Why .ETH names?

how the one true portal into web 3 is easing crypto accessibility.

Adetola ✌️

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Published in

Coinmonks

5 min readDec 6, 2021

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Last month early adopters of ENS were airdropped as much as 5 figures worth of $ENS governance tokens for just buying a .eth domain name. It did get a lot of people who had missed out on this interested. For most in the crypto space; November was ENS month. It was the month ENS truly did come into the limelight. Although ENS names have been a thing since 2017, most people didn’t hear of it till after the airdrop news and even many more people are still in the dark.

In this article, I’ll be diving into ENS names and what they represent looking into the future.

What is ENS?

Ethereum Name Service(ENS) is a naming protocol of the decentralized web. It exists on but is not limited to the ethereum blockchain. It turns difficult to read or even remember machine data into human-friendly names.

What is an Ethereum Name?

In the words of the ENS company itself; think of it as claiming your web3 username alongside a name for all your crypto wallets and decentralized websites.

It is that .eth name you must have seen on the profile of most of your favourite crypto influencers on Twitter.

What if I told you vitalik.eth above is his ethereum wallet address and he doesn’t have to scramble to get his phone for a copy and paste each time he wants to receive payments into this wallet. Or even more excitingly that this name could onboard his other wallets even from other blockchains.

Welcome .eth; no more long and unfriendly Wallet Addresses

Think of your traditional websites domain names. They help project your websites IP address into human-readable format. Your IP address looks something like this “192.158.1.38” and you definitely can’t recall that every time you’re pitching your website to a potential visitor. Here’s where your .com, .org, .uk DNS names come in — human friendly. Take medium.com for example instead of the previously long 192.158.1.38

It’s almost the same problem being solved by a .eth name.

Would you rather tell someone your wallet address is 0xec61a31Df8Ffba6b3d537165dB9b00Bc49Cgd3e3 or that your address is Brantley.eth.

I bet you picked the latter. Anyone is more likely to remember that. It would save a lot of stress, especially when receiving crypto payments.

ENS beyond just ethereum wallets.

ENS currently supports as many as 110 of the top blockchains and not just the ethereum blockchain on which it runs. Getting a blockchain supported on ENS just involves getting the blockchain included on ENS address encoding lib. So our friend Brantley could receive $sol using this same .eth name. The name allows linking of your multiple wallet addresses.

A step further; DNS namespace integration

This allows most DNS names owners to onboard their DNS names into ENS. Using budweiser.com name as an example. We could onboard our budweiser.com name into ENS and then use budweiser.com to receive payments in sol,ftm e.t.c.

.ETH name; your Web 3 username/Profile

Imagine having a single preset Username and avatar for all your social platforms from Twitter to LinkedIn, IG and even medium and not having to sign up every single time you’re new on a platform. ENS does this with most of your favourite decentralized platforms. You could store your username, avatar and other profile data across multiple services.all your decentralized apps.

In the future, we just might be signing in with Ethereum and not Google.

Privacy Concerns 🔐

Generally, on the blockchain, privacy has been an area of concern as anyone with your wallet address could scan it with scans like and view all the previous transactions you’ve had with that wallet.

With ENS names it goes a step further as all your different addresses are linked to just one name. With that name, anyone could see all of your wallets and subsequently all of your previous transactions. So before updating your profile picture with your .eth name. Not that they couldn’t already do this same when you share your wallet address. Just be certain of how much you’re willing to share before making it public.

Budweiser displaying beer.eth Image source: Budweiser

Final Thoughts

Although the adoption of ENS names is more common with already crypto inclined people. ENS and crypto generally are still in their early days and ENS remains the most widely integrated blockchain naming standard.

With the recent DNS namespace integration, the solid team backing this project and more recently with its transfer of governance to its community. I’m certain we’ll be seeing more innovative steps to drive mainstream adoption and also counter some of its privacy cons. Also worthy of note is that there are plans to integrate the enabling of the records being transferred and stored outside the ethereum blockchain.