simplified day-to-day use of crypto-related services, etc.)

• Key performance metrics (KPIs) proving ENS’s impact and measurable results

What could they use ENS for? - Identity, verification, naming.

Another major entry point for institutional adoption is through rollups and sidechains. I strongly believe institutions will either launch their own chains or launch on existing ecosystems using established tech stacks like Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, Linea, or other RaaS solutions.

A great example is ZKsync which recently announced Deutsche Bank, Tradeable, and WonderFi launching their own Elastic Chains using its tech stack. Another noteworthy mention goes to QuarkID for using the ZKsync chain to issue 3.6M digital identities to people in Buenos Aires! (*hint, they all need names ;))

Partnerships: Strategic Alliances for Growth

Overview

Partnerships involve organizations or entities that collaborate with ENS in a more strategic or promotional way. This can include businesses that actively promote, co-brand, or distribute ENS (tokens, or names and subnames) as part of a larger value proposition. Partnerships are more about strategic alignment and mutual benefit, often involving marketing, cross-promotion, or co-development opportunities to help grow both ENS and the partner’s ecosystem. These efforts are closely tied to integrations, as successful partnerships often cannot exist without solid integrations in place.

If we want to transform the entire crypto user experience - from changing how wallets are displayed to giving every user universally resolvable names, we need a collective effort from the entire Web3 community. But more than that, ENS Labs and service providers must put partnerships high on the priority list to secure this transformation.

Something that has been working and I expect it to continue working is the following.

Main Focus Areas (For Now):

• Wallets

• Wallet-as-a-Service providers (AA service: smart accounts)

• Social networks

• Games

• CEXes (mention trends here that they are launching their own wallets)

• Payments

• Identity-related products

• Web3 browsers

• Brands

• Messaging apps and protocols

• Communities, Blogs, Influencers

• Other consumer apps

Wallets: The Gateway to Crypto

Why Wallets Are Important

Wallets are essential to the crypto industry because they serve as the primary interface between users and blockchains. They provide secure access to your assets and the web3 app you interact with. Wallets enable blockchain interaction and are the gateway to… financial freedom 👀 They provide you with full ownership and control over your assets and are cryptographically secured. They allow access to the entire crypto ecosystem - invest, trade, and participate in a $2.4 trillion market (at the time of writing).

Furthermore, wallets are onboarding vehicles for the masses. Every wallet has a clear call to action: “Come to crypto, use our wallet.” For games, it’s about playing and spending money. For DeFi projects, it’s lending, borrowing, and investing. For social apps, it’s connecting and sharing. Wallets, however, must first sell you on the vision of crypto as a whole. Hence, the onboarding vehicles for the masses.

However, with account abstraction and smart wallets - games, DeFi projects, dApps, and platforms are also becoming wallet providers. As wallet issuance becomes decentralized, we need to ensure that ENS is integrated everywhere, across all these touchpoints.

What Worked

• Coinbase Wallet (cb.id): has issued around 11 million subnames so far. These offchain subnames are gasless to claim, stored offchain (typically in centralized databases), and use CCIP-read for resolution. While the technical implementation and characteristics are well-known, the real potential of offchain subnames lies in their broader impact.

  Imagine 11 million Coinbase Wallet users, each with a username in the form of an ENS subname (thecap.cb.id). This subname works seamlessly within the Coinbase Wallet app, but it also resolves in any other wallet, dApp, protocol, chain, or client that supports ENS.

  What excites me most is how offchain subnames serve as a frictionless entry point into the ENS ecosystem. They allow users to quickly adopt a Web3 identity with minimal effort and understanding required. I believe companies with large user bases will leverage offchain subnames to introduce their users to Web3.

  Once users have an offchain subname, they could easily claim the same subname onchain - whether on L1s, L2s, or even some app chains. The process would be as simple as flipping a switch to claim their subname onchain. I think Coinbase (cb.id) will likely implement a similar feature, taking into account lessons learned from Base.eth subnames.

• Uniswap Wallet (uni.eth): Uniswap recently launched its Wallet and integrated ENS, issuing subnames under the uni.eth name. As of now, they’ve issued around 1 million subnames. This approach provides a unified, cohesive digital identity for all users, making it easier to manage their interactions across the platform.

  Whether for airdrops, promotions, or simply showcasing a user’s identity, these subnames simplify operations and enhance the user experience. By consolidating identities under a single ENS namespace, Uniswap is streamlining its digital ecosystem and strengthening its connection with users.

  Rainbow Wallet (ENS registrations): might be one of the first, if not the first, wallets to fully integrate ENS. They’ve taken it a step further by allowing users to register ENS names directly within the app. This is a prime example of attention to detail and quality in product design.

  While ENS may not be strictly necessary, meaning your wallet can function without it, offering it shows a certain class, OG status, and commitment to high standards. It shows a dedication to building products that are not only functional but also meticulously crafted with a major focus on user experience.

  Currently, this level of implementation is typically seen in large teams with broad project scopes, inclusive goals, and the resources to afford sophisticated product developments. However, thanks to the growing tools and services being developed within the ENS ecosystem, this level of integration will soon be accessible to everyone, with ease.

• Unicorn Wallet (taking it to the next level): is revolutionizing wallet infrastructure and go-to-market strategy by utilizing smart accounts and ENS subnames to enable anyone to easily launch a wallet for their community. Recently, they partnered with ETH Denver and successfully onboarded 20,000 users to crypto. As a naming service, Unicorn Wallet leverages ENS through the Offchain subname service provided by Namespace, further enhancing the user experience by offering simple, seamless wallet solutions tied to ENS identities.

Case Studies Needed (!)

It would be really valuable to see measurable data that demonstrates how ENS simplifies processes, how users respond positively to it, how it can generate revenue possibly, etc. for these wallets. Case studies showcasing these outcomes could be used in a presentation or pitch deck specifically tailored for wallets. After reading it, wallets should have a clear understanding of how ENS can have a positive impact on their platform, whether through enhanced user experience, increased engagement, new monetization opportunities, or something else.

How Does ENS provide value here?

Integrating ENS subname registration into wallets greatly simplifies the user onboarding experience, as well as user transactions and transaction safety. One often underestimated aspect is the value of ENS address records. With support for over 100 blockchain types (see ENSIP-9), imagine registering an ENS name or subname (whether onchain or offchain, free or paid) to create a smart account. This automatically provides a wallet + name that can support over 100 blockchain addresses, meaning that by simply choosing a name for your wallet, you could receive crypto on any of those 100 blockchain networks, all using that single ENS name!

What Makes Me Bullish

I’m thrilled to see OGs in the space like Coinbase, Uniswap, Rainbow, and others embracing ENS and implementing it. This is going to inspire others to do the same, and soon, we’ll hopefully see a lot more human-readable names replacing the traditional 0x addresses.

Integrating ENS resolution and subname registrations isn’t just a technical upgrade—it’s a cultural movement that benefits everyone, especially those who have been hesitant to enter crypto due to its complexity. One Web3 username for all addresses? That’s a simple solution to a major barrier.

Wallet-as-a-Service Providers

Essentially, WaaS providers enable businesses to seamlessly onboard users into the crypto world without the usual complexities of wallet management. They usually work with crypto exchanges, startups and app builders, DeFi platforms, gaming projects, e-commerce platforms wanting to accept crypto, fintech firms expanding into the crypto space allowing all their users/clients to buy, hold, and trade digital assets, and more client types.

Why This Matters for WaaS Providers

Integrating ENS into WaaS offerings helps bridge the gap between usability and the complex addresses, making crypto more accessible to mainstream users. By simplifying wallet management and allowing users to interact with human-readable names, the clients of the WaaS providers can significantly improve user onboarding and ease-of-use in their products.

In addition to improving usability, ENS names offer significant interoperability and branding opportunities that businesses can leverage to strengthen their identity in the Web3 space.

By integrating ENS, WaaS clients can differentiate themselves in a competitive market, attract more users, and provide a more professional and comprehensive wallet experience that meets both user expectations and industry demands. Companies like Biconomy, Web3Auth, Privy, Stackup, Pimlico, Etherespot, Magic.link, and ZeroDev are already offering solutions that align with this vision. Each has a unique approach but all stand to benefit from adding the human-readable component of ENS to their services.

This is another area of focus that we as ENS Service Provider plan to focus on, besides regular wallets, because we think this represents a grassroots approach to implementing ENS at the ground zero.

Social (Media) Networks

Many protocols are building identity-verification apps and Sybil-resistance services. As the rise of AI agents and AI-generated content accelerates, I believe that social networks will play a critical role in distinguishing AI agents from humans. I expect to see a gradual multi-decade transition from the centralized social apps we’re used to, to more user-aligned decentralized alternatives.

One appealing benefit of a decentralized and permissionless social network is that it solves one aspect of the cold-start problem for identity and your social circle. Using Farcaster as an example, any client (social network) built using the Farcaster protocol can leverage its existing and very rich data structures about its users to kickstart its network.

Farcaster has >1M addresses connected to it. Check the Dune dashboard for more stats. Despite having just 1M users and around 30k daily active users, it has become one of the most successful Web3 protocols. For comparison, Meta has 3.3B users, Instagram has 2B, TikTok has 1.9B, Snapchat has 800M, and X has 300M. The Web3 space is still ridiculously early.

ENS context

Allowing users to claim their existing Web3 identities, such as their .eth name or subname, is a no-brainer for these new Web3 social networks. Users can bring their profiles, onchain history, social circles, followers, feeds, and more with them. Which is the promise of decentralized social networks.

Games: Massive Onboarding Opportunity

Even though I’m not much of a gamer, there are no words to describe how bullish I am on the gaming industry. But there are numbers:

• Gaming market size: ~$250B

• Player count: ~3.2B

• Mobile gaming market: ~$100B

• Spent on games per year: ~$200B

• Blockchain games market size: ~5B

• Global tournament prize pools:

  • Dota 2: $40M, Total viewership: 107M people

  • Counter-strike: $2M, Total viewership: 71M people

  • League of Legends: $6.5M, Total viewership: 142M people

  • Fortnight: $15M, Total viewership: 100M people

You see where I’m going with this…

Note* the numbers are quick Google searches cross-checked with ChatGPT asks, therefore, my assumption is they are more or less correct but should be double-checked with trusted sources.

If you look beyond the impressive numbers and bullishness surrounding the gaming industry, you’ll see the true potential games have for onboarding users. This is why every game should integrate ENS as their native username system for all registered players. Every game you sign up for is likely to feature some form of smart wallet designed specifically for that game. Now, imagine if, along with that wallet, you could receive a wallet name that is universally recognized and can communicate and resolve across the entire Web3 space. This would work seamlessly in any dapp or project that supports ENS, as opposed to being stuck with a siloed, centralized identity that only functions within that specific game. When you think about it that way, ENS sounds like the clear winner, right? It’s time to focus on games and gamers, making ENS integration as simple and easy as possible for them!

Although it’s been challenging to get the games to integrate ENS so far, we’ve had some great conversations with a few game developers interested in integrating ENS. Each team we’ve spoken with has had unique custom implementation requests, such as the ability to pay for subnames using native tokens, an easy transition from offchain to onchain subname implementation, and more. Given the size and potential of the gaming industry, Namespace plans to take all the feedback we’ve received and integrate those specific feature requests into our app. By doing this, we’ll create a versatile, game-specific solution that can be used by other game projects as well.

How Games Leverage ENS

• DCL.eth: Player usernames. Plots of land as subnames.

• OVR.eth: Using subnames as plots of land in their metaverse.

• Creative Idea: Bootstrapping/fundraising through selling subnames for a spot reservation basically whitelisting your wallet (based on the subname) to get early access. Improved in-game economy by having another form of tradable asset in there. Potential revenue generating mechanism - onchain (paid) subname registration for players comes with additional perks and benefits.

CEXes: Transitioning Users Onchain

It’s hard to believe that CEXs are still seen as the go-to places for onboarding crypto users, yet they have rather messy interfaces (trader-focused) AND don’t have human-readable names. Users are still forced to copy-paste addresses when transacting and crypto people first learn about limit orders and then about wallets, wallet security, onchain asset management, etc… (smh).

If there’s one thing of max value that I can share with you that will inspire you to look deeper into this verticle for helping ENS grow is this notable trend I’ve seen:

Many CEXs are launching their own wallets! This seems like part of a larger plan to eventually move everyone onchain. By using familiar CEX interfaces to onboard users and gradually transitioning them to onchain experiences, launching a wallet appears to be a smart strategy for now. (Coinbase, Kraken, BitGet, even Uniswap which is a DEX).

An interesting parallel here is that when you want to issue human-readable names and identities to wallet users, you can start with minimal friction by offering Offchain subnames. These subnames are gasless (free) to claim, don’t require on-chain transactions, and can be claimed with a new wallet that has no funds. They function just like any other ENS name or subname, meaning they are resolvable in all ENS-supported apps and ecosystems. Once users get comfortable with onchain interactions, accumulate funds, and understand the benefits of being onchain, they can claim their (once offchain) username onchain (on L1, L2s lie Base, Optimism, etc. or Namechain). Just saying.

Ok, the Service Provider Program just announced, and we have 2 product launches + an AI product announcement to do. I’ll keep the rest short(er).

Payments

Last year, some of the biggest payment companies in the world showed support for ENS by integrating resolution services into their apps, most notably PayPal and Venmo. What I find most valuable about PayPal and Venmo’s support is the legitimacy it brings to ENS. Their adoption signals trust and mainstream recognition, reinforcing ENS as a critical part of Web3 infrastructure.

What I like about PayPal and Venmo is the legitimacy it gives to the ENS. What I like about the onramping companies is that you could potentially onramp people to crypto, have them deposit funds to their new wallet, and from those funds charge a $1 for a wallet name. This creates an ongoing demand for new Subnames, but it also creates a financial incentive for payment companies to do this because they can make more money.

Beyond legitimacy, there’s a powerful onboarding opportunity with onramping companies. Imagine a flow where users onramp into crypto, deposit funds into a new wallet, and in the same transaction claim a wallet name for free or for a fee. This not only creates a continuous demand for ENS subnames but also introduces a financial incentive for payment companies—turning wallet name issuance into a revenue stream.

One great example I want to highlight is Rise which does payroll services (among other things). They have issued around 150K onchain identities (RiseIDs) as part of its payroll system. I believe each user that is onboarded gets an opportunity to mint an NFT that is associated with their onchain identity within the context of the Rise app.

Safes, multisigs, and DAO-focused payment services are another good use case. These platforms handle onchain treasury management and payments, making them ideal candidates for implementing ENS - further simplifying wallet naming, identity and transaction management.

Identity-Related Products

This category is a no-brainer.

Take Privado, for example. It provides tools and services for onchain self-sovereign identity management using ZK proofs. If Privado integrated ENS, it could enable all of its customers who leverage its solutions for various identity-related use cases to issue ENS subnames to their users. This would position ENS as a foundational identity layer, distributed through other identity service providers like Privado.

Another thing is that Privado, much like other service providers, encourages external contributions to expand their service offerings and is welcoming to other projects building similar things. They have a marketplace where you can browse and use identity-related services alongside their core offering. I expect more and more providers to do the same in the upcoming years.

Web3 Browsers

Recently, ENS Labs welcomed Mely and James as the newest team members leading Partnerships and Growth for ENS. One of the key side quests they should absolutely pursue? Native browser resolution for .eth domains. I think this falls out of the scope of Service Providers because Labs is the only team with enough credibility and connections to see this through.

To get you a little excited: what if .eth domains were natively supported in all browsers? This would mark a major shift, signaling that browsers now embrace fully permissionless, decentralized, and censorship-resistant websites. Imagine the demand this would create for ENS, the only truly decentralized domain name solution.

Website Builders

One product category that will help us pump these numbers is no-code decentralized website builders. These are website builders like any other (Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, etc.) but use ENS domains and decentralized storage as infrastructure for deploying and hosting websites.

The total number of websites worldwide varies depending on the source, but most estimates converge around 1.5B websites and approximately 360M registered domains.

For comparison, there are only 1.7M ENS domains and 950k domain owners, with just 30k decentralized websites currently live (content hash records). While these numbers are impressive within our own ecosystem, they’re still very low compared to traditional DNS domains. (All ENS stats here.)

Brands

Brands have a powerful network effect on ENS. Currently, at least 30 major brands own ENS names (see the list here: https://ownerslist.eth.limo/). The next step is getting these brands to actively issue subnames to their communities, integrate ENS into loyalty programs, or explore other ways to utilize ENS with their business models. By embedding ENS into their ecosystems, brands can enhance user engagement, strengthen their Web3 presence, and create new opportunities for customer acquisition and interaction.

Messaging Apps and Protocols

Messaging apps and protocols are a natural fit for ENS, as their interests align perfectly. ENS is the de facto username system of Web3, and messaging apps need usernames linked to wallet addresses to enable intuitive peer-to-peer communication between wallets. It’s much better (UX-wise) if that communication is not perceived as ‘wallet to wallet’ but ‘ENS to ENS’.

There are two ways to approach this:

1. Subs for Messaging apps – Messaging apps can integrate ENS subname registrations, allowing all their users to claim a human-readable identity for easy and more intuitive communication.

2. Protocol-Level Integration – Working directly with protocols like XMTP, DM3, and others to offer ENS as a built-in service for their clients. This ensures messaging apps have a streamlined, low-friction way to implement ENS, enhancing user experience across the ecosystem.

Communities, Blogs, Influencers

Communities, blogs, and influencers are in a unique position to integrate ENS and provide real value to their audiences. All of these can issue brandable wallet names for their fans, followers or members, offering them a simple, recognizable identity that ties them directly to the influencer’s brand. This makes it easier for followers to engage and interact with the influencer onchain, while also providing a more personalized and professional experience in the community setting.

AI: Autonomous Identity

The rise of autonomous AI agents marks a major shift in digital systems, where these agents operate independently, making decisions and engaging in economic activity without human intervention. However, for these agents to truly function as independent entities, a critical infrastructure challenge must be addressed: establishing verifiable, persistent identities that enable meaningful agent-to-agent and agent-to-human interactions. ENS presents an ideal solution for this, offering a decentralized and cryptographically verifiable identity layer that preserves the core principles of Web3 while allowing autonomous agents to participate in complex economic systems.

ENS provides several key features that make it a perfect foundation for an AI agent registry. First, it offers a global, human-readable, and machine-verifiable naming system, which allows agents to be easily discovered by humans and other agents across Web2 and Web3 environments. Furthermore, ENS operates on the Ethereum blockchain, ensuring that identities are cryptographically verifiable without relying on centralized authorities. This verifiability extends beyond identity, enabling agents to advertise their capabilities and interact with one another seamlessly. Through ENS’s hierarchical domain structure, agents can be organized in sophisticated ways, supporting delegation, governance models, and efficient discovery across diverse Web3 space.

Beyond serving as an identity framework, what makes ENS powerful is how it can help create an economy for autonomous agents. Integrating agent metadata allows agents to define their abilities and permissions, ensuring they can operate within clear limits. It also supports agents working across different blockchains, so their identities and actions stay consistent across different working environments. This decentralized approach eliminates the need for centralized trust mechanisms, allowing agents to function as sovereign entities. As the AI agent economy continues to grow, ENS-based agent registries will provide the foundational infrastructure for agent-to-agent interactions and cross-chain collaboration, positioning ENS as a cornerstone in the development of AI identity.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what Namespace has been focusing on for the first part of 2025 and will be one center of attention moving forward as our Service Provider work and application. 🫡

Domain Tokenization

Trust me on this one.

Domain tokenization is poised to become a significant trend in Web3 because it bridges the gap between traditional internet infrastructure (regular domain names) and the decentralized, blockchain-based ecosystem of Web3.

Here’s why it will be big:

• Ownership and Control: Tokenization transforms domains into NFTs, granting users permanent, decentralized ownership instead of leasing them from centralized entities like ICANN or GoDaddy.

• Interoperability with Web3: Tokenized domains, like those from ENS, integrate with dApps, wallets, and identity systems, simplifying Web3 interactions.

• Monetization and Trading: Tokenized domains become tradeable assets, enabling buying, selling, or fractional ownership on NFT marketplaces, and unlocking new economic potential.

• Decentralized Internet Infrastructure: Tokenized domains pair with decentralized solutions like IPFS, supporting a censorship-resistant, fully decentralized web.

• Digital Identity and Branding: Tokenized domains act as portable, verifiable digital identities, linking wallets and profiles for enhanced Web3 branding.

• Speculative Value: Tokenized domains are seen as a Web3 "land grab," with names like .fun or .dev gaining value, echoing the .com boom.

The combination of true ownership, Web3 integration, and economic potential makes domain tokenization a natural evolution for the decentralized internet. It’s not about replacing traditional domains, it’s about extending their capabilities onchain. As blockchain adoption grows, tokenized domains will become as foundational to Web3 as URLs were to Web2.

Just trust me on this one, k?

ENS Ecosystem: Developers

I’ll never write an ENS article without mentioning the importance of ecosystem building and development - bringing in new developers, thinking about developer acquisition, and fostering talent retention. This is a topic I could talk about for days.

The overall health and longevity of a chain or protocol are directly tied to the activity, dedication, and commitment of its developer community. Nurturing this is crucial. Initiatives like hackathons, events, rewards, grant programs, fellowship programs, and both small and large grants run by ENS working groups all play an essential role.

These are the areas we should focus on if we want ENS to continue thriving. While there’s always room for improvement, I truly believe that compared to other ecosystems, ENS ranks very highly… close to the top actually.

ENS Community: The Overlooked Strength

One often most overlooked strength of ENS is its incredible community - advocates, collectors, traders, brokers, community space hosts, educators, and more. These are people who have been passionate about ENS for years, with no compensation, incentives, or expectations in return. I remember one specific day there were a significant number of ENS name registrations. This resulted in ENS DAO generating substantial revenue, all thanks to the dedication, speculation, and belief of the ENS community in the ENS protocol. Whether we like it or not, speculation plays a role in driving demand, and it translates into profit!

Moreover, I’ve witnessed some incredible stories of people onboarding new users to crypto, gifting them ENS names, and donating names to others. The ENS community is made up of individuals who work tirelessly for the ecosystem, and no one officially employs them or provides the right tools to easily distribute names and subnames for profit or give incentives (financial or other) to keep doing what they are doing. This reveals a big misalignment of incentives. Unfortunately, the community of traders, speculators, and those seeking profit is often perceived negatively, and too many overlook its potential. But if we align incentives, this community could be a powerful engine for growth.

The hype, the name registrations, and the overall traction that ENS has gained can largely be attributed to this very community - through trading, hyping, and flipping .eth names. The true potential lies in leveraging the ENS community to drive real growth. Imagine allowing them to mint subnames for their friends, family, local businesses, followers, and communities. Believe it or not, this is already happening! I once heard a person tell a story about how they onboarded their local shop owner to crypto and had them register .eth name and set it as a primary name. True story.

If we enable all ENS name owners to become Web3 identity service providers and mint subnames for others, we could onboard millions of users. But to unlock this, we need platforms that make this possible, we need proper incentives that drive desired behaviours, and we need a lot of discussions to get there.

Degen-Friendly Strategies

Meme tokens and meme communities are some of the most powerful forces in the crypto space, and they have an unmatched ability to onboard people into crypto. Ultimately, our goal should be to ensure every crypto user has access to an ENS name or subname. The specific strategies we use to get there may vary depending on the stage of the market cycle, but the end result remains the same.

Some of the degen-friendly approaches we’re currently exploring (and have confirmed they work) involve building tools and apps that cater to the needs of emerging and trendy protocols, like Farcaster and Frames. These platforms are a great fit for spreading ENS adoption quickly and effectively, especially within fast-moving communities.

We also worked with a few meme token communities during the Onchain Summer campaign led by Base. In each instance, we worked with amazingly talented folks who are the most passionate community builders I’ve ever seen. That said, I’ll always welcome working with anyone who has been an honest meme coiner, with a proven reputation for their brand, their values, and community strength.

Final Thoughts

If I was a smart man I would break this article into 5-10 smaller articles and publish them every few weeks making it look like I’m constantly writing about something. But I’m not a smart man as you can see.

Truth be told, I wish I had more time and energy to write about all of this. There’s so much more to share - so much I’ve learned about the protocol, the DAO, the inner workings of governance, the ENS ecosystem, and the countless products, ideas, and initiatives that ENS improves.

But, there’s plenty of time ahead of us and lots to do.

So let’s get to work.

🫡

The Unsung Heroes

The first time the Service Provider program was announced I felt inspired and wanted to write about the ENS ecosystem, its builders and contributions, and how big of a role they play in the ecosystem. You can read more about that here:

https://mirror.xyz/thecap.eth/-5iqLKLfZDyCaWVg26kx-e-GrvHBs6d7V74OtUqaXlc

Now, a year and a half later, I still find it funny that people are not bullish enough on Service Providers and the ENS ecosystem. ENS has organically attracted some of the best builders in Web3 without needing to spray millions in $ENS incentives. When you compare our ecosystem or even our weekly calls, we rival (in numbers and quality) those building on L2 chains. And that’s wild when you think about it because L2s are full-fledged economies where you can build anything. ENS, by contrast, operates within a much more constrained scope—domains, identity, naming services, etc. Yet despite these limitations, we’ve built one of the most vibrant, high-quality developer ecosystems in Web3. That should tell you something…

https://x.com/TheCapHimself/status/1836426454713921607

ENS is open-source

We all know what being open source means but do we really know what it implies and enables? Let me try to capture the value and importance of being open-source.

Open-source projects have a fundamental edge over private companies. When anyone, anywhere in the world can contribute, innovation and scaling aren’t bottlenecked by a single entity’s vision or resources. It becomes a global movement of builders collaborating to create something bigger than themselves, something that benefits everyone, equally.

People spend way too much time fixating on ENS Labs, with both praise and criticism, while overlooking the work Service Providers are doing. More importantly, there’s this expectation that Labs should build everything—the protocol, the tools, the apps, and not just one, but multiple apps tailored to different users and use cases. That’s neither realistic nor how ecosystems thrive. The real strength of ENS comes from the broader community of builders pushing it forward.

To clarify, ENS Labs is in charge of developing and improving the protocol, enhancing performance, features, scalability, etc., while ensuring it remains decentralized, neutral, and censorship-resistant for everyone. Tailoring the protocol to fit the specific needs of one user group wouldn’t just complicate things, it would fundamentally shift how the protocol is perceived and used by the broader ecosystem.

That’s exactly why the Service Provider program exists. To fill market needs, build apps, drive developer adoption, increase dev integrations, forge partnerships, focus on industries, and push innovation forward. It’s about installing ENS into every corner of Web3, verticle by verticle.

The Role of Service Providers

There’s an ongoing discussion about the role of Service Providers—what they should focus on and how to best leverage their time and skills to maximize ENS’s impact and growth.

Coming from the startup world, I always approach things by identifying real problems and finding practical solutions that actually help people. All Service Providers should be asking themselves this question: What needs to be done to cement ENS as the de facto naming service of Web3, forever? And figure out how to best utilize their unique skills and make meaningful contributions.

When deciding how to best contribute my time and effort to ENS, I kept asking myself that question over and over again. That question shaped my focus, and I’ve shared my thoughts on what needs to be addressed in my case, how I’m defining the problem that exists in the market, and what I’m doing to solve it.

I outlined my thoughts in this article:

https://mirror.xyz/thecap.eth/ljmAC-waaXuFnAGwqXdFbxW1GD3uWhF2kHWRFckoAeA

Our approach to contributing to ENS is not one-dimensional because we embody our work (ENS) as a lifestyle. That means building, collaborating, advocating, hosting spaces, doing podcasts, appearing at events, giving talks about ENS, and representing ENS across different channels. It’s about making ENS an integral part of our daily lives, not just through writing code, but through community and culture.

And we are not the only ones! A few months ago, I reached out to my fellow Service Providers to check in on what they’re building. My goal was simple: highlight their work and make sure more people, or at least my subscribers and followers, know about their contributions to ENS. Too much great work flies under the radar, and that needs to change!

Service Providers Showcase

A couple of months ago, I asked every Service Provider to give me updates on what they were building. Even though I knew what everyone was working on, I was still blown away by their impact. Hopefully, this gives the next generation of Service Providers a clear picture of what the first batch focused on and serves as a foundation for what’s next.

Eth.limo

https://eth.limo/

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We've been focused on introducing more resilient systems and processes to ensure that performance and availability are top-notch. In addition, we also spent a significant amount of time this year preparing for the eth.link migration to the eth.limo service. In terms of new features, we are in the process of building and testing a more "trustless" implementation of the eth.limo service that pushes the resolution logic down the client.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the ENS?

Public goods are hard, but a rising tide lifts all ships. The eth.limo/eth.link services play a pivotal role in expanding the reach of decentralized websites built with ENS by providing valid URLs, accessible to anyone. This means that there is a lower barrier to entry for developers and users alike when it comes to either publishing or accessing decentralized content. Additionally, we also provide resolution capabilities via DNS over HTTPS (DoH) which allow users to wire up various clients (Kubo, native DNS, etc...) with CCIP-read enabled ENS name resolution.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

• We launched *.gno.limo, using the Genome Domains ENS integration for Gnosis.

• We now power the eth.link service.

Reasons to Be Bullish

We aim to continue to partner with and support ENS ecosystem projects and their users. Ideally, our future state is one in which we have removed the vast majority of implicit trust assumptions relating to the eth.limo service, without sacrificing performance or usability.

Ethereum Follow Protocol

https://efp.app/

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We are building Ethereum Follow Protocol (EFP), a decentralized onchain social graph protocol for Ethereum accounts. It is a new primitive of the Ethereum identity stack that complements the other existing elements, especially ENS.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

The Ethereum ecosystem needs a native onchain social graph protocol that complements the other existing elements like ENS. It adds a social layer to all the things that we’re already doing in crypto.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

• EFP launched on September 24, 2024!

• Activity in one week: ~4.4k lists created by ~2.5k unique users, who have performed nearly 100k list operations (follow, unfollow, tag, untag).

• Activity on the public testnet: ~1.2k lists created by ~1.1k unique users, who performed ~72k list operations.

• For up-to-date stats, see the EFP Leaderboard and our Dune analytics dashboard.

• EFP has 13 confirmed integrations so far. For those interested in integrating, see our public API docs.

• EFP is the only web3 social graph protocol that does not have its own competing name and profile system and instead makes full and exclusive use of ENS: Primary Name, avatar, header, bio, twitter, github, telegram, discord, URL, and contenthash.

Reasons to Be Bullish

EFP’s ambition is to become a new protocol of the Internet, alongside ENS, enabling a new era of Internet accounts that enable self-sovereign, portable identities.

Unicorn.eth

https://www.unicorn-wallet.com/

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

Adding utility to names. We want to make every name a safe, user-friendly wallet, or even better, a wallet creation portal!

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Onboarding new users to web3 is unreasonably difficult.

• 0x addresses

• Networks

• Seed Phrases

• Phishing

• Countless ways to make expensive mistakes

We want to make all of the above a thing of the past and help anyone with a domain name onboard their users to web3.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

Our infrastructure is going to be used by everyone at ETH Denver, and that's only the beginning. We hope to soon enable anyone who wants to launch a wallet to be able to launch the safest wallet in web3 in just a few clicks, all built on top of ENS.

Reasons to Be Bullish

Everyone talks about onboarding the next billion, but we have a strategy to actually do it. We want to enable brands to SAFELY onboard users into the space, while also promoting their brands via their domain name. Each brand can control what their users are able to access in the brand's wallet space, and if the user has wallets with multiple brands, the assets underneath are the same (one smart contract wallet, multiple domain names; Thx ENS!) Our wallet design makes phishing nearly impossible and we remove all the complexity from the normal web3 experience, giving the user and CEX-like experience.

Wildcard Labs

https://wildcardlabs.xyz/

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We're building a unified records resolver that empowers users to manage their ENS records across any Layer 2 (L2) network that posts its proofs on Ethereum Mainnet. Whether it's Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, or others, we want users to have the freedom to manage their ENS data on their preferred L2. Our motto is "Unchain your ENS records"—emphasizing the flexibility and interoperability of ENS across the Ethereum ecosystem. ENS is inherently multichain, and we want to ensure it serves the entire community, especially as L2 adoption grows.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Our contributions to the ENS ecosystem are all about breaking down barriers between chains and making ENS management simpler and more intuitive for users. As people engage with different chains, they shouldn’t feel restricted or locked into one network. By supporting multichain ENS record management, we’re making it easier for users to interact across the ecosystem, aligning with the multichain future of Ethereum. This approach not only helps onboard more users but makes the entire experience of managing records seamless and user-friendly.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

We’re excited about integrating existing tools like AvatarSync and ENSRedirect into our platform. AvatarSync will allow users to pull their social media avatars from platforms like Twitter, Farcaster, and Lens directly to their ENS profile, or even generate new avatars automatically. ENSRedirect will let users link their ENS name to a URL seamlessly. These are just the beginning. We'll keep building and adding new plugins to our unified resolver manager to enhance the user experience further.

We’re also experimenting with different in-person strategies for onboarding users to ENS. At ETHSafari 2024, we recognized that gas costs were a significant barrier for non-Web3 native users, especially those new to wallets like Coinbase Wallet. To address this, we set up a site where attendees could gaslessly claim a safari.eth ENS subdomain. The response was amazing—over 250 people claimed subdomains, astonished that they could get an ENS name for free without paying gas. Each subdomain was even set up with an autogenerated avatar, aligning with our goal of eliminating barriers to entry and making ENS easy for casual users. You can still claim these subdomains at http://safari.eth.limo.

Reasons to Be Bullish

Looking ahead, in the next 5 years, we see a future where network switching on wallets is a relic of the past. Our vision is an interoperable, multichain Ethereum ecosystem where managing ENS records is as seamless, intuitive, and chain-agnostic as possible. We'll continue building new tools and plugins that make ENS more interactive and fun, allowing users to do even more with their names and records. ENS will become an integral part of everyday Web3 experiences, making it fun, functional, and easily accessible to everyone.

Namestone

https://namestone.com/

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We aim to be the premier subname provider for ENS. We believe that issuing subnames should be easy. Today there are over 10 million subnames, we hope to facilitate the next 100 million through NameStone.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Our products and tech help anyone with an ENS name, including brands like POAP and Converse.xyz, create and issue L2 or gasless subnames. We also built enspro.xyz, a personal subname management system free for anyone to use. Further, we strive to not only provide technology but education as well. We are proud of our work with Columbia Business School professor Omid Malekan, where we issued L2 ENS names on Arbitrum for his class of future leaders.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

We’re proud of our accomplishments so far!

• Over 15,000 subnames

• 100+ domains using our products

• 2,000+ L2 subnames

• 1m+ resolutions and growing

Reasons to Be Bullish

NameStone’s internal mantra is “your name, your way, fast”. We aim to deliver subnames with the right amount of customization, from 100% gasless to issuing on and L2 your choice, from trusted to trustless. Whatever a business needs we are here to serve. Our number one goal is to support ENS in being the first and last username of every person, business, and event on the planet.

Blockful

https://blockful.io/

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

Until now our biggest effort as a service provider was working towards a better user experience and developer experience for the offchain domains, by creating a standard for write operations such as editing records, issuing subdomains, and transferring them. The standard is called wildcard writing.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

The proposed standard will enable the integration of any given domain issuers such as Base, Linea, and Namespace by providing a common writing interface, meaning that all those domains could be managed by the ENS app and any other frontend that adopts it. Creating a network effect that will improve user and developer experience.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

Milestone:

• Fully working database implementation deployed to Mainnet enabling CCIP-Read and wildcard writing.

• A frontend application to show how the user experience looks like with this standard. name.ful.xyz/

• dapp integrating with the proposed standard for the Database Resolver (Arbitrum L2 WIP)

• Development of the L2 version of the standard and deploying it on Arbitrum Sepolia. Soon we'll deploy it on Optimism and Arbitrum Mainnet.

• ENSIP-16 modified to gather the most important information of the offchain domains

Next Steps:

• Support the integration with the existing offchain issuers (e.g. Base, Linea, Namespace, Namestone) and ENS Labs for the ENS app.

• Deploy on production to L2s

• Integrate with the ENSv2 architecture

Reasons to Be Bullish

Our future vision is also related of how we wanna evolve the service provider relation with ENS for the next year. We aim to become an organization that supports the governance, through tools that increase security, transparency and efficiency of the DAO. Currently we are a team of 15, doing work supported by the Uniswap foundation, Optimism, Arbitrum, Shutter DAO and others coming soon.

NameHash Labs

https://namehashlabs.org/

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We're building NameKit to help reduce the barriers for devs to build strong ENS integrations into their platforms. There's many subcomponents to NameKit, including NameGuard and ENSNode which our team is working hard to release. More details here: https://github.com/namehash/namekit

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Some of the key outcomes we're working towards right now include improvements to the core ENS protocol and refinements to the UX for key ENS interactions. For example: social profile records are a key opportunity for improvement. We're working on an ENSIP that can accelerate the loading time of ENS profile data by 10x or more while also always serving the latest state and not stale cached results. Additionally, this ENSIP can support cross-chain resolvers and offchain resolvers.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

At frENSday we'll be sharing more details about the above ENSIP under development.

Reasons to Be Bullish

We're actively building, hiring, and looking for special talent to join our team to help ENS grow!

Unruggable

https://unruggable.com/

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We are working on making ENS better overall and easier to use.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

We are addressing fundamental challenges with ENS, including scaling and improving multi-chain support.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

We recently launched Unruggable Gateways, which allows resolving data cross-chain, including resolving ENS names from L2s to L1 Ethereum with proofs.

Namespace

https://namespace.ninja/

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

Our focus is on growing ENS userbase. We are building apps and developer tools that streamline the adoption and use of ENS and expand its utility. We are building both for the end-users - allowing them to seamlessly issue subnames to anyone on any chain, and for developers - enabling them to easily integrate subname registrations and management into their dapps.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Our products are directly tied to the ENS. We work with wallets to issue subnames to their users, with games to implement ENS as a gamer username system, with AI launchpads to assign a human-readable identity to all agents, with blockchain tools and service providers to extend their core offering with namespace-as-a-service, etc.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

We built Namespace App, Namespace Dev (soon), and Namespace SDK!

In terms of partnerships and integrations, we are constantly working on moving the needle forward and keeping active conversations going. Currently talking with multimillion-user wallets, payroll, rollup-as-a-service, identity providers, etc.

• We are closing in on 30,000 Subnames in total.

• More than 100 ENS Widget integrations.

• More than 100 namespaces running.

• Dev tooling integrations with Web3js, QuickNode, Tatum = more than 1,000 downloads.

• Farcaster frames integration.

• Subname minting available on Ethereum, Base, Optimism, or Offchain.

Reasons to Be Bullish

We are constantly working on new things, experimenting, following industry evolution, and staying in the loop with all innovation and development. We will not stop until we have minted 1 billion subnames and installed ENS subname registration with every wallet, app, protocol, and social network, and completely replaced the 0x addresses with human-readable names!

UPDATE (Feb 2025)

These Q&As are a couple of months old and A LOT has happened since then:

• EFP kept growing and the team has launched IdentityKit - a new flagship product complementing EFP in the beginning but in the future be used as an open-source library with all identity-related tools and services for Web3 apps.

• Unicorn has partnered with ETH Denver and onboarded 20,000 users and got accepted into Orange DAO.

• Wildcard Labs has launched Records.xyz - an easy multichain record management website.

• NamehashLabs has launched NodeAI and NameAI - further compiling their developer tooling system for scaling ENS.

• Namestone has launched Durin - easy-to-launch L2 registries that enable L2 subname minting.

• Namespace is soon releasing its Dev Portal - making Offchain subnames easily accessible to everyone and is also working on V2 version on the Web app and an AI agent naming standard.

And probably a ton of new updates and developments that I’m not aware of.

So I’ll say it once again:

You, are, not, bullish, enough, on, Service Providers!

🥂

Growing up in a small, close-knit community, I never imagined becoming part of a global movement reshaping the future of the internet. Yet, that is exactly how I felt when I first encountered Ethereum in 2018. A small group of hardcore believers, dreamers, idealists, and techno-optimists, working together towards a better future.

Back then, I didn’t really understand, nor could I ever foresee the potential of Ethereum. I’ve been in crypto for 7 years, 3 years with ENS, building, investing, researching, contributing, helping around, advocating, and then building some more.

I'm not gonna pretend I've been building in Ethereum since the early days. I'm by no means an OG builder. But I'm privileged enough to have been a part of the community in the early days and now to be an active contributor to an ecosystem I deeply care about (ENS).

From the start, I was drawn in by Ethereum’s core values: technical excellence, relevance to society (cypherpunk disruptive revolutionary nature), close collaboration, and a culture of inclusion and empowerment. Similar values kept me in ENS for 3 years now. These ideals unite a diverse, decentralized community, striving to build a fair and transparent techno-optimist future.

As Ethereum’s community continues to grow, it’s essential to preserve the unity and shared purpose that sparked this decentralized revolution.

Acknowledging and overcoming challenges

The Ethereum ecosystem has faced its share of challenges, from debates around the Ethereum Foundation to discussions about the ENS as one of its most successful non-financial apps (as stated by Vitalik.eth himself).

https://x.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1855981251313926582

However, I believe these tests have only reinforced the strength and solidarity of the ETH community.

ENS expressed this sentiment beautifully:

“It’s incredibly inspiring and motivating to see so many adding .eth to their handles as a powerful statement of solidarity with Ethereum’s core values. It is also a testament of ENS’s commitment and alignment to Ethereum.”

These words remind us that, despite obstacles, unity and shared purpose remain at the heart of Ethereum’s ethos. Standing together under the .eth banner is a testament to our commitment to decentralized principles and mutual support.

the .eth stays on

https://x.com/ensdomains/status/1882087800809689375

Challenges will come and go, but the principles of solidarity and resilience that underpin Ethereum remain unwavering.

“The future of Web3 is built on unity, trust, and the enduring legacy of decentralized and permissionless systems we collectively build.”

Each of us plays a role in shaping this future. Together, we ensure that Ethereum—and the broader Web3 ecosystem—continues to reflect the ideals of its foundation.

United under .eth banner

It's amazing to see so many people on Twitter embracing the support for Ethereum by changing their usernames to include their .eth addresses. This wave of support is a powerful statement of solidarity with Ethereum's core values and dedication towards decentralization, transparency, and building a more equitable world.

The small act of adding ".eth" to your username sends a clear message that you believe in the future of Ethereum, your commitment to the Ethereum ideals, and its potential to revolutionize the internet. If you want to, you can join the movement and show your support by changing your Twitter handle to include your .eth name/subname!

Let's work together to build a more secure, equitable, and user-owned internet.

[yourName].stayson.eth

Since we actively work with ENS, the most Ethereum-aligned dApp, helping it grow through building apps, and dev tools, doing partnerships and integrations, and since we wholeheartedly believe in Ethereum, we wanted to demonstrate our support in a creative and meaningful way.

As we’re preparing to ship a fun little tool that will allow anyone to spin up a quick Subname minting website in minutes, we wanted to test it ourselves. We decided to build a custom Subpage (Subname Minting Page) where people can (and should) mint a subname from stayson.eth.

I encourage you to test it by minting a Subname at: stayson.namespace.ninja

But this isn’t just about claiming a subname or us testing new product launches; well, it is, but it’s also about publicly showing your commitment and support to Ethereum as the leader in innovation, research, and building.

Wait, is it StaysOn.eth or StaySon.eth? 🤔

Either way, the point remains the same. Minting a subname under stayson.eth, you join a collective of individuals rallying around Ethereum’s core principles. Think of it as planting your flag in the ETH ecosystem and standing shoulder to shoulder with countless others who share a vision and work towards realizing that vision.

A shared sense of purpose is what drives innovation in web3.

Note on .eth subnames

Subnames represent a powerful tool for strengthening collective identity. Namespace is becoming a leading platform, enabling companies, communities, wallets, games, DAOs, and others to create unique identities under the beloved .eth namespace.

Subname values:

• Empowering Individual Identity: subnames provide every member with a personalized handle, ensuring their presence feels unique and valued within the community.

• Consistent Brand Experience: using a unified namespace, organizations present a consistent identity that reflects their vision and values.

• Streamlining Operations: subnames simplify asset management, role designation, and access control within decentralized systems, making collaboration smoother and more efficient.

• Brand Alignment: communities that operate under a shared namespace with a unified identity present a strong, unified front.

• Supporting a cause: occasional support for .eth-aligned

Whether for businesses, DAOs, or communities, subnames amplify the sense of unity and purpose by allowing members to connect through a shared digital identity.

Build a custom Subpage in 10 minutes

If you like stayson.eth page and you want to build one for you or your brand (community, DAO, group, users, etc.), you can do it by using our Subpage Template. We’ve made this process very simple. The template has a Subname minting feature built in. If you have any questions or need any help with building the page, join our Builder Chat and message Artii or Cap.

https://github.com/thenamespace/subpages/tree/master

Years from now, we’ll look back and realize the biggest move was simply to invest in AI16Z, Virtuals, Zerebro, or any AI framework/OS that's emerging now, and then watch it reshape everything.

This is our generation’s Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Google moment, but bigger and more revolutionary! This is that window of opportunity all over again. Except this time, the mission is even more meaningful: empowering society through AI+crypto that’s driven by the MANY, not the few.

This is a very unique moment in time and a unique combination of multiple factors that will make this AI movement like something we've never experienced before.

The combination of:

1. decentralization (coordinated, community-led, egalitarian, and open development efforts towards equitable internet),

2. crypto financial incentive/inclusion (real skin in the game through investments in projects you believe or contribute to, and making life-changing money),

3. memetic value (memes as powerful attention-grabbing + community-forming mechanisms that spark global interest and create virality),

4. AI innovation and development (it's simply AI's time and it's the natural step in technological evolution)...

all of these forces converging and making this a perfect storm!, makes something unique that AI stands to benefit from most!

I don't know about you, but I'm not waiting on the sidelines. Whether you’re investing your money, your time, your dev skills, your creativity, or educating people about it, the payoff, both financially and for the future of humanity, could be enormous.

🫡

It is my strong belief that once ENS launches Namechain it will be of utmost importance for all of us ENS contributors and supporters to work as hard as ever on cultivating the builder ecosystem and culture there.

ENS as a protocol and an onchain identity primitive already has everything builders need to enable self-sovereign digital identity and a thriving ecosystem of identity-related apps.

Furthermore, it is composable enough to ensure seamless integration with complementary technologies, allowing devs to experiment, innovate, and push boundaries of what’s possible even more.

I expect a big surge in identity-focused apps, protocols, and tools to pop up on Namechain bringing the vision of self-sovereign digital identity closer to reality. But I don’t like leaving things to chance and betting on belief that they’ll come organically.

But there’s one essential prerequisite for this transformation: ATTRACTING AND RETAINING BUILDERS.

We need to ask ourselves some fundamental questions:

- What brings people to certain ecosystems?
- What motivates them to build there?
- Most importantly, what inspires them to STAY?

As an active ENS ecosystem participant, Service Provider, and aspiring steward, but also a ZKsync delegate focused on creating their builder ecosystem, I’ve spent considerable time exploring these questions.

The answers lie in a combination of key things:

1. Clear Vision and Mission

- Mission and Vision statement: what are we building towards and why?
- Sense of purpose: being part of something bigger / revolutionary, and solving real-world problems.
- Value alignment: decentralization, open-source ethos, censorship-resistance, etc. (this is ecosystem-specific)

2. Technical excellence

- Tooling: High-quality tools, SDKs, APIs, docs, and integrations - making the development experience a joyful ride
- Reliable infrastructure: secure, stable, low downtime, predictable performance
- Innovations: unique features, thoughtful design architecture, modular and composable, allowing creative expression through code.

3. Financial incentives

- Funding: grants, hackathons, incubation programs, fellowships, etc.
- Contributions: through bug bounties, plugins store, milestone-based funding to encourage engagement, etc.
- Innovative programs: Service Provider program, Retro grants, etc.

4. Governance

- Skin in the game: Give most dedicated builders and contributors governance rights or influence over the development direction / roadmap.
- Predictable governance: stable, fair, transparent, inclusive, non-radical, just and welcoming to others.

5. Community and culture (it’s all about the people!)

- A thriving builder culture: establishing a mission-driven collective!
- Supportive and open communities: easy access to help, mentorship, collaboration, etc.
- Recognition and celebration: celebrating each other's success and highlighting achievements and major wins (new products, partnerships, etc.)
- Mission alignment: ecosystems that embody the values developers care about are more likely to retain dedicated builders

6. Access to users

- Established user base: builders prefer chains that have established user bases for their applications to thrive.
- Network effects: ecosystems with flagship "killer" apps often attract developers who want to build complementary or synergistic solutions.
- No users on chain/protocol = no one builds there = extremely hard to solve cold-start problem.

7. Marketing and branding

- Coolness factor: chains like Base have managed to make themselves feel culturally aligned with builders, promoting themselves as “the place to build”.
- Prominent Advocates and Evangelists: devs often follow where influential figures, teams, and companies are building.

By addressing these areas strategically, we can ensure that Namechain not only attracts builders but also inspires them to stay.

It's 2am and this is what keeps me up at night. So I thought I'd share it with you.

I wish I could also share how much of a personal challenge I take it upon myself to crack the code of building the most vibrant ecosystems in the projects I deeply care about.

But, we’ll get there anon. One step at a time.

GN.

🫡

Scaling the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) to a billion users and beyond is the vision that’s been driving me to build on top of this protocol for over two years. As a Service Provider, DAO member, delegate, and ENS advocate, I wanted to share some thoughts on scaling ENS. This article is a culmination of my knowledge, my experience as a builder, and my personal insights.

Earlier this year, I organized the ENS x Chainlink side event during ETH Belgrade. At that event, I gave a talk titled “Scaling ENS to 1 Billion Users: Strategies for Mass Adoption of ENS.” Ever since then, I’ve wanted to put this into an article and share it with the world. This article does just that.

What is ENS?

Not gonna spend too much time here as I expect people to know the basics already but — ENS is a decentralized, permissionless, and open naming protocol built on Ethereum. Soon, however, it will be on its own L2 chain called Namechain which will address some of the scaling issues and unlock a lot more opportunities for builders.

If you’re interested in learning more about ENSv2, here’s an ENSv2 development proposal where you can keep up with the latest discussions on this topic. If you’re interested in Namechain, you can watch frENSday presentation and read this thread.

Problems (addressed) with ENS

Machine-readable → Human-readable

ENS can be used as a naming system for every digital resource, turning machine-readable hexadecimal strings into a human-readable format, making usability and user experience much better.

Censorship Resistance

ENS domains are self-custodial NFTs secured by your wallet’s private key. Therefore, building a website with a .eth domain and a content hash record protects you against censorship.

Security and scams

Address-related scams: address poisoning, address spoofing/mimicking, clipboard hijacking, identity impersonation, potentially even identity theft, and fraud if the .eth name gets stolen. ENS fixes all of these.

Web3 Identity Cold Start Problem

Every Dapp in Web3 requires a new profile setup which is time-consuming and can be fixed by having an ENS name/subname which requires one setup and is readable, visible, and accessible everywhere.

Siloed usernames

Currently, any Dapp usernames are stored on databases offchain and serve no purpose outside of their local environment, and can’t communicate with other Dapps’ usernames.

Web3 UX sucks 🍋

“ENS humanizes wallet addresses” is probably the coolest sentence that Crypto Twitter has ever said about ENS! It improves the Web3 user experience by turning hex addresses into human-readable (.eth) names or subnames. This makes the overall crypto experience more user-friendly, intuitive, and less scary and overwhelming for new users.

End game

Map all crypto addresses to human-readable .eth names/subnames. 🥂

Why do we need to scale ENS?

Before we get to the ‘how’ we scale ENS, we should talk about ‘why’ it’s important to scale it.

ENS has been called many names so far:

• a domain name, wallet name, digital identity, web3 username, universal profile, multichain passport, DID, NFT collection, but also a DAO, public good, open-source protocol, naming standard… and rightfully so. ENS is a multi-purpose naming protocol and spans across many industries.

Some of the notable industries (with use cases) where ENS is used include:

• wallets (wallet names), wallet-as-a-service providers (natively integrated as a service offering), blockchain tools and service providers (either natively integrated or enabled through their extension/plugin/add-on marketplace), gaming (in-game assets naming for players or land), DAOs (member/payroll management), communities (unified and cohesive group identity), registrars (domain/subdomain registrations), marketplaces (speculating and trading), social and knowledge graph protocols (a ‘name’ as a core identity piece), social networks (usernames/identity), communication protocols (natively added to the tech-stack), email clients (as digital identifiers), privacy-preserving dapps, and many others.

But probably most notably, ENS has entered the “Web3 Identity” industry that is currently going under the radar and hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves!

https://x.com/TheCapHimself/status/1813261099216540149

Identity starts with a name. For the most part. That makes ENS a Web3 identity primitive, a core building block for onchain identity, closely related to attestations, reputation, social graphs, and other identity primitives, that collectively participate in building systems that create our digital identities.

Btw, how did we come to this?

Because of its early launch, and popularity, along with public, open-source, modular infrastructure, thoughtful protocol design, good reputation, Ethereum-aligned values, detailed technical documentation, and vibrant ecosystem of partners, integrations, builders, developers, supporters, traders, and community members, (phew) ENS is now a general-purpose naming service for the entire Web3 world, or as we like to, half-jokingly, say ENS stands for Everything Naming Service.

ENS has evolved into so much more than a simple name service for decentralized websites as it initially started. Generally speaking, this is a good thing, but we have to acknowledge that ENS is trying to catch up with its growth and demand from everyone who uses it for different purposes, in different industries, and in different contexts. Thus, we need to scale it.

Ok, how do we scale it?

The best way to fix a problem, or to turn something good into something great, is to understand the root cause of a problem or the opportunity waiting to be seized. So, let’s start with the high-level issue, or as I like to call it, the Umbrella Problem.

Umbrella problem

The main problem we’re addressing is this: 0x addresses are simply not good enough for crypto mass adoption! If we want to onboard the next billion people into crypto, we need to present these addresses in a human-readable format, immediately.

We can’t expect parents, grandparents, and people from all walks of life—with varying backgrounds, knowledge, tech-savviness, and IQ points—to understand private keys, seed phrases, and cryptic public addresses. Relying on them to correctly copy and paste these complex strings every time they want to make a payment? That’s a recipe for disaster. Even experienced crypto users regularly fall victim to address-related scams and mistakes. If we don’t simplify this aspect, we’re setting up newcomers for failure, and mass adoption will remain a distant dream.

https://x.com/TheCapHimself/status/1828387001449546124

Quick side-track story because, well, ADHD brain: I recently read about a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis, who was ridiculed in his time for advocating that doctors, surgeons, and midwives regularly wash their hands before childbirth. In the 19th century, mortality rates were high among women who had just given birth due to something they called “childbed fever,” and the cause was unknown. Semmelweis observed that most deaths occurred when doctors and medical students attended births, compared to when midwives did. He noticed that doctors and students often went directly from performing surgeries and autopsies to examining patients in the maternity ward—without washing their hands in between. Deciding to test his hypothesis that handwashing would significantly reduce the mortality rate, he introduced a strict protocol using a chlorine solution before examinations. The results were immediate and dramatic. The mortality rate from “childbed fever” in the maternity ward dropped from around 18% to less than 2% almost overnight.

I’m not entirely sure why this story about Semmelweis reminded me of ENS. But much like Semmelweis’s theses, rooted in mere observation, I believe that having a human-readable name is an absolute necessity for mass crypto adoption. I firmly believe that integrating ENS would accelerate adoption by making the onboarding process easier and more intuitive for newcomers, especially in wallets, and save lots of funds in the future.

Anyway, back to our main story. We’ve identified our first and biggest problem: hexadecimal 0x addresses are not good enough for mass adoption and need to be suited up with human-readable .eth names. Great, so we agree we can do better. But what do we do about it, and where do we go from here? The technology already exists, it’s called ENS, and yet not everyone uses it or sees the immediate value it provides.

Well, let’s dissect that one. On to the next problem.

Ongoing (known) Challenges

As an ENS Service Provider, I had an opportunity to integrate ENS with other projects, build custom solutions for others, build dapps on ENS, making subname registrations easy for non-tech users, easy to implement in dapps for developers, and much more! As my dear friend Marcus would say, I pretty much consider myself an ENS lifer now. But most notably, I worked on a lot of ENS-related partnerships and integrations for different industries and different contexts.

Everyone’s eyes light up when I talk about ENS! It’s irrefutable at this point that everyone loves ENS protocol and it has no equal by far. Anytime I would propose any type of integration, I would get an immediate yes! However, after we’d defined the scope of the integration, the enthusiasm would fade out.

I’ve realized that among builders, ENS is perceived as a vitamin, not a painkiller. It is perceived as something that doesn’t necessarily solve a problem and takes the pain away, but improves something and makes it a bit better.

Apart from this problem gradually being solved itself, as ENS keeps onboarding new projects and protocols and has more partnerships and integrations, this is a problem that gets solved by ongoing education, new users coming to crypto and hopefully preferring ‘names’ instead of ‘0x addresses’. We also solve this having measurable impact ENS integration on the user/customer satisfaction levels among projects ENS was integrated with.

I’ve recently advocated for more research-oriented reports for existing ENS implementations (such as cb.id) and turned them into a beautifully designed, insightful, and a joy to read Case Study of the entire integration. It could include: implementation details, technologies users, the results it brought, how it improved the wallet and its onboarding experience, increase in user count, user satisfaction level, promotional benefits through cross-collaborative marketing campaigns, etc. Which could later be used as an educational piece to educate and onboard new wallets.

Vertical growth bottleneck

Besides the ongoing challenges actively being addressed such as raising awareness for ENS (and crypto for that matter), educating the masses on what it does, what problems it solves, why you need it, how and where to get yourself this web3 username, etc. ENS faces something I call the “Vertical Growth Bottleneck” problem.

This highlights that the vast majority of ENS registrations (~70% of them) have come from a single source — the ENS app. This limits registration capacity to only one front end. I.e. You have to already know about ENS to get an ENS name or a subname which is the problem in itself and certainly a bottleneck for growth.

There are a few exceptions, such as Vision which offers bulk registrations besides regular ones, Space ID which is the aggregate of all web3 naming service providers, Rainbow wallet which supports in-wallet name registrations, Coinbase wallet which offers cb.id subnames when creating a Coinbase wallet, Uniswap wallet with uni.eth subnames, and a few others maybe and even though this is an early sign of ENS getting getting the attention it deserves, it’s not nearly enough. We only getting started. Or as Jesse from Base would say—it’s still day one!

Ok, what should we do? How do we fix this?

The opportunity

Think about what account abstraction did for wallets. It didn’t just enable smart account creation, batched transactions, and social recovery. Next to technical advancements, it allowed wallet creation to happen outside traditional wallet providers. Now, when you jump into some crypto game, it asks you to create an account (e.g. login with Google) and voilà! That’s your smart (wallet) account associated with the game. It’s not a prerequisite to have a wallet anymore to participate in the gaming industry and enjoy playing crypto games. This applies not only to games but all blockchain apps.

Now, think about ENS and its registration front ends. ENS names are mainly registered through the official ENS app (app.ens.domains) and some other domain registrars offering registration services. But when you add subname registrations into the mix, something wonderful happens. Subname registrations can occur outside the ENS app or third-party registrars, they can be implemented in every single Web3 app, across various contexts, and for countless purposes.

Just like account abstraction did for wallets—allowing anyone to essentially become a wallet provider by removing the complexities of requiring a wallet to use a blockchain dapp—the same principle can be applied to subname registrations. Every single blockchain dapp in Web3 can become an ENS subname registrar and start issuing (selling) names or subnames to their users, thus spreading the human-readable format as the official industry standard.

Just like you don’t need to know you’re creating a wallet when you go use some dapp or play some game, you don’t need to know you’re creating an ENS-powered username in those dapps or games.

And just like Account abstraction allowed anyone to become wallet providers, ENS—with its easy subname registration implementation—can allow anyone to become a web3 identity provider! And we at Namespace focus exactly on that!

Horizontal Scaling 🪄✨

To address the Vertical Growth Bottleneck and enable horizontal scaling, we need to diversify and increase the number of name and subname registration front ends and providers. To get there, we have to make ENS name and subname registrations easy to implement and accessible to all developers—in all development environments, among all major tooling services, and across all public and private dev libraries and blockchain tools and service providers.

So far, for the most part, ENS has been thought of as a read-heavy app. Because of that, most used libraries like WAGMI, Etheres.js, Viem, and others, support basic ENS read() operations, allowing you to get() all data associated with a name or address and resolve the name and all the records. None of them allow developers to implement ENS name or subname registrations for example which are becoming more and more important and present in major web3 apps. Not only that, but they are also necessary if we are to undergo this shift from machine-readable to human-readable wallet formats. Therefore, it’s time to shift the thinking from ‘read’ to ‘write’, and allow registrations, subnames, and record management from all of these places.

Then, and only then, can developers start integrating ENS into their products intuitively. This includes all decentralized apps, wallets, centralized exchanges (CEXes), Layer 2 chains, protocols, blockchain tools and service providers, games, communities, companies, institutions, DAOs, blogs, banks, social networks, you name it. The best way to do this right now, in my totally unbiased opinion, is to use Namespace SDK, which allows anyone to easily set up subname registrations either on our platform and their own websites or dapps.

Horizontal scaling doesn’t rely solely on developers alone. I believe the ENS community will also play a big role in becoming subname registration providers through their own projects: personal websites, linktrees, blogs, or custom pages built to sell subnames, whether for fun, for a cause, fundraising, bootstrapping, community access, token-gated benefits, or simply for flexing and the sheer profit of having a cool subname.

When it comes to ENS community I believe a great power lies within them. However, something that I see missing, and will be actively looking to address this gap, is incentives alignment.

However, building the right tools and apps for these two groups is easier said than done.

Problems we need to fix

As I said before, to unlock horizontal scaling and enable seamless ENS integration and Subname registrations EvErYwHeRe. And we need to build the tools that make this possible.

There are two groups of people that could become front-end ENS name/subname registration providers and bring more name and subname registrations:

1. Blockchain devs – building cool dapps that would facilitate registrations

2. Non-tech users – ENS community selling them, trading them for fun or profit, and onboarding people to ENS and crypto

And we must focus on fixing all of the problems they might have, and build necessary tools, for adding ENS into their apps or allowing regular people to get a subname, by making the process simpler, smoother, and risk-free.

Great, what are some of the problems?

Le problème(s)

Most of these are not so much “problems” as much as they are verticles that I believe we can do better and help ENS improve. These are all that I believe would positively contribute to the growth of ENS in users and registered names/subnames.

For teams and devs

• ENS is present on L1 only which means high gas fees (for transacting, updating, extending, and building on top of ENS) which limits the usability and creative experimentation which usually creates new use cases. (it will be fixed with Namechain but in the meantime, ENS must work on all, or at least, major L2s)

• Meet developers where they already are - in familiar environments they use to build and deploy their dapps (blockchain tools and service providers)

• ENS is built to be modular and composable, so that it fits everyone’s needs through custom-built solutions, which makes case-specific implementation a challenge (not a priority) for less funded teams (I.e. games, wallets, communities, etc. all have specific custom requests).

• No out-of-the-box solutions for specific use cases to streamline ENS integration and adoption such as subname registrations for different industries.

• Building and running your own Offchain subname infrastructure requires time and domain expertise (CCIP-read, EVM gateway, custom resolvers, etc.) and custom solutions require dev resources, and time to hack it together, maintain, run, and upgrade it if necessary.

• Difficult implementation of minting and managing subnames and their records on different L2s.

• Lack of dev tooling services for ENS name/subname registration implementation. (we are fixing this).

• ENS ‘write’ operations need to be added to all public and private dev libraries and blockhain service providers that currently support just ENS ‘read’ operations, mainly resolution. Continously upgrade them (ethers.js, VIEM, ENSjs, web3js, WAGMI, and others) to support L2 subnames (minting + record management and resolution).

• Due to its evolving nature, it’s hard for public, most used web3 libraries, to keep up with constant changes and upgrades and ENSIPs.

• No clear or measurable value of customer satisfaction during the onboarding process with ENS subnames integrated.

• Not enough education on the importance of ENS and its benefits.

For non-tech users

• High TX fees on L1 for minting names, updating records, and renewing.

• No user-friendly platform for Subname selling, renting, management, and other features for nurturing the ENS non-tech community. (besides Namespace)

• No platforms other than Namespace offer customizing subname minting process on L1 and other L2 chains, custom prices, whitelisting, token-gating, etc.

• Lack of monetization opportunities - make ENS into dynamic assets that could generate revenue and be used for good.

• No ability for non-tech users to easily implement Subname registrations on their websites (working on ENS Widget 2.0 to fix this).

• Lack of education around entrepreneurial opportunities with ENS names, other than trading them. The only way to make money with an ENS names (right now) is to sell them, while you can sell subnames in many different use cases or rent them and make passive income.

• Making a platform that facilitates minting Subnames to be a fun, profitable, degen-friendly, and enjoyable process.

Where does scaling happen

The way I observed it, scaling ENS happens on 3 different levels:

1. Infra level: protocol level stuff, NameWrapper upgrade, ENSv2 protocol upgrade, Namechain (L2 launch), ENSIPs, and other protocol improvements that often require a DAO vote.

2. Tooling level: different APIs, SDKs, and public libraries like WAGMI, ethers.js, ENSjs, Web3js, VIEM, etc. that allow probably 99% of developers to use ENS in their products.

3. App level: consumer-facing apps like marketplaces for trading, apps for subname issuance and management, dapps finding creative use cases for ENS and spreading adoption, or dapps using ENS as their core piece of infrastructure.

Each of these is evolving at its own pace, influenced by the new industry standards, innovations, and market needs and demands. They are actively nurtured by various parties associated with ENS, most notably Service Providers, and others:

• Infra: ENS Labs (Namechain, ENSv2, NameWrapper, etc.), Unruggable (L2 trustless gateways), Blockful ENSIP-16 improvements + ENSIP: Wildcard Writing, and others.

• Dev tooling: Namespace and Namestone on L2 subnames + Offchain subnames, ENS Labs on ENSjs, and others. Integrations with dev libraries and expanding their offering falls under this category as well.

• App level: Vision for trading and registrations, Namespace for Subname minting, ENSpro and Nameful for managing Offchain subnames, 3DNS and NameFi for tokenizing domains, ENS Fairy for gifting domains, FluidKey for private transitions via ENS subnames, Unicorn wallet for simplified onboarding experience using ENS names, etc.

  • Furthermore, all ENS partners, integrations, wallets, games, chains, etc. that use ENS for different purposes fall under this category.

There are others in the ENS Ecosystem associated with ENS. These are just some examples to demonstrate the difference between the 3 levels on which scaling occurs.

What to do

For ENS to stay on this dominant trajectory of being de facto naming system for Web3, it needs to continuously work on 4 things:

1. Technical improvements of the protocol

2. Increase in developer tooling and developer experience

3. Apps for ENS or that use ENS as a core

4. Integrations and Partnerships

These are very important for the growth of ENS and maintaining its #1 spot in the market. We should place an equal value on each of these and simultaneously work on them. Especially since we are moving into the ‘identity’ era and I’m expecting ENS to be used as a general-purpose naming service for everything web3.

This article has an additional 50 pages that I decided not to publish at the moment. I will schedule and publish them in the upcoming weeks to make it easier to read and less overwhelming.

Next, I will be focusing on what worked, still works, and will work in the future for ENS and where should we put our efforts to effectively scale ENS and solidify its position as an Everything Naming Service in Web3 forever.

The next articles will cover a more detailed analysis for scaling ENS with a specific focus on certain industries, verticals, opportunities, roles, user groups, Service Providers and their work so far, suggestions, predictions, etc.

As a sneak peek, here’s the summary of topics I will talk about. Even as a simple list like this and without me explaining anything about them further, they can guide your direction of thinking when it comes to ENS growth. But I look forward to talking more about them in the upcoming weeks and months:

1. L2 Subnames

   1. Rollup-as-a-Service + App chains

2. Integrations

   1. More dev tools

   2. Public web3 libraries

   3. Blockchain tools and service companies

   4. Projects, Dapps, Companies

   5. Institutions

3. Partnerships

   1. Wallets

   2. Wallet-as-a-Service providers (AA service: smart accounts)

   3. Social networks

   4. Games

   5. CEXes (mention trends here that they are launching their own wallets)

   6. Crypto payments

   7. Identity-related products

   8. Web3 browsers

   9. Brands

   10. Website builders

   11. Other consumer apps

4. Service Providers

5. Offchain Subnames

6. Registrars - registration providers (revenue sharing fee)

7. Strategy:

   1. GTM + biz dev + growth hacks + marketing + PR

8. ENS Labs

9. ENS developer community

10. ENS Community

11. Degen-friendly strategies

Cheers 🥂

Follow me on the journey (with my work with Namespace) of growing ENS to 1 billion users by subscribing here and following me on social media. 🫡

Cap X: @thecaphimself

• Cap Warpcast: thecap.eth

• Namespace X: @namespace_eth

• Namespace Warpcast: @namespace

I haven’t been writing much lately, and the reason is that we (the Namespace team) got a grant from the ENS Foundation to keep building our platform, supercharging ENS with more utility, and integrating ENS everywhere to be easy to access and implement.

I will be also publishing from the Namespace blog - Substack, and newsletter: Paragraph, so you can follow us there.

But here I am now.

I wanted to write my thoughts on Namespace and ENS and how these two work together.

Mission alignment

Namespace and ENS essentially have the same mission.

You can pick any single mission out of all of these below and it would hold true:

• Help ENS become 1 and global namespace for Web3 domains

• Make sure ENS becomes the global web3 identity standard

• Official naming system of web3 world

• Name every web3 digital resource

• Grow ENS in every possible way

• Integrate with it with as many projects (games, wallets, dapps, etc.)

The ENS Labs and Namespace team however do different things to support this mission. ENS Labs works on protocol development, whereas Namespace focuses most on the consumer side, + developer tooling.

• ENS Labs → protocol layer.

• Namespace → application layer.

However, our focus extends beyond the application layer. We are exploring different ways to contribute to the ENS ecosystem. One significant initiative is developing infrastructure to facilitate the seamless minting of L2 ENS subnames for chains built on the OP stack. (stay tuned)

Namespace Goal

Our primary goal is to democratize access to Web3 identities through ENS. This involves:

1. Allowing anyone to mint an ENS name or subname, making Web3 identities accessible to all.

2. Enabling ENS name owners to become Web3 identity providers, allowing others to mint identities from their platforms.

To achieve this, we are:

• Integrating ENS with other dapps, projects, and infrastructure providers.

• Developing innovative tools for the ENS community to utilize their names and facilitate subname minting.

• Providing developers with an easy-to-use toolkit for simple ENS integration and subname management.

Proactive Integration and Innovation

To achieve our goals, Namespace is actively working on several fronts:

• Integration with Other Projects: We are integrating ENS with various dapps, projects, and infrastructure providers to ensure seamless adoption and utility.

• Developer Toolkits: Providing developers with easy-to-use toolkits for integrating ENS and managing subnames.

• Innovative Solutions: Building unique solutions for the ENS community, such as infrastructure for minting L2 ENS subnames on other chains (stay tuned).

Both ENS and Namespace are forging strategic partnerships to drive adoption and growth. For instance:

• ENS and Uniswap: ENS partnered with Uniswap to allow users to mint subnames from *.uni.eth.

• Namespace and Wallets: Namespace is collaborating with wallet providers to enable easy subname claiming and enhance user experience.

Birth of Smart Wallets

We believe the future of Web3 lies in smart wallets that leverage account abstraction. These wallets enhance user experience by eliminating the need for remembering and writing down seed phrases and private keys, making onboarding easier and more secure. Our focus on partnering with smart account wallets aligns with this vision, ensuring that users can easily manage their ENS identities.

But there’s one thing missing…

The Era of Subnames

I said that the Namespace launch marks the beginning of the Subnames era. Subnames are at the moment the easiest to giveaway and set up crypto normies with an easy-to-remember wallet they can accept money to.

Subnames offer numerous advantages:

• Ease of Use: Subnames are easy to set up and remember, making them ideal for newcomers to the crypto space.

• Offchain Flexibility: Subnames can be issued offchain, reducing costs and improving accessibility.

• L2 Compatibility: Subnames will be the first to migrate to L2 solutions like Optimism and Base, enhancing scalability and performance.

• Token-Gated Access: Subnames can provide token-gated access to various features, such as minting and private club membership.

Offchain Subnames

Offchain subnames are unique in a way that there’s an element of trust between the users who use them and the company that issues them.

And although not fully decentralized, if you’re trusting the company who’s providing them, like Uniswap with uni.eth subnames, they are really good to use because:

1. They cost nothing to mint

2. They are easy to integrate

3. Flexible for upgrades

4. Offer a higher degree of control

5. Easier to use as Web3 username (due to no gas required for updating)

6. And most importantly - Easily upgradeable in the future!

Conclusion

ENS and Namespace are united in their mission to revolutionize Web3 identity. By working together, we aim to make ENS the global standard for digital identities, ensuring that every user can benefit from a unique, secure, and easily recognizable identity. As we continue to innovate and expand the ENS ecosystem, we are excited about the future of Web3 and the role that ENS and Namespace will play in shaping it. Join us on this journey as we strive to make Web3 identities accessible and practical for everyone.

🫡

This article delves into the relationship between ENS and its surrounding initiatives, exploring whether the success and usability of ENS are connected with the broader ecosystem or if it can stand robustly on its own.

As the last ENS Small Grants round is officially finished, and the proposal for Service Providers Stream has passed, we are still overwhelmed with excitement and joy for the support Namespace has received from the community. We secured the 3rd place and could not be happier with the results! These projects were a great source of inspiration and motivation behind writing this article.

Let’s dive in.

Beyond the Basics

Ecosystem projects are where all the action happens! They are the lifeblood of ENS, serving as catalysts for growth and innovation. They bridge the gap between a robust protocol and the end user, making the technology accessible and functional for a diverse audience. These projects are where the abstract becomes tangible, where ideas transform into real-world solutions. ENS might have the most elegant and modular design, built from first principles, but it’s the Ecosystem projects that show us what ENS is really capable of.

There are a few main perspectives to look at when talking about the “health and longevity” of a protocol. The adoption will depend on a few main indicators that define its success. This is especially true for open-source public good protocols such as ENS. Let’s review some of them.

Usability: Use Cases and Dapps

Ecosystem projects help to improve the usability of ENS by creating user-friendly interfaces and tools. This could include the development of easy-to-use dApps that integrate ENS, making it more accessible to non-technical users.

They often bring innovative use cases to the table, expanding the utility of ENS beyond basic name resolution. This could include subdomain services, domain trading, identity solutions, communication services, and much more! All of which can be built on top of ENS, further demonstrating its versatility.

Projects that come to mind that have managed to bridge the gap of ENS being a fully developer-centric protocol to broader adoption, recognition, and wider use by non-tech end users.

Companies

ENS Vision: single-handedly introduced the creation of a Community aspect for ENS. It helped drive the biggest revenue for ENS DAO through speculating and trading .eth domains. It introduced a social aspect to the decentralized domains by allowing token-gated and exclusive groups to emerge ensuring domain registrations and renewals.

1W3: has managed to onboard 1500+ users who now have fully permissionless censorship-resistant websites with .eth name as their domain. Considering there are ~22k total dWebs on ENS and if 1W3 has 1500 users that means that they are responsible for ~5-6% of total Decentralized Websites ever created with .eth domain.

Namestone: API and offchain community subnames. Recently, their founder Slobo.eth announced in Twitter space that they want to issue 100M names in the next 5 years. Considering Coinbase alone has 100M users on their CEX, I trust they can do it.

**Namespace: **(regular selfless shill) going after Digital Identity space with the mission to equip every existing and new crypto user with a Digital Identity by turning all ENS name owners into Digital Identity providers allowing anyone to claim a subname anywhere.

Public Goods

TKN DAO: onchain token data management system, allowing various stakeholders like wallets, web apps, smart contracts, and token communities to control and update a shared token dataset transparently and efficiently.

SIWE: Sign-In with Ethereum is an innovative authentication method that allows users to use their Ethereum accounts and ENS profiles to control their digital identities, offering a decentralized alternative to traditional intermediaries.

EAS: Ethereum Attestation Service is an open-source infrastructure enabling onchain and offchain attestations, providing a foundational layer for authenticating information and facilitating decentralized systems like reputation, governance, and social media.

ETH.LIMO: Privacy-preserving ENS gateway for resolving ENS records and associated IPFS/IPNS/Skynet content. LIMO allows users and dApp developers to effortlessly access and host static sites built with a combination of IPFS/IPNS/Arweave and ENS.

EFP: Ethereum Follow Protocol is a simple, open, and composable protocol for Ethereum, allowing users to create and manage lists of Ethereum accounts or ENS names for various purposes, enhancing on-chain identity.

—

All of these, and many many more, contribute to ENS evolution as the backbone of Web3 infrastructure and are cementing ENS as the de facto Naming system of Web3.

Technical Evolution

The real-world application of Ecosystem projects provides essential feedback for ENS, helping identify areas for improvement and optimization. This ensures ENS evolves in line with user needs! Additionally, these projects address crucial challenges in scalability and security, contributing to a more resilient ENS infrastructure.

Cross-pollination with other blockchain technologies through ecosystem projects enhances ENS's interoperability and functionality. So far, this is mostly seen by projects utilizing Chainlink’s CCIP to build both offchain and L2 subnames such as Unruggable Names. Ecosystem projects often develop new infrastructure that complements ENS, including protocols, functionalities, and services, further enriching the ENS ecosystem.

Integration and Adoption

ENS has a considerable number of integration partners across various sectors of the blockchain and crypto ecosystem. These partners range from wallet providers, decentralized applications, exchanges, and other platforms that utilize ENS for their naming services.

Some of the types of integration partners ENS typically has include:

1. Wallets and CEXes: Many wallet providers integrate ENS to allow users to send and receive crypto using ENS names instead of traditional wallet addresses. Some are even adding the ability to mint .eth name (or a subname) directly from their app. Coinbase Wallet is a prime example of being an ENS power user. They managed to issue more than 3M Subnames to their users.

2. Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs): These platforms may use ENS primarily for facilitating transactions and user interactions.

3. Blockchain Explorers: These platforms often use ENS to display more user-friendly addresses in transaction histories.

4. Defi projects: They integrate ENS for ease of transactions and to improve overall user accessibility and experience.

5. Games and Metaverses: This includes various services like governance platforms, identity verification services, and more.

6. Website builders: Mostly utilize ENS as a domain name to their users for building permissionless censorship-resistant websites.

7. Communities (DAOs, PFPs, Brands, Content creators, etc.): Increasing brand awareness through digital presence and cohesive and collective identity.

If you’re interested in seeing who are the biggest advocates and early adopters of ENS, I wrote an article called “Who will drive ENS mass adoption” that covers some of the biggest players in the space.

One might say - these are not directly tied to the strength of the ENS protocol and don’t depend on the Ecosystem projects. They just implement and use ENS. True, however, there are Ecosystem projects, and there will be more in the future, that will help wallets, games, and metaverses quickly and easily implement and issue Subnames (Digital Identities) to their users, help Decentralized website builders easily sort through available subnames for free websites and blogs, offer free or monetizable subnames to communities, brands, content creators, and so on and so on for each of these user groups that use ENS already and many more that are yet to come.

ENS is the only naming system that is capable of completely changing how we view and share wallet addresses with each other. The only Naming system that has the power to change the entire crypto culture from 0xK3pR…D12k to alice.eth. And Ecosystem projects will be the ones that, through different integrations, cool use cases, and creative tools and features, help speed up its adoption and therefore create a new industry standard where when people you to send them your wallet, you send your .eth identity.

Many great and reputable companies in Web3 have integrated ENS and are issuing Subnames. These subnames are Digital Identity assets in their earliest form. And they will become more detailed and more important in the future.

Economic Sustenance

The influence of ecosystem projects extends far beyond technological innovation. These initiatives are very important in underpinning the economic sustenance of ENS, creating a strong financial foundation for the network's continued growth and success.

At the core of their contribution is the revenue generation. Ecosystem projects, particularly those offering specialized services like domain trading, lending, subdomain registrations, or unique digital identity solutions, etc. bring in revenue for the DAO by creating more demand for ENS names.

Innovative applications and use cases developed by these projects make owning an ENS name more appealing. As a result, we see a surge in new registrations and renewals, a primary source of income for ENS. For instance, the emergence of token-gated communities or unique applications for digital identities has spurred a notable increase in demand for ENS names or ensured renewals.

This is crucial in maintaining a steady income stream for the ENS ecosystem by ensuring registrations and renewals.

Moreover, ecosystem projects significantly contribute to the network effect for ENS. They play a significant role in brand enhancement. Their success stories and innovative applications bolster the ENS brand, making it more attractive to a wider user base.

Another key aspect of these ecosystem projects is their ability to engage and retain a loyal community. Engaged users contribute to the economic health of ENS through increased usage and participation in the Ecosystem. Moreover, a loyal community serves as advocates for ENS, further driving adoption and economic activity.

Service Stream Providers (proposal overview)

Up until recently, Ecosystem projects didn’t have a clearly defined sustainable funding stream for their projects. Even though their products are built on ENS or with ENS as a core piece of their product.

AvsA to the rescue

For the first time ever, ENS DAO will be focusing on “investing” in its ecosystem growth by providing sustainable funding to the most innovative, impactful, and committed teams and projects that utilize ENS protocol.

AvsA made a strong case for why ENS needs Ecosystem projects:

“A lot of the best ENS improvements (offchain registrars, profile avatars, DNS integrations) did not come from building features voted by a large group, but rather the result of passionate deeply knowledgeable developers who were free to experiment.”

Therefore, he started the proposal for enabling funding for Service Providers which successfully passed the voting and is being implemented as we speak.

I highly recommend everyone to read this 3-minute overview below!

https://twitter.com/namespace_eth/status/1721516081280630796

The entire discussion around creating a Service Providers Stream in greater detail can be found on the ENS discussion forum: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/temp-check-proposal-for-new-service-provider-streams/18044.

Chat with Founders and Builders

When the proposal was first introduced it caused a lot of excitement for a lot of founders! I reached out to some founders to get their opinions and perspectives on the proposal.

The feedback and discussions primarily focused on several key areas:

1. Impact and Value of Ecosystem Projects: There was a common understanding of the significant impact and value that ecosystem projects bring to ENS.

2. Indirect Marketing Through Ecosystem Projects: Many people highlighted that while ENS might not engage directly in marketing (which is good), enabling builders and protocols to undertake marketing efforts is beneficial. This strategy is seen as crucial for expanding ENS's presence and enhancing its reputation.

3. Need for Strong Builder Incentives: In a competitive landscape where other protocols actively seek talented developers, ENS must offer compelling reasons for builders to remain and invest their time in the ecosystem. Such incentives are not just about financial rewards but also about creating an environment where innovation, tools, development of new use cases, are actively encouraged and supported.

4. Shortcomings in Current Funding Models: A recurring theme in the feedback was that the current funding models lack providing long-term support for builders within the ENS ecosystem.

Concerns

During our discussions, several key concerns were raised about funding within the ENS ecosystem:

1. Funding Allocation Concerns: There's an inherent risk in setting aside funds for ENS projects. One worry is that it might attract people more interested in financial gain rather than contributing genuinely to the ENS ecosystem.

2. Complicated Funding Process: The process of funding could become overly complex, inviting scrutiny from those not fully understanding the projects' needs or their value.

3. Challenges in Project Recognition: It was noted that projects may need to work harder to justify their value to get the necessary votes. There are no guarantees voters will recognize their impact and contribution to the ecosystem due to the project’s complexity.

4. High Voting Threshold for Approval: A major worry is the high vote count required for project approval – 1M+ votes. This is seen as a potentially unrealistic goal, considering even significant proposals like this one, for Service Stream Providers didn’t get 1M+ votes.

5. Risk of 'Death by Committee': A critical point raised was the danger of 'Death by Committee,' where projects might flounder if they are consistently subjected to intensive scrutiny and justification to a committee. This could significantly hamper innovation and progress.

In summary, the need for a well-balanced and effective funding strategy within the ENS ecosystem is clear. Such a strategy should facilitate meaningful projects while steering clear of issues like attracting opportunistic entities, overly complex funding mechanisms, and the risk of hindering project progress through excessive oversight.

Conclusion

"If you wanna go fast, go alone, if you wanna go far, go together.” — African proverb

ENS is not just a technology or a protocol; it is a living, breathing community of innovation and collaboration. The success and vitality of ENS are closely linked to the diverse, creative, and committed individuals and teams who constantly push the boundaries of what’s possible.

As ENS continues to evolve, it's clear that its journey is far from over. The path ahead is bright with the promise of new discoveries, innovations, and collaborations. As we look to the future, let's remember that each one of us plays a part in this unfolding story. Whether you're a developer, a user, an advocate, or simply a curious observer, your involvement and support help shape the future of ENS.

So here's to the builders, the dreamers, the doers, and even toxic haters and squatters – and to the exciting journey that lies ahead for ENS. May our collective efforts continue to inspire, innovate, and lead the way in the ever-evolving world of Web3.

🥂

In the last few years, the narrative around digital identity has been rapidly evolving, driven mostly by the advancement of Web3 tech, open-source protocols, public good infrastructure, onchain primitives, and the amazing people behind it.

Web3 Identity has become a foundational element of the new internet, offering a promise of decentralized and user-controlled IDs facilitating a shift from centrally controlled data and identities to user-managed ones.

Historically, our identities (and data associated with them) have been controlled by centralized entities such as tech giants. But Web3 introduces a paradigm where users have complete autonomy over their onchain data and self-sovereign digital identity.

My Fascination with Identity

Even though it never occurred to me before, it feels like the Identity is a fluid puzzle made out of a few bigger pieces and even more smaller ones that make up the whole picture of our identity and who we are. DIDs, reputation, attestation protocols, etc. are just a few bigger ones.

Something I’m fascinated by when thinking about them is that they differ in nature from each other and work towards the same goal:

1. DIDs and Identities - Identifiers - name, username, universal profile as my friend Evan (@evanmoyer_eth) likes to call them. (They come from the outside world, freedom of choice, or our parents).

2. Reputation system - monitoring and capturing onchain activity and creating a merit-based system for more transparent insight into individual behavior. (It comes from the organization, an app, a community, etc. that has certain criteria that define the type of people they want to let in, work with, accept, reward, etc.)

3. Attestations - verifiable claims about who we are, what we do, what we did, where we come from, etc. (our behaviors and behavioral patterns, our collective onchain activity).

What is Digital Identity?

Digital identity in the context of Web3 is how a person is seen and represented onchain. It’s made out of information such as name, birth date, social handles, and blockchain addresses, but also, contents of the wallet such as assets, NFTs, and POAPs held, onchain activity, and behavior captured by reputation and attestation protocols that represent onchain credentials of a user. Collectively, this represents the user’s onchain Digital Identity.

Some time ago I tweeted this:

https://twitter.com/TheCapHimself/status/1697228229503819965

I don’t know if I’m correct or not but it certainly feels like what I’m witnessing it’s happening out there.

Decentralized Identifiers

DIDs are the foundation of the self-sovereign identity system. Period.

They are identifiers that can represent virtually anything that needs a unique ID. They essentially map arbitrary computer data with human-readable form (.eth names and subnames). This can be applied and used to represent people’s wallets, names, contracts, digital assets, documents, objects, social handles, or anything else.

ENS stands out as the supreme market leader in this space. Its success isn't just by chance. The strength of ENS isn't solely dependent on its market position but also on its solid foundation. It has arguably the most sophisticated infrastructure and protocol design in its space, making it efficient and reliable.

Furthermore, its governance model sets it apart. Being governed by the ENS DAO ensures that decisions are made with the broader community's interest in mind. The DAO is led by some of the most biggest thought leaders in the crypto world.

What makes ENS extremely strong is its Ecosystem projects that are building on top of the protocol. As more projects integrate and develop on top of ENS, its utility and value proposition multiply. This symbiotic relationship means that as these projects grow and thrive, they simultaneously strengthen ENS's position, creating a positive feedback loop that benefits everyone.

Some interesting developments and cool projects:

• Offchain minting subnames completely gasless using CCIP

• Storing assets in your ENS name

• Minting subnames on L2s using CCIP

• Doing swaps by sending

• Gassless DNSSEC integration

• 3DNS & NicNames: Tokenizing Web2 domains through ENS

• 1W3: Decentralized censorship-resistant websites - 1w3.io

• Immutable/Locked Records

• TKN: Token Name Service - public onchain token database anyone can curate

• UnruggableNames: OP subnames with AA built-in

• NameSys: global off-chain gasless ENS records manager

• Namehash/Nameguard: Make ENS names safe(r) again!

• KiwiStand: web3 alternative to the tech-focused news Hackernews

• Namespace (soft shill): ENS Subnames management platform for everyone

So many things are happening it’s actually overwhelming to keep up with everything.

Reputation

What the hell is onchain reputation and who even needs it?

Reputation, in the context of Web3, refers to a measure of trust or credibility that a user or entity has within a community or platform. This reputation can be based on their past behavior, contributions, or interactions.

Onchain reputation is a system where a user's reputation is recorded and managed on a blockchain. This way, their reputation is transparent and can be verified by others in a decentralized manner, without relying on a central authority. This could be used for a variety of purposes, like deciding who gets to participate in a decision, who gets access to certain resources, or to encourage good behavior in online communities.

For example, if you frequently contribute valuable information to a community, your on-chain reputation might increase. This reputation could then be visible to others, and might even carry over to other communities or platforms within the Web3 ecosystem, thanks to the transparency and interoperability features of blockchain technology.

Who decides on its merits?

How do we measure reputation?

Who gets to decide what action/achievement counts?

What my community values, some other communities might find unfit.

For example: if you’re looking to join the most prestigious Onchain Traders community, they might let you in if you qualify. However, the qualifying criteria could be a reputation-based smart contract that measures your profit and loss for your onchain trades of a connected wallet.

Others might implement some other criteria and focus on something else.

This is why Onchain Reputation, like every other public good primarily, needs to be built from the philosophy of building composable data primitives that developers can use to build their own systems the way they see fit.

Imagine if our Identity is a transformer made out of legos, legos are the building blocks or onchain primitives that we'll use in blockchain to build our identity but the reputation and its strength will depend on a case-by-case basis.

For example: it's a good enough reputation score to have a wallet older than 1 month and have 100 transactions on it in order to send a message using the Coinbase app and not be flagged as spam. But the same criteria might be too weak if you want to vote onchain for some important DAO proposal.

Intermezzo - Late night wonderings

Why do all of us have equal (1) vote for presidential elections?

I started wondering, why do I get only one vote for president. I’m a nice guy, I build stuff, I work, I have a family, I pay a lot of taxes, I built my NGO, I donated a shit load of money in my life, I’ve done a lot of charity work, I helped children and families, I’m well educated, I studied abroad… when you compare me with the average voter 50 and 60-year-old voter in my country, they got nothing on me. So why my vote isn’t worth at least 1.1 given all the sweet troubles I went through to become a good, upstanding, law-abiding, proud citizen, brother, family man, academic, and wealthy man?

This opened a world of thinking when I realized I’m just a guy who tries hard and has some mild successes under his belt. What about other people who are actually smart, geniuses, scientists, surgeons, PhDs, scientists, or millionaires, philanthropists who donate a big % of their total yearly income, who do charity work, who contribute more than their money - their time, who are undeniably good people.

Why do we all get the same (one) vote in presidential elections?

Why not have a voting system that is a sliding scale from 1 to 2? So that everyone gets 1 vote worth 1 point but almost no one gets 1 vote that is worth 2 points? Everyone gets 1 vote but you could get 1.05, 1.10, 1.15… 1.95, and 2 based on your behavior, activity, reputation, income, family status, and whatever else merit.

Why not implement a voting system that rewards those who are irrefutably the best of what this world has to offer and gives them up to 2 votes?

I’m magnitudes dumber than Elon Musk. Why not have his vote be worth 1.65 points, maybe?

For some reason, this can become something like a well-designed structure that incentivizes us to be better human beings and thus create better societies.

I knoooow. It sounds nuts.

But at this point, this does seem like it’s not achievable because the system can be gamed but.. maybe smart contract hardcoded logic cannot!

Attestation

Attestation protocols in the Web3 are crucial mechanisms that help in verifying the authenticity and integrity of data or identities within decentralized systems. They serve as a proof mechanism so that some entity can prove certain facts about itself or someone else, without revealing unnecessary information.

Attestations are what give onchain reputation meaning… among other things.

I recently did a Twitter thread summary of J.P. Morgan’s article about Digital Identity which you can find below.

https://twitter.com/TheCapHimself/status/1713900758649942303

In the article they very nicely describe this:

Verifiable Claims or Attestations are a set of claims made by one entity (the issuer) about another (the identity holder). A third party can verify these claims because the issuer has digitally signed the VC, proving its authenticity.

These claims can be literally anything. In the context of digital identity, they can be the user’s name, address, age, qualifications, degrees, memberships, etc. Claims are usually stored offchain but still secure enough in the sense that only your wallet’s signature with your private key can unlock them. If done correctly.

If you’re interested in attestations, I highly recommend Bankless episode with Bryce Patrick and Steve Dakh

Conclusion

The excitement around Web3 Identity paints a hopeful picture for a future where we get to control our own digital identities, breaking free from the grips of big tech companies. With new tools, open-source code, public goods, and identity primitives used as building blocks to craft our identities, values, and reputation systems, we're stepping into a world of self-sovereignty. Projects like ENS are leading the charge, making it easier for us to own our names and data online.

It's a thrilling peek into a future where the internet becomes a friendlier and fairer place for all of us.

Salud 🥂

In this context, Artists and Creators are essential in our everyday life as they, simply put, bring us together. They bring forth new ideas, challenge existing norms, and inspire us to see the world from different perspectives through their work. They enrich our lives, spark our imaginations, and shape the narratives that define our collective human experience.

Artworks such as songs, paintings, gifs, memes, videos, photographs, sculptures, films, and so on, predominantly made by creators, artists, and other creatives, are what I like to call the medium of emotional exchange between them and the people when words fail to transcend reality people need to grasp. To me, music is particularly interesting because it breaks the language barrier. It successfully communicates emotions, where certain sounds tend to cause the same emotional responses in every human being alive. That’s like magic to me.

Anyway, if I tried to describe my level of addiction to music I’d have to use words like heroin and sucking dick so I won’t do that. But I need you to trust me and understand when I tell you that music is a source of inspiration, motivation, and life itself for me. Hence my interest in Music, especially in the Web3 world which brings a ton of innovation and levels the playing field allowing for more artists and creators to flourish.

Let’s take a look at how Web3 Music is slowly shaping the world for the better by fundamentally changing the underlying operating infrastructure.

Known problems in Music Biz

Next to my personal experience, the stories I’ve read over the years, and things I’ve heard from others, I did a ton of research for this article. I came to the conclusion that the music industry faces several significant challenges, many of which have been prevalent for a long time.

To name but a few…

1. Limited Artist Revenue

Artists often struggle to earn a sustainable income from their music due to various factors. The traditional music industry structure involves multiple intermediaries, such as record labels, distributors, and streaming platforms, which take a significant portion of the revenue generated. This results in artists receiving only a fraction of the earnings from their work.

Limited artist revenue or by now commonly known as the “we can so fuck you why not take your money” tax, describes the reality we live in where there are a few centralized players that have a monopoly in the market and charge ridiculous fees. The most common examples are Apple’s store charging 30% commission on the purchase price, Uber and Lyft charging 20-30% of the fare amount, and so on.

For music specifically, it’s pretty much common knowledge that Spotify and other major music streaming services are peeling the skin off of musicians by paying them as little as 3 sprinkles of fairy dust per every 74 billion song plays… more or less.

How about this though, according to Coinbase’s findings: “The music industry makes billions every year, but artists only get 12% of that.” Let’s take a second to imagine if average workers paid 88% tax on their income like the musicians kinda do. Ain’t that little nuts? Or maybe this 👇

https://twitter.com/Cooopahtroopa/status/1533203100210630656

We should stop here (for now) to prevent the progression of our state of depression.

2. Copyright infringement and piracy

The ease of digital distribution has led to uncontrolled piracy and copyright infringement, causing substantial financial losses for musicians and artists in general. Unauthorized downloading, streaming, and sharing of music through various platforms have made it challenging for artists to protect their intellectual property and receive proper compensation for their work.

As someone who comes from a third-world country not only that I witnessed this, but there are numerous artists in our country that have sung in their songs (predominantly sarcastically) about this phenomenon.

“Not only that, but up until I was 18 years old I thought going to Pirate Bay and downloading shit was a normal thing, you know… something that everyone just does in the world”, said one young man who I once knew. I may be semi-piracy oriented when it comes to education, the availability of resources, piracy in transparency, and quality public goods, but I do condemn unauthorized use of others’ lives work!

3. Lack of transparency and fair royalty payments

Royalty payments have long been a complex and opaque area in the music industry. Artists often face challenges in understanding how their music is being monetized and how royalties are calculated and distributed. Lack of transparency and outdated systems can result in delayed, inaccurate, or unfair payments to artists.

Here are a few examples of real-world situations where royalties in the music industry have been poorly handled and have caused...

1. Taylor Swift's Royalty Dispute with Apple Music: In 2015, Taylor Swift publicly criticized Apple Music for its initial decision not to pay royalties to artists during its three-month free trial period. Swift's open letter to Apple resulted in a change of policy, but it highlighted the power dynamics between artists and streaming platforms, and the need for clearer royalty structures.

2. Mechanical Royalty Issues: Mechanical royalties are paid to songwriters and publishers for the reproduction and distribution of their compositions. The music industry has faced challenges in accurately tracking and distributing mechanical royalties, particularly with the rise of digital streaming. This has led to lawsuits against major record labels and streaming services for underpayment and inadequate reporting of mechanical royalties.

3. Sampling: Sampling involves using portions of existing songs in new compositions. The process of obtaining proper clearance and licensing for samples can be complicated, leading to disputes over royalties and copyright infringement. Famous cases like the "Blurred Lines" lawsuit involving Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, or the dispute over the use of the "Amen Break" drum sample highlight the complexities of handling royalties related to sampling.

4. Collecting Societies mismanagement: Collecting societies play a crucial role in managing and distributing royalties to artists, composers, and publishers. However, there have been instances of inadequate transparency and accountability within these organizations. Some collecting societies have been accused of delays in royalty payments, inaccurate tracking of usage, and a lack of clarity in their distribution methods.

5. YouTube's Content ID System: It was designed to identify and manage copyrighted content on the platform, and has faced criticism for its handling of music royalties. Some artists have reported instances where their original compositions were incorrectly flagged as copyrighted by other entities, resulting in the artists themselves facing restrictions or losing revenue from their own content. These issues highlight the challenges of accurately managing and distributing royalties in the digital age.

And God knows how many more individual cases are out there when it comes to artists who, unlike Pharel, Robin, or Taylor Swift, don’t have millions of followers or the same amount in their bank account to pursue legal action when mistreated.

4. Imbalanced power dynamics

The music industry has historically been characterized by imbalanced power dynamics, where artists have limited control and leverage over their careers and creative decisions. Record labels and other industry entities have held significant control over contracts, marketing strategies, and artistic direction, potentially exploiting artists in the process.

Even Prince was annoyed

The Prince himself fought numerous battles with record labels over his career, often related to royalty payments and creative control. In 1993, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol as a protest against his contract with Warner Bros. Records, claiming unfair treatment and insufficient compensation for his work. Prince's case shed light on the imbalanced power dynamics between artists and labels and their impact on royalty arrangements.

Record labels and managers and other players in the music industry will still exist, no one’s denying that. They will need to reconsider their offering and adapt to the new standards. And it’s up to us not to fuck up those new standards being made now.

5. Fragmented licensing

Licensing music for various uses, such as synchronization in films, commercials, or streaming platforms, can be a complex and fragmented process. Different licensing bodies, rights organizations, and territorial restrictions can create inefficiencies and challenges in obtaining licenses and ensuring proper compensation for artists.

Wait but why Web3, ser?

If I had to sum it up in a few words, blockchain technology pretty much solves all of the aforementioned issues and it certainly offers musicians numerous compelling reasons to embrace this new web3 music paradigm.

I’ll try to cover a few without boring you to death.

Direct Control and Independence

Web3 empowers musicians with total control and independence over their careers. By leveraging decentralized platforms, musicians can bypass traditional gatekeepers, such as record labels and distributors, and directly connect with their audience. This autonomy allows artists to make decisions aligned with their creative vision and retain a higher percentage of their earnings.

However, some people argue that an artist cannot fully immerse themselves into their craft while simultaneously having to worry about the ‘business’ side of things. So cutting out the intermediary, I foresee, will only play a role in the transition and distribution of power, melting the existing centralized music power structures that keep ridiculously big chunks of the market.

To elaborate further, there will still be ‘intermediaries’ but their reign over the music market will become a lot more decentralized, a lot more evenly distributed between themselves and other ‘players’ in the field who will engage in a web3 music industry. But we are not in the business of fortune telling, looking at cards or the beans to see the future, so we’ll just have to wait and build and see.

Fair Compensation and Transparency

Web3, in principle, leverages blockchain technology to ensure fair compensation and transparent transactions. Smart contracts enable automated royalty payments, eliminating delays and disputes commonly associated with traditional distribution models. Artists can track every transaction, ensuring they receive their fair share of revenue without relying on complex intermediaries. Don’t trust, verify.

As far as fair compensation goes, everyone thinks that musicians and artists will become millionaires. I don’t necessarily think blockchain will help you become a millionaire, it’s still up to you, your music, your charm, your talent, hard work, your charisma, but what I do know is that blockchain infrastructure and builders will give a fair chance to everyone.

This will result in a lot more creators and artists making a decent living, rather than the ‘everyone who’s in the web3 music will become a millionaire’ mindset. The law of natural distribution will still apply to artists making money. I’m just happy that a lot more of them won’t have to struggle. And kudos to those who actually become millionaires. Probably the ones currently willing, and crazy enough, to lead this revolution.

Global Reach and Access

Historically, artists faced challenges in expanding their reach beyond their local or regional scenes due to the limitations of traditional distribution channels. However, web3 music platforms powered by the blockchain offer a global reach that was previously unimaginable. Artists can distribute their music to audiences worldwide, regardless of their physical location. This means that talented musicians from remote areas or underrepresented regions now have the opportunity to showcase their creativity and gain recognition on a global scale. As a result, listeners can discover and appreciate a wider spectrum of music from diverse cultural backgrounds.

And not only that. Musicians can distribute their music internationally with greater ease. Platforms, websites, streaming apps, and mobile apps, that will be built and used for this type of distribution (or any other use of web3 music) will be plugged into the blockchain networks and have a single source truth to access musicians’ songs from thus creating a shared, publicly available and easy-to-use source that is fully transparent.

Enhanced Fan Engagement and Community Building

Web3 facilitates direct engagement and interaction between musicians and their fans. Artists can cultivate loyal communities and foster deeper connections with their audience through platforms that encourage participation, feedback, and collaboration. This level of engagement builds stronger fan relationships, fuels support for artists, and creates a vibrant ecosystem.

Surely, one of the most significant aspects to consider is that the Web3 music industry genuinely rewards early fans, contributors, ambassadors, and others who actively participate. It provides an avenue for innovation for builders, creators, and fans to collectively work on what they love and get paid for it!

Consequently, a lot of innovative opportunities arise for music connoisseurs to contribute to the ecosystem and create microeconomies within the industry. These opportunities include:

• discovering and supporting emerging musicians,

• sharing their music,

• curating personalized playlists,

• and engaging in other meaningful ways.

In this manner, music enthusiasts can play a more substantial role and contribute to the growth and sustainability of the Web3 music industry!

Tokenization of Music Assets

“Tokenization is the process of converting a real-world asset, such as a piece of artwork or a music right, into a digital token. These tokens can then be traded on a blockchain network. Tokenization offers many benefits, including fractional ownership, increased liquidity, and reduced transaction costs.”

Web3 enables the tokenization of music assets, unlocking new revenue streams and creative opportunities. Musicians can tokenize their music, offering fans unique digital assets that represent ownership rights, potential revenue share, exclusive content, and access to limited-edition merchandise or experiences. This tokenization revolutionizes monetization models, allowing artists to benefit from the growing interest in digital collectibles and blockchain-enabled assets.

Fractional ownership

Tokenizing music rights provides a significant advantage by allowing for fractional ownership. This means that several investors can own a portion of the rights to a song or album. This is particularly beneficial for aspiring artists who may not have enough money to fund their projects entirely. But it works both ways since the early supporters of those artists will be paid royalties for their early support.

Liquidity

Music rights are typically illiquid and hard to sell. Tokenized music rights can be conveniently traded on a blockchain network, granting investors greater flexibility and control over their investments.

Reduced bureaucracy

Buying legal rights, transferring ownership, verifying ownership, and so forth, can be time-consuming and quite expensive. Handling all of this on the blockchain, however, can be mastered and executed by a 9-year-old with a goofy sticker on their laptop.

Copyright Protection and Attribution

Web3's transparent and immutable nature provides robust copyright protection and ensures proper attribution for musicians. Artists can establish verifiable proof of ownership and track the usage and distribution of their work, safeguarding their intellectual property rights. This combats plagiarism, piracy, and unauthorized usage, creating a more secure environment for creators.

It's important to note one thing though - While the Web3 music industry holds great potential, it's important to recognize that it is still evolving, and challenges exist, such as navigating new platforms, understanding complex technologies, and building sustainable revenue models. However, many musicians and industry professionals are optimistic about the opportunities Web3 presents for a fairer, more empowering, and artist-centric music ecosystem.

Ecosystem Overview

With each passing day, the Web3 music industry evolves, drawing attention from investors, technologists, and music enthusiasts who recognize its potential to revolutionize the way music is created, distributed, and experienced. As the infrastructure and user adoption continues to improve, the Web3 music industry is on a path toward a sustainable and vibrant future, poised to reshape the music landscape for generations to come.

Just to name a few…

Audius: Audius is an innovative music streaming platform that leverages blockchain technology to empower artists and listeners with greater control and freedom.

Sound.xyz: Sound embodies the essence of music: a harmonious bond between listeners and artists. By harnessing web3 technology and embracing its principles, they are forging a platform that fosters a collaborative music movement.

Catalog: Catalog is a marketplace built specifically with the goal of reclaiming music ownership for artists, by using blockchain technology to redefine how music is valued, bought, and sold.

Royal: Royal is a marketplace co-ownership is put front and center, where fans can invest in music, earning royalties alongside artists.

Favorite Newsletters

• Invest in Music

• Water and Music

• WavWRLD

• Ziggy Ziggy Music

Market Overview

The global music industry is valued at around $26.2B. Do you know what this means, anon?? It means that Elon Musk alone could buy the entire global music industry 7 times over.

But that’s not important right now, what’s important is that the entire NFT Music market, according to some stats from 2021, was valued at around $1.5B. It’s not super impressive, but given it came into existence less than a few years ago, it’s tip-top.

And when it comes to the total amount of songs minted as NFTs, that number tops at around $10M, according to different sources. However, this number can be debatable since the revenue generated is in ETH primarily and as we all know, ETH is very volatile.

Global Music Industry Stats

• 82.2 million Americans have paid music streaming subscriptions.

• Independent record labels accounted for 31.4% of the world’s streaming and physical music sales revenue in 2020.

• Spotify holds 31% of the total subscribers of the music streaming market, the largest portion of any streaming service.

• Globally, there are 616.2 million people who have paid music streaming subscriptions.

• Universal Music Group is the world’s largest record company, earning 32.1% of the global streaming and physical music industry’s revenue in 2020.

• As of 2017, about 35% of internet users access music via copyright-infringing methods. (‘Skini ga slobodno’ - Vojko V)

Is the music industry growing you ask?

I’ll answer with a copy-paste of some stats.

*Worldwide, the global music industry’s revenue increased from $56.74 billion in revenue in 2019 to $59.45 billion in 2020.

In 2021 alone, the U.S.’s recorded music industry grew by 22.9%. US and Canada together had a 22% growth rate this year, up from their 2020 rate of 7.5%.

However, the Middle East and North Africa is the fastest-growing region for the global recorded music industry in 2021, with a 35% growth rate.

In the future (between 2021 and 2026), the global music industry is expected to have a CAGR of 8.5%.*

Some Web3 Stats

I pulled some interesting stats about Sound, Catalog, and Zora marketplace to showcase here. I chose these 3 for no particular reason other than I just like them. There are some others mention-worthy that pull some good numbers as well.

Disclaimer: I want to urge caution and not take these numbers as set in stone because the data varies from Dune query to Dune query and I have no idea how or why but it does. Also, I wrote this article weeks before posting it cos I’m busy af and periodically lazy. Check the resources at the bottom of the article for sources.

Sound.xyz Stats

• 483 total creators

• 1,604 total records created

• 123,241 total song mints

• 7.1 average song per collector

• >2.7k ETH total volume (>$5M current ETH value)

• 3,961 people who currently own Sound NFT

• 7,420 people who own + owned Sound NFT

• 17,381 collectors on Sound

Catalog Stats

• 548 total creators

• 2,042 total records created

• 1,209 total records sold

• >650 ETH (>$1.2M current ETH value) total volume

• 435 total collectors

• Catalog primary trading marketplace is ZORA (3M volume)

• 420 artists who sold a record

• The success rate of selling out is 77%

ZORA Stats

• 8,412 total artists

• 810,220 total collectors

• 3,615,604 total NFTs minted

• 11,543 total collections created

  • 8,529 fixed-size collections

  • 3,014 open editions

• 3,533 ETH total primary sales

• 144,588 ETH total secondary sales

Dusha Gang Dusha Gang

And now, boys and girls… I have to selflessly shill my sh*t. Not because I’m an egomaniac cursed and blessed to build forever, but because I’m as excited as a mermaid receiving a pair of waterproof shoes that I get to work on something I’m actually truly passionate about!

I’m working on putting together an all-star team of amazing people to build something in the web3 music space. I’ll dedicate a full article explaining what we’re building and what’s the underlying thesis that fuels our motivation.

For the curious-minded only: DolDusha, the valley of the soul, summed up in one Limited Meme-Edition Presentation.

You can join our Discord to share music, art, love, news, gossip, and vibes.

To conclude

Listening to the song is like taking a glimpse into the soul of the creator who has decided to let us in for a brief few minutes through their songs. We take a small part in their life and temporarily experience who they were. It is as personal as personal gets. And that’s why people who are great creator requires an insane amount of courage and bravery.

Someone once described artists as brave souls who stand alone and naked in front of the crowd and share the purest deepest part of themselves on a silver platter for everyone to consume… and I think it’s hauntingly beautiful because it hits straight to the point. (*I wish there was a painting bringing this description to life*)

To demonstrate the power and weight of what kind of relationship artists and creators have with their work and what kind of struggles they have to go through while creating, I give you an excerpt from one of the greatest speeches ever given by one of the greatest men alive, Nobel Prize winner, Ivo Andric:

“…But in the end, do not past and present confront us with similar phenomena and with the same problems: to be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts – one’s own and those of others – which so often exceed one’s capacities? And what is more, to endure one’s own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.

So it happens that beyond the imaginary demarcation line between past and present the writer still finds himself eye to eye with the human condition, which he is bound to observe and understand as best he can, with which he must identify, giving it the strength of his breath and the warmth of his blood, which he must attempt to turn into the living texture of the story that he intends to translate for his readers, in such a way that the result be as beautiful, as simple, and as persuasive as possible.”

Thanks and <3s

There are a lot of people I chat with, follow, look up to, and find interesting in this space. Below are some of the people who helped me and inspired me to kickstart this journey and write this article.

• DolDusha team and the community

• Coophatroopa

• Water and Music

• WavWRLD

• MusicBen: ziggyzag

• David from Sound XYZ

• BoysClub for a cultural movement and I highly suggest their newsletter too!

• Song Camp

• Polygon with Everything Music

• @0xjck from Momentify

• @leo5imon from AmpyMP3

Resources:

Dunes and Drugs and Rock n’ Roll:

• Sound-Music-NFTs

• Sound-xyz

• Catalog-Soundxyz

• Catalog

• Zora-creator-toolkit

• Music-industry-statistics

It's been some time since I last wrote about ENS. After publishing MeetENS.eth.limo my team and I focused on building our product while somewhat impatiently awaiting the launch of Name Wrapper. And now that it's out there, as Mr. Holmes would say, "the game is afoot."

There are so many amazing people in the ENS community, who provide educational materials about ENS, keep everyone updated with new developments, cover the governance news, support and actively advocate for the ENS names and the protocol itself, and so on.

Given that every single aspect of ENS is covered, I decided to take a different approach that aligns with my initial motivation for writing and focus on making predictions about the future of ENS.

That said, we’re here now, asking the right questions and trying to provide the correct answers. Who will drive the mass adoption of ENS? I’ve managed to narrow it down to the following (ranked by the non-existent ‘random’ function):

1. Centralized Exchanges and Wallets

2. SDKs, APIs, tools & services (Wallet-as-a-Service and AA)

3. ENS Community

4. ENS Builders

5. ENS Labs team

6. Metaverse and the Gaming industry

7. Decentralized websites

8. Decentralized social networks

9. DNS managers - Domain name providers

Let’s dive in.

1. Centralized exchanges and Wallets

It’s difficult not to start with Centralized Exchanges as the number one driving force behind the potential mass adoption of .eth names. Especially because we have Coinbase as a Case Study for a job well done in utilizing Web3 identity through ENS on their platform. CEXes in general are leveraging their user-friendly interfaces, familiar onboarding process, established user bases, and robust infrastructure.

Since Coinbase integrated ENS and launched Coinbase Profiles, 2M new crypto users got their brand new web3 (cb.id) identity. That means that a single entity is solely responsible for issuing 2M names, and who knows how many more in the future.

An article from March 2023 states that “Coinbase reported 98 million registered users in early 2022, a 42 million increase on the same time last year, with 9M of them trading actively (at least once a month).”

Here’s a screenshot from the same article:

The same argument can be made for Non-custodial (and custodial) wallets. There are great examples, such as Rainbow Wallet, that have done an amazing job allowing people to easily register their .eth name and get an ENS profile, everything from their app. So if other wallets were to follow the path of Rainbow and implement ENS, they would focus on giving out .eth names to their new users instead of the 42-character address.

According to CoinDesk’s latest article, Metamask has more than 30M active monthly users. I wish we had the number of people who used Rainbow Wallet to register a name. As a matter of fact, there’s an ongoing discussion at the moment around building a way to track the source of ENS Registrations and implementing a referral fee structure that can be used by other wallets and platforms providing a way for users to secure their digital identity. Read more about it here.

Now imagine if all of those people decided to mint their .eth name and a social profile from the Rainbow app. This action alone from one wallet provider would effectively 10x the number of ENS users if not more. And there lies the power of future adoption through wallets!

There is no indication that these numbers are going to slow down as we, as crypto maniacs, collectively agree that we are still early and crypto is taking over. Coinbase is yet to provide a way (an incentive) for its existing (and growing) user base to claim their cb.id profile. If they successfully do that by the time the next bear market arrives, that means we’ll have close to a 100M cb.id names issued by Coinbase alone, through ENS.

Therefore, all of these exchanges possess the potential to significantly expedite the mass adoption of .eth names through seamless integration with the ENS. Right at the gates of entering the world of crypto, from that point onwards, users would be given an ID (NAME) along with the KEY as a verifiable credential of their on-chain existence, that would replace long 42-character addresses with no emotional meaning.

ENS has been making strides in increasing its partnerships and working hard behind the scenes to bring ENS to the masses through a variety of partners. Everyone knows that I’m a big proponent of active BizDev efforts for every company, DAO, non-profit, anything and I’ve made my intentions known in the proposal I wrote on the Governance forum here.

Integrating ENS with CEXes and Wallets and providing every new user with a Web3 ID, right at the gates and the moment they are first entering crypto, not only enhances user experience but also propels the wider adoption of ENS, facilitating the realization of its potential as a decentralized identity standard.

2. SDKs, APIs, tools & services (Wallet-as-a-Service and AA)

The reason why the term 'entrepreneur' is not commonly used in the cryptocurrency industry is not a coincidence, I believe. Although there are entrepreneurs and founders in the industry, they still call themselves 'builders'. This terminology reflects the fact that the majority of projects and founders in the industry are still focused on building infrastructure and tooling projects. In other words, the crypto industry is still in the phase where we primarily build for builders. And when compared to the web2 world, we have only just begun to explore the potential of building blockchain native and actually usable applications in web3.

Since they represent the entrance to a place of honor, glory, and happiness, the wallets are for the crypto newcomers what the gates of Valhalla are for the battle heroes, the beginning of eternal glory. (“ovo je bilo malo jako a?”)

Wallets already gained tremendous popularity and cemented themselves as a key functional piece of crypto utility. You cannot use crypto if you do not have a wallet. Therefore, wallets are gatekeepers to entering the world of crypto.

With the recent introduction of Account Abstraction that I talked about recently here, companies are now able to offer Wallet-as-a-Service to other companies, brands, and corporations, making it easy for them to launch their own wallet.

Up until now, it has been challenging for major companies like Nike, Starbucks, Budweiser, and others to onboard their users/consumers into the world of crypto due to limited education about it. This process often requires significant effort on their part, which is generally not ideal. However, with the introduction of Wallet-as-a-Service, these obstacles are effectively eliminated. By integrating wallets as an integral part of their business, these companies can seamlessly incorporate blockchain and cryptocurrency functionalities without their customers even realizing they are using them.

Some companies already offer Wallet-as-a-Service such as Coinbase and Safe. And there are others that offer amazing tools for developers utilizing the Account Abstraction model such as Biconomy, ThirdWeb, and many many others.

Big Big Brands

If we look at brands, Puma, Budweiser (beer.eth), Gucci, Coca-Cola, Tiffany, OnlyFans, NBA, and many others who bought their .eth name (see the full list here), all have hundreds of millions of users that are waiting to be onboarded. So it’s safe to say that we can expect mass adoption to happen through these brands taking full advantage of what blockchain has to offer. And you can bet your bottom dollar that these users won’t use 0x3Lk6…Pm3e but rather john.beer.eth or lisa.onlyfans.eth and so on.

For now, we can only speculate on how ENS names will be used by the big brands but one thing’s for certain - there will be no shortage of innovative and creative ways that these brands will use .eth names!

3. ENS community

ENS has become a popular protocol in the web3 space, and much of its success can be attributed to the ENS community. The community has played a revolutionary and pivotal role in the adoption and proliferation of ENS and no one can deny that! It was the community who created the hype and that in turn created a huge demand for .eth names that inevitably put them on the map as a lucrative and desirable asset to have as part of your identity.

One significant contribution of the ENS community has been the creation of various clubs and private communities centered around ENS. These communities have generated buzz and excitement around limited .eth names, leading to the creation of various collections such as the 999 club, 10k club, emoji collection, and so forth. The enthusiasm of the community members has added significant value to these collections making their floor price skyrocket.

Additionally, community members have taken the initiative to educate others about ENS through various platforms, including Twitter spaces. These spaces have become a popular platform for individuals to learn about ENS, hold live auctions to sell names, engage in conversations about the technology and meet amazing people and make friends. The efforts of the community have led to increased awareness and adoption of ENS among a wide range of crypto users.

Furthermore, there are a lot more interesting stories from the community such as - community members have gifted .eth names to their friends, family, and local stores, coffee shops, local businesses, etc. creating a grassroots movement that has helped ENS gain more widespread recognition!

Name Traders

ENS name traders deserve a special mention. Buyers, sellers, and flippers will play a crucial role in onboarding the next generation of users in the crypto space and ENS itself. These traders are motivated primarily by financial incentives and making a profit on minted names. Buying a name and reselling it at a higher price is a game played by the best in the industry since the first domain name service in web2 came out.

They are incentivized to buy valuable names early, hold them until the market demand increases, and then sell them at a profit. This behavior can lead to higher demand and adoption of ENS names, as more people become interested in trading them.

In addition to financial incentives, ENS name traders may be motivated by the sense of community that surrounds the technology. Many traders are passionate about ENS and want to help promote it to others. They may be involved in creating communities, organizing events, and providing education to newcomers. These efforts can help to onboard the next generation of users in the crypto space and promote the use of ENS names.

Strength in numbers! The power of the community should not be underestimated.

With that in mind, I strongly believe that the community is the lifeblood of every project in the web3 space. With this in mind, my team and I created Namespace with the simple thesis in mind - ENS community members will be the ones who will kickstart the mass adoption of .eth names. Let’s build for them and allow them to get the most value from their .eth names. Namespace honors ENS entrepreneurs! We are fully committed to providing this community with the best possible set of tools, features, pre-defined use cases, and resources for ENS brokers, entrepreneurs, resellers, traders, etc. to have the best resources at hand to onboard the next generation of users in crypto and equip them with web3 identity with ENS.

The ENS community has played a revolutionary and pivotal role in making ENS as popular as it is today. Their enthusiasm, dedication, and efforts to educate and spread the word about ENS have been instrumental in driving the adoption and growth of the technology in the web3 space.

4. ENS Builders

The strength, stability, and overall health of any chain or protocol is the ecosystem building on it and cementing its position as a de facto place to be for what you need. In the ENS case, the strength of the ecosystem and partnerships is extremely strong that it’s THE naming system for the entire web3 world.

I already wrote about Ecosystem Builders in one of my previous publications for the Namespace which you can find here.

There are several projects that leverage the powerful properties of ENS such as messaging, domains, identity, naming system, etc. I believe these projects will either attract a significant number of new ENS users or serve as a blueprint for others to follow due to the innovation and creativity they brought to the playing field. These projects have the potential to demonstrate the value of ENS to a wider audience and inspire others to explore its capabilities.

Some worthy mentions include:

ENS Vision: OGs in the ENS space who have played a significant role in attracting and enabling the trading experience of ENS names. They enable users to discover and trade ENS names via an extensive categorization of listings.

NftyChat: Created by the Lead Ecosystem Working Group Steward - Slobo.eth, NftyChat is a native web3 chat app that offers direct messaging with friends, community creation, token-gated access, and community discovery.

1W3: No-code website builder using .eth domains. A one-stop solution to design, build and publish a native web3site on IPFS or Arweave. Helps you create a censorship-resistant website from predefined templates in minutes. Pretty awesome!

ETH Limo: A privacy-preserving ENS gateway for resolving Ethereum Name Service (ENS) records and associated IPFS/IPNS/Skynet content. LIMO allows users and dApp developers to effortlessly access and host static sites built with a combination of IPFS/IPNS/Skynet and ENS.

Org3: An ENS-subdomain-based organization management tool built for communities and DAOs built by Julieshi.eth.

ENS Maxis: The very first PFP NFT collection in the ENS community. In the true spirit of ENS, Maxis is a no royalties collection - a rarity for a PFP project. PFP collections will play a crucial role in using them as subnames for their community members.

.earth: A pioneering collection built on top of ENS through .eth name in combination with subnames. The new NameWrapper contract will unlock even more powerful features for collections.

Unruggable Labs: Recently created and led by the gigabrain himself Premm.eth who is a core contributor and has brought many innovations to the ENS protocol over the years. Unruggable Labs is bringing unruggble subname rentals.

Web3Domains: A web3 publication dedicated to ENS, on-chain Identity, decentralized domains, and websites, and is led by one of the biggest and most prolific advocates and delegates of ENS - GaryPalmerJr.eth.

Namespace: (shameless plug 🫡) Wallet identity management platform for businesses and individuals, providing ENS name owners tools and features to get the most out of their .eth names for them and their community.

5. ENS Labs

The ENS Labs OG team has already done so much for the broader Ethereum ecosystem and is yet poised to play a critical role in onboarding the next billion users to the world of crypto through ENS.

There are many different ways that the team is making strides in furthering ENS as the official naming system for every digital resource in web3.

Let’s go over a few of those:

Educational campaigns

These campaigns will aim to demystify the often complex world of blockchain and crypto, making it more accessible to everyday users. By providing clear and concise explanations of the benefits and functionalities of ENS, the team hopes to encourage more people to adopt the platform.

The community itself is already doing an amazing job by writing articles, publishing guides, recording tutorials, and hosting Twitter spaces, podcasts, and interviews, and will continue to do so. And the ENS DAO has done a good job of identifying and supporting the ones that are making an effort and will continue to do so.

Marketing Campaigns

Marketing campaigns will also play a big role in onboarding new users. The team plans to leverage various marketing channels to raise awareness of ENS and its benefits. By highlighting the unique features of ENS and its ease of use, the team hopes to attract new users from a wide range of backgrounds and industries.

So far, the campaign led by Khori.eth and the team behind FTF, has yielded some amazing results. A lot of prestigious publications have talked about ENS, and the team has attended lots of interviews and podcasts with industry leaders and participated in IRL events.

ENS Manager Dapp

In addition to marketing and education, the team will maintain its focus on improving the ENS manager app. This app serves as a central hub for users to register and manage their ENS names, and ENS Labs will continue to add more features and functionalities to make it even more user-friendly and comprehensive.

Partnerships

Making more partnerships is another important aspect of the plan. By collaborating with other projects and platforms in the crypto space, and integrating ENS, we can expand the reach of ENS and introduce it to new audiences. These partnerships can also lead to new use cases for ENS, further solidifying its position as a versatile and valuable naming system.

Gassless DNS integration

The team is also working on Gasless DNS integration, which will enable web2 companies and big brands to easily transition into the web3 space. This integration will make it easier for existing brands to adopt ENS names, integrated it, and use all its capabilities for their community, loyalty programs, gated access, memberships, or anything else and promote broader use and adoption.

Improving and upgrading ENS overall

One exciting development on the horizon is the extension of ENS names to other L2 chains. By expanding ENS to other chains, users can enjoy the benefits of ENS across multiple platforms and ecosystems. This will also help to further popularize ENS and improve its usability and use cases as the gas prices will be significantly lower.

6. Metaverse and Gaming

As the world of Gaming and Metaverse moves towards the decentralized future, there is no doubt that ENS will play a significant role in providing a web3 identity for gamers and their digital assets. This is important because a web3 identity is necessary for users to fully participate in these environments and to securely own and trade digital assets on the open market.

In addition to establishing an identity for users, ENS will also be used to provide unique names for every digital asset in every metaverse that will eventually be open and compatible with each other. These assets, such as in-game items or virtual real estate, will be publicly tradable on the open market, and having a unique name is essential for tracking ownership and facilitating transactions.

No one knows what the future holds with a great degree of certainty, but some use cases have emerged and have been tested already. One such example is dcl.eth names provided by Decentraland. Decentraland is a Metaverse project that upon signing up and registering you are immediately offered to claim a free web3 identity (username) such as a cap.dcl.eth that will be used for the in-game experience.

We are yet to witness the full potential of web3 games and one open Metaverse that everyone can be part of and enjoy. And even though no one can know for sure what role ENS will play, besides stated above, I’m still pretty sure it will be a naming system of choice for everyone in the space.

7. Decentralized Websites

There are significant differences between a standard web2 domain and an ENS domain. While a web2 domain is simply an address that points to a website, an ENS domain is a powerful tool that enables a wide range of use cases and offers a superior experience in several important ways.

The superiority of ENS domains over Web2 domains

First and foremost, ENS domains are censorship resistant. Unlike a traditional domain, which can be seized or taken down by governments or other centralized authorities, an ENS domain is secured by the decentralized Ethereum blockchain. This means that the domain is owned and controlled by the person who holds the private key, making it virtually impossible for anyone to take it down or restrict access.

Furthermore, ENS domains can serve not only as a website address but also as a wallet identifier. This means that users can send and receive cryptocurrency using their ENS domain, eliminating the need to remember long and complex wallet addresses.

Additionally, ENS domains can function as a user's web3 identity, making it easier for users to authenticate and access decentralized applications and services. With that, users will be in control of their own data and decide who they want to share it with, for how long, and possibly even get paid for it.

In terms of other key features, ENS domains are highly customizable, allowing users to add metadata, text records, and add other information to their domain. This can include social media profiles, contact information, and more.

Some stats

The results vary depending on the source whenever I want to find out how many websites in total are out there in this whole wide world of ours. But they all converge around the same numbers; 1.5M websites and around 360M domains registered.

For comparison, there are only 2.8M ENS domains and 690k domain owners, and currently, only 20k decentralized websites are live. And we’ve already gone over whose more superior and who overs more utility.

Some thoughts

There will definitely be a necessity for decentralized and censorship-resistant websites with the future we are heading towards.

The birth of ENS decentralized websites and domains has revolutionized the way we interact with the internet. And we’ve only scratched the surface. By highlighting the differences between traditional web2 domains and ENS domains, it becomes clear that ENS domains offer superior functionality, security, and a lot more utility. As we embrace the decentralized future, ENS domains will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the way we navigate, transact, and identify ourselves in the digital world.

8. Decentralized Social Networks

I’m almost tempted to leave this empty because it’s so obvious how .eth names are connected with social media but let me say a few things.

The power of social media lies in its ability to connect people, and ENS is uniquely positioned to enhance this connection by providing a decentralized naming system for individuals. Unlike traditional social media handles, ENS names are censorship-resistant and can be used not only as an identifier but also as a wallet address and web3 identity.

The ENS community has been advocating hard and spamming Elon left and right to integrate ENS with Twitter and allow people to create and login into accounts by Signing in with Ethereum. He’ll come around eventually.

Social media is designed to highlight individuals, and every person values their account name or @handle. With the emergence of decentralized social media platforms, our wallets will serve as our handles. It's unlikely that anyone would want to be identified by their wallet address, such as 0xR4k9...Df17. Instead, individuals will opt for ENS names like thecap.eth, alex.thegreat.eth, mark.arb, stani.lens, billy.avax, and more, as they provide a more user-friendly and personalized way of identifying oneself.

When it comes to social media, I believe that the entire movement will happen as soon as we figure out the on-chain identity puzzle around web3. The identity puzzle is composed of a lot of different things we need to solve where DIDs such as ENS are only one piece of it. I highly suggest a Bankless Episode with Wayne Chang to learn more about Identity.

Once certain platforms such as Lenster, Farcaster, Mastodon, Minds, or anyone else, gain significant traction, it will spread like wildfire. And the ENS will have already been integrated with them by then and offer a seamless and frictionless registering a (.eth) name (handle) experience. That is if they hadn’t registered one already. And if they had, they would only need to Sign-in-with-Ethereum and voila, their profile awaits along with all of their data already there and available and transferable across any other social media platform. 🪄 ✨

9. DNS managers - Domain name providers

ENS architecture is built to be compatible with DNS thus allowing a seamless transition between traditional web2 and web3 domains. It acts as an extension of traditional domain name service allowing anyone to expand their presence in the web3 space using their official domains. As a bridge to the web3 world, it is important for ENS to work well with DNS and ensure seamless integration between the two systems.

That said, there’s an ongoing effort and interest by the ENS team and the DAO, and its entire community, to establish an open line of negotiation with IANA and ICANN and discuss the potential of ENS (.eth domains) being included and accessible in the DNS registry and natively resolve in web browsers. I believe the ENS Labs team has already in communication with the said organizations but as any major and big decisions, things are moving slowly.

With gasless DNSSEC (which is relative close to release), domain registrars like GoDaddy and DNS managers like Cloudflare could theoretically make it a single click of a button for their users to import their existing DNS names into ENS, effectively crypto-enabling their existing DNS names. This would allow similar functionality to what you can get today when you import a DNS name into ENS, but it'll be completely gasless.- Greg from ENS Labs

Maybe I’m biased here, but it is highly likely that very soon .eth domains will become the first web3 domain system to be accepted in the DNS registry. When that happens, it will mark a significant milestone for the ENS and further cement its position as the leading decentralized naming system. This development is expected to lead to a surge in adoption and usage of .eth domains, as more people and businesses recognize the benefits of using it. This integration will significantly increase the accessibility and legitimacy of .eth domains, as well as generate interest and excitement from the broader tech community, creating a positive buzz for the ENS domain given it will be the first, and possibly for a very long time, the only web3 domain that works with DNS directly.

So…

Who do you think will be the one to kickstart and drive mass adoption?

Did I forget someone?

If you think I did, let me know in my DMs on Twitter or Telegram @theCapHimself.

Or if you’d like to connect and talk anything about ENS, Namespace, or crypto in general, I’m just one DM away.

Cap 🫡

It's safe to say that blockchain and crypto as an industry has grown and matured a lot in recent years. It's been a thrilling, high-speed rollercoaster ride so far, brimming with new developments and cutting-edge innovations, and up-only movements. But now that the bear market has been around for a while it’s the game played by the real ones only. Now already known phrase ‘build the bear’ is the best environment for builders to do what they do best -- build, create, innovate.

One of the innovations that have been the talk of the town in recent months has been Account Abstraction. While this term may be unfamiliar to a regular crypto user, it truly represents a significant step forward in the way we perceive and use crypto wallets and accounts. It is one of those breakthrough innovations that will forever be remembered as one of the critical ingredients for the mass adoption of cryptocurrency that will be used by millions and billions of users in the future and yet remain unknown to the vast majority.

But for us, builders, investors, early adopters, tech enthusiasts, blockchain advocates, crypto punks, maniacs, and misfits, this marks a significant achievement that will radically transform and improve how we build things and help with removing the frictions to global crypto adoption.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

What is AA?

My goal is to try and explain Account Abstraction (AA) without being boring and repetitive from what you’ve already heard. Let's see if I can do it.

AA is, simply put, a concept that refers to the ability to separate the functionality of an account (wallet) from the underlying code that powers it. Think of an account/wallet as a collection of funds that are controlled by a private key. However, with account abstraction, an account can be thought of as a smart contract that can perform any number of operations beyond simple transfers of funds. This opens up a world of new possibilities for developers and users alike, allowing for more flexible and powerful applications to be built on top of the blockchain. It transforms rudimentary accounts into smart accounts with programable functionality.

Allow me to elaborate

In order to truly understand what AA is you need to know there are two different types of accounts in crypto:

1. EOAs (externally owned accounts):

   1. Custodial — wallets provided by CEXes usually where you don't hold your own keys (yuck).

   2. Non-custodial — where you have to keep your keys and are solely responsible for your own funds.

2. Contract accounts — These are pretty much smart contracts that have some kind of pre-programmed behavior and act as wallets.

The best example of a smart contract wallet is Safe; you create a 'safe' which is a contract that acts as a wallet. In this case, the safe is multisig wallet that is owned by you and other participants/custodians you wish to add. After you add them, you create the consensus about how many of those custodians would need to sign/approve every transaction that happens on that wallet. Hence the name, multisig. So Gnosis provides 'smart(er) contract wallets' which are preprogrammed to do one function - act as multisig wallets for you and your co-signers to increase the security of funds and it is primarily used by the DAOs or other organizations, groups, and so on.

That said, the power of AA lies in this -- it basically unlocks the ability for all accounts to become "Smart Accounts". So what proponents of AA advocate is to make all new wallets into smart accounts because they have the potential to be superior to EOAs. Essentially, with ERC-4337, you have everything you need to build a smart account for your app and experiment with building different use cases, across different industries.

As John Rising puts it:

Specifics?

Ok, let’s dig even deeper!

Contract accounts or smart wallets (call them whatever you like) are code. And code is the law!

And as we said, pretty much anything is possible from this point forward. The only limit is some developers' creativity and business acumen in predicting the future. Deciding how to implement and take the most advantage out of this new tech. And as you’ll see below, it’s up to the founders to decide how to best use it and make their own projects more user-friendly, easy to use, and improve functionality overall.

I wanna talk about specifics. One thing that is simultaneously very annoying to me and also challenging is that everyone parrots back whatever they learned by heart about certain concepts and aims to sound smart and eloquent. But what marks a good understanding of certain concepts?

I believe that only through giving clear explanations and propositions of how certain technology or innovation can and will be used in the future, is that when you truly understand them and their potential. Everything else is just saying nice words and trying to sound smart.

Benefits Overview

Let’s start off with some benefits. There are several key benefits.

• First, it allows for greater flexibility and functionality in the applications that can be built on the blockchain -- developers’ haven.

• Second, it makes it easier for developers to build and deploy these applications, since they can leverage the existing infrastructure of the blockchain rather than having to build their own from scratch.

• Finally, it can lead to improved scalability and performance of the blockchain, since account abstraction can help to reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored on the blockchain.

• The real magic though is on the end user’s side of things -- it aims to significantly improve UX for all dapps and the overall usability, therefore, helping speed up mass adoption.

Wen Use cases, Cap?

Alright, let’s try and predict some future if we can. The way to do it is to look at the current functionalities of AA, look into the features it provides, then look into what’s been happening in the industry and predict where we’re going.

Below is everything I read and understood about AA. I’ll also try to give some random examples with some silly use cases that might not be the best business models but can certainly demonstrate the power of AA and hopefully deepen your understanding of their potential.

Anytime I do so, I’ll write “Super Random Example”.

Permission controls

For EOAs, if you have access to the private key you can sign any single transaction with that wallet address because the private key grants access to *everything* on that wallet. However, for Contract Accounts, you could define a list of permission you want to be allowed to be executed for some specific account.

Out of everything you’ll read below, I find Permission Controls to be the most powerful as they allow for the creation of a lot of future use cases.

Mutli-sig Wallets — One obvious example is multi-sig wallets. Multi-sig wallets are basically Contract Accounts that have a programable condition to require a certain number of signers in order to execute some transaction. For example 3 out of 5 signers (co-owners of the Contract Account) are required to approve a transaction. The most famous one is Gnosis Safe mentioned above. It’s pretty cool.

Super Random Example — Let’s say there’s a scavenger hunt platform where whenever you accomplish some task you get to mint an NFT. And the first 10 people to complete the entire scavenger hunt and mint all NFTs automatically get deposited 500$ into their wallets. Sure, why not. Not saying it’s a good idea, but it’s possible.

Batch/bundle transactions

For EOAs, you need to sign each transaction if you want it executed. But Contract Accounts are capable of batching transactions together. What this means is you could for example approve a token swap and swap a token in the same transaction. Pretty cool eh?

Super Random Example: This can come in handy if you’re a degen (like me) and you occasionally trade some shitcoins and thus would like to, for example, give permission to a contract, execute a swap, and revoke the permission in the same transaction when buying some questionable token from some questionable DEX.

There are a lot of other use cases for batching transactions that the entire DeFi space is crazy about and we’ll talk more about it below when we come to the Industry-specific examples.

Account Recovery

From what I've seen so far, seems like the most fuss is around the social recovery mechanism. This basically describes the ability to recover your wallet if you had lost your seed phrase or your private key to that wallet.

And I get it, the vast majority of the current normies (future crypto users) will need to have a social recovery system in place because let's face it some people are not worthy to be entrusted even with a pen let alone with one key to all of their assets and wealth. (shrug).

For EOAs loss of a seed phrase or a private key means losing access to everything on that wallet, forever! But with Contract Accounts, you can program any logic in code and define how the account can be recovered.

Super Random Example: Let’s say 2 out of 3 previously defined wallets can sign the transaction that will grant them access to your funds so they can transfer them to some other wallet on your behalf. These 3 people can be your spouse, your friend, and your lawyer for example, or your ex, current lover, and Vitalik. I’m not judging. What I’m trying to say is this way you and your funds are protected even if you lose your private key. If you choose the former, that is.

There are certain risks here, and you should definitely choose only people who you fully trust, but it’s a worthy tradeoff for significant UX improvement that will help onboard new and inexperienced crypto users.

Transaction limits

We mentioned in the previous example right above where we said you could choose 3 trusted persons to access our wallet if you lose access to it, right? So how the Transactions Limit would work in this case is that once they access your wallet you could say that they can only do a certain number of transactions. Maybe 1, 2, or 5, or however many you had previously defined.

So what Transaction Limits enable is that you can write any logic to control how the funds can be transferred. Another example would be, to write a function to halt transactions to other addresses while you recover your account.

Super Random Example: Forbid yourself from sending money to a certain wallet or limit yourself to sending only one transaction per month because why not, you’re only practicing using AA in your coding.

Automated Transactions and Pre-approvals

As you already know by now, each time you wanna do a transaction on the blockchain you have to sign it. Using pre-approvals to automate certain transactions, it will be possible to sign one transaction that will pre-approve all the following transactions for either a number of executed transactions or for a certain time period.

This finally enables **Subscriptions**** in crypto! Soon, you’ll be able to pay for some service or an app that you subscribed to in eth or stables.

Super Random Example: Parents can control their kids’ wallets and how much they get to spend on a daily or monthly basis, on certain things, like games, or monthly spending limit overall, etc.

Super Random Example Take 2: Or companies can control how much their employees get to spend yearly on business trips and days off work.

Super Random Example Take 3: Or limit your husband’s spending limit of your wallet to 1 transaction per day, because, let’s face it, he has issues.

As my examples are getting worst and more nonsensical I hope that my point, and your understanding of AA, is getting better.

Chain Abstraction Concept

If I had to explain what this does for the end user in the fastest way possible it would be like this — from multi-chain to chainless experience.

Chain Abstraction is the concept that is powered by Account Abstraction to a certain degree. It describes the ability to use any dapp on any chain even if you have funds on one blockchain. If this doesn’t make you excited I don’t know what will.

However, it’s worth mentioning that Chain Abstraction is not purely enabled by AA. You can have a good degree of Chain Abstraction without AA as well, using General Message Passing Protocols. Axelar team has a good definition:

“General Message Passing is more than wrapping assets and transferring them between chains: it enables a developer building on one chain to call any function on any other connected chain.”

Super Random Example: Imagine being an Ethereum maxi and only stacking ETH and being able to use any application on any EVM-compatible blockchain while you don’t need to bridge your funds there.

Sponsored (Gasless) Transactions

Having sponsored transactions is like being a hot girl going to the club — you can go without the money and you know you’ll still get drunk. (silence + crickets chirping). This failed attempt at me trying to be funny, at the risk of appearing as a semi-sexist writer, put aside, sponsored transactions open up a ton of cool use cases.

If you haven’t understood it by now, sponsored transactions are transactions where someone else covers the cost of executing a transaction from your wallet.

Super Random Example: A new free NFT collection from Nike that is launching is automating its contract to pay for gas fees on minters behalf so they can literally mint an NFT for free, or even use a brand new wallet to mint an NFT without having any ETH on that wallet.

Super Random Example: Mint a POAP for free? If the POAP creator covers the gas costs for you and POAP had previously integrated AA into their protocol.

Super Random Example: You could also limit the number of transactions you want to pay for a certain wallet. The limit can either be in numbers or the total amount of gas fees. This can come in handy for corporate accounts for example where your company sponsors your business wallet and pays for your gas fees or something like that.

The possibilities are endless and I’m sure we’ll see a million creative, fun, and helpful use cases come into existence.

Industry Specific Examples

After doing some calls and interviews with people from the industry I discovered that the companies that are most interested in AA are coming from:

1. DeFi

2. Gaming

3. Wallets

DeFi

Projects utilizing AA primarily for batching transactions so when you’re trading, swapping, doing limit orders, etc. you can do it all in one transaction. This significantly improves the overall user experience as it fixes one major issue.

Combining AA with other contracts that execute transactions on your behalf can resolve permission issues. One example can be Limit Orders on trading platforms and DEXes. By pre-approving the contract wallet's ability to execute transactions on your behalf, users can now execute transactions that were previously not possible due to permission issues.

Imagine coming to a website where you can: do a swap + approve 2 token contracts + add liquidity to some pool, all of that in one transaction, and do it for free by having someone pay for your gas fees. Come on! This sound crazy but it’ll come sooner than you think. And we can expand on this even more…

Let’s say that you want to do some yield farming or simply stake some ETH. But, instead of receiving token rewards you want to auto-compound them each month. Or maybe you want to auto-compound 50% and have another 50% swapped for stablecoin and then sent to a different wallet that you use for shopping. And so on and so on. This is all possible using AA methods and a little bit of automation and there are some projects working on this already.

From what I’ve seen, DeFi projects are also fans of the chain abstraction concept. And how they put it into practice is by allowing every single user a seamless experience of swapping, leverage trading, derivatives trading, etc. How?

Let’s say that you are on Polygon and the dapp you want to use is on Avalanche. Currently, that’s a semi-problem. Because it’s solvable but it’s inconvenient that would discourage probably around 90% of people to use the Avalanche app. The other 10% might bridge the funds and use it. However, the dapp on Avalanche could allow, through AA, the ability for liquidity bridging from chain to chain + batching transactions + cross chain execution + bundle transactions to give a one-click experience = allow users to use the Avalanche app from Polygon chain. (Mic drop)

Gaming

Many people believe, including me, thanks to my NeoTokyo crazy fellow citizens, led by Ellio and Becker, that the Gaming industry will be… sooo big, that my English skills are not on the level high enough to try and describe it. It will surely be the industry responsible for on-ramping the biggest number of people into crypto, with or without their knowledge. Especially since gamers are usually more tech-savvy than the rest of the population. I personally believe that the Gaming industry will be the first one to lead us across to the chasm and to the early majority followed by mass adoption.

So what’s the problem with crypto and gaming? Well, dear Anon, turns out that repeatedly signing every single transaction, while playing the game, annoys the heck out of gamers. That is one of the biggest problems that is addressed by utilizing AA. You won’t need to sign a transaction each time you want to perform something on the blockchain while playing the game. There are some other advantages that can and will be used by utilizing AA and those are gasless transactions, social login, session keys, etc.

With session keys, you can create and customize a session for a set period of usage, interaction, or gameplay. Therefore, the user just signs one transaction during the session while playing the game and they are good to go until they exit the game.

Wallets

Wallets can utilize a lot of the features we discussed above. We can do a small recap of what wallets have been doing primarily.

For now, wallets use AA to provide the next generation of users with a self-custodial wallet that enables fast, cheap, and secure cross-chain transactions through one-click bridging and swapping. On top of all of this, wallets could also have a coded social recovery system where if you lose access to your wallet you could potentially recover your funds from previously designated people.

One really annoying thing that all crypto OGs are familiar with wallets is that when you create a new one you have to have some ETH there in order to execute transactions or do anything with it. So, you have to deposit some funds from your other wallets. It’s a painful process.

Using wallets in the future will be a frictionless experience where users won’t have to know about any chains, or bridges because the whole perfecting cross-chain interoperability, and liquidity, through AA, will essentially make the entire experience chainless. All actions like swapping, bridging, paying, and transferring, will be executed through only one transaction.

Furthermore, if I had to guess, there are going to be a lot of wallet-specific use cases. Some wallets will be dedicated to one user group like parents, gamers, or traders, and will have accompanying AA features to serve those typical needs best.

We’ve already spoken about all the features but I think that batching transactions, spending limits, sponsored wallets, or paying for gas in the different tokens (most likely in stables), but also something that is pretty big is the ability to sign transactions using either your fingerprint or face ID.

Some will say that this compromises security but all of our banking apps and information are already faceID-enabled and so I don’t see how this will be different. It may be a small ‘security’ tradeoff but it’s a huge UX improvement.

The Identity

If you know me (and let’s face it you don’t) you know that I absolutely love Decentralize Identity. I plan on publishing an article covering it as well in the future.

One of the core pieces of the identity puzzle is DID (Decentralized Identifier). Ever since the crazy rise of ENS, there have been quite a few out there but no one comes even close to the overall quality and raw power of ENS as a protocol.

You might be wondering -- what does this have to do with AA though? Well, we’ve already established that Wallets are one of the first and prob the biggest adopters of AA. And a combination of a smart wallet + web3 identity is very powerful.

I already spoke about this in one of the articles I wrote about ENS called Meet ENS which represents an all-encompassing knowledge base about ENS, but Coinbase has done a wonderful job pursuing decentralized identity and has integrated with ENS to provide its users a quick web3 ID for the wallet they create using the cb.id extension.

Now, if you know me (and let’s face it you still don’t), I’m the founder of Namespace - an ENS subname management platform that helps ENS name owners get the most out of their names. And while I was working on figuring out what is the ultimate goal we’re working towards and what is our vision, I came up with this:

Therefore, another reason why I’m bullish on AA is that it will help decentralized identifiers such as ENS become more standardized and in the process revolutionize the entire wallet experience. Eventually, we’ll all have only usernames or IDs instead of long chunky 0x4kP6…P3sD wallet addresses, that will be cross-chain compatible and usable across the entire web3 space where people will send you their account name (.eth, .lens, .avax, .crypto name, etc.) or any other when you ask them to send you their wallet.

This is really important because I think Wallets and CEXes will be responsible for massive on-ramping of new crypto users each time the tide shifts and we enter a bull market and I think the number of new users with every new bull market will be exponentially growing.

Bonus (wallet) Use-case

Since we mentioned Coinbase, I have to say a few things about them as well. I recently tweeted that:

https://twitter.com/TheCapHimself/status/1644080536023969803

And I really mean it! At least for now. You never know who might surprise you in crypto.

Anyway, Coinbase recently launched Coinbase Cloud which provides something called Wallet-as-a-Service. I believe this is something closely related to Account Abstraction and Smart accounts that they are working on and it’s, hands down, one of the biggest gigabrain business moves. Hence my new profound respect for them.

Their aim is to provide tools for programable smart accounts to other big Web2 and Web3 companies, thus enabling them to enter the web3 market and provide a smooth experience for their ‘normie’ users. What does this mean?

Well, let’s say that Starbucks wants to enter web3. Starbucks has a lot of customers who have no idea about crypto and don’t have a crypto wallet set up. So asking them to create one in order to get certain benefits won’t be a frictionless onboarding experience and probably not a lot of people will bother doing it.

We’ve been saying for a while now -- the mass crypto adoption will come once the end user doesn’t know they are using crypto! And Coinbase is here to give the tools for companies like Starbucks to build just that.

So imagine logging into Starbucks again, but now this time you won't need to connect your wallet. Utilizing the wallet-as-a-service feature Starbucks will provide an in-app smart account/wallet for you that is associated with your existing account and you’ll get to receive all crypto-related benefits seamlessly. You’ll use and participate in crypto activities without even knowing it.

This one is so interesting that I might write another article about it.

To conclude

As I said in this tweet:

https://twitter.com/TheCapHimself/status/1620113428823040024

and I firmly stand by it.

Account Abstraction is a game-changer that has the potential to be a major catalyst for the widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies. In essence, this innovation brings forth a range of benefits that are too good to ignore. It is poised to revolutionize blockchain technology and make it more accessible and user-friendly. However, it's worth noting that this innovation is still in its early stages, and there are technical hurdles to overcome before it can be adopted on a larger scale.

There are many aspects to be excited about when it comes to AA. Whether you are a dev or the end user or an admirer of good tech. It unifies, simplifies, improves, and commercializes digital identity, wallet creation, gaming experience, navigating chains, and overall experience in web3 by providing necessary tools for builders.

The widespread attention from industry giants is a testament to the foundational role that AA will play in the further development of the Web3 world and yet it will remain unknown and unseen by the majority of regular users.

Despite this, AA represents a significant shift in the way that accounts are designed and used, with the potential to usher in a new era of innovation and growth in the blockchain space. While it will require significant changes to wallets and other software applications, the benefits of this new technology are expected to be substantial, making AA a true game-changer in the blockchain industry.

Grateful

This article wouldn’t be possible without these amazing people below who helped me along the way:

• Rhic from Biconomy (and Charlie for introducing us) - helped me understand what industries use AA the most and how they are using it.

• Zeneca from Zen Academy - helped me understand broader use cases.

• Krunal from UniDex - helped me understand the DeFi application aspect and actually kickstarted my interest in AA during our chat a long time ago.

• Edi from SpaceShard - helped me confirm my findings and understanding.

• The entire crew at InternDAO.

• David from Bankless for posting this tweet which helped with my research xD

• The ultimate AA cheatsheet AwesomeAA from Kurnal

As always, feel free to slide into my DMs either on Twitter or Telegram (@theCapHimself) to talk about... well anything crypto, really.

🫡

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