Last Days to Bid on ENS Short Names
ENS 5 and 6 letter name auctions are ending this week and there are less than 3 weeks left for 3 and 4 letter auctions.
Bid for a name here!
Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a decentralized registrar of names and addresses on Ethereum, that allows users to transact or interact with smart contracts via .eth domain names rather than using long addresses.
Users can currently purchase 7-letter names at the ENS Manager or participate in the ongoing Short Name Auction (3–6 letter names).
About ENS
ENS launched in 2017, with an interim registrar of top-level domains (TLDs), that users could purchase through a vickrey auction. Subsequently, a Permanent Registry has been created and domain names with 7 letters or more are available for purchase at ENS Manager or on the secondary market at ENSListing.
After being battle tested in the Long Name Auction, ENS was ready for the Short Name Auction (3–6 letters) that was likely to see increased demand, higher bids and squatting behavior. Thus for the Short Name Auction, ENS implemented an english auction with a steep price curve to mitigate domain squatting. Minimum bids are:
- 0.025 ETH (~$5) for 5–6 letter domains
- 0.8 ETH (~$140) for 4 letter domains
- 3.2 ETH (~$550) for 3 letter domains
Bids must be 5% higher than the last bid and submitted within the auction time frame. However, any bids sent in the last 5 minutes of an auction will extend the auction by another 5 minutes.
All bids must be submitted in WETH and are held in escrow until the user is either outbid or wins the auction. Auctions are staggered for convenience so bidders don’t have to settle all auctions at once.
Here’s a review of the Short Name Action timeline:
- Short Name Reservation Period (July 11 — Aug 17) — users could reserve 3–6 letter names ahead of the auction, by proving that they had a sufficient claim on the name. Learn more about the reservation process requirements here.
- Short Name Auction (Sept 1 — Present) — users enter bids into an english auction for 3–6 letter names; auctions are staggered and the highest bidder at auction close wins the name. Participate in the auction here.
5 & 6 letter auctions — until Oct 20th!
4 letter auction — until Oct 27th!
3 letter auction — until Nov 3rd!
However, due to a bug that was found in the ENS short name auctions on Open Sea, some auctions may be delayed (eg. ether.eth auction ends Nov 15).
- Instant Registrations (After auctions late Oct — early Nov) — users can instantly register any short names that were not purchased during the auction; just as all 7+ letter names are available today. Registrations can be made through the ENS Manager.
Names on the permanent registry are minted as NFT tokens for users to own and they must pay rent (domain fee) annually to keep the domain — the annual fee will be the original minimum bid per domain (based on length), not the final auction price.
ENS is currently supported by many wallets, such as Argent, Cipher, MyCrypto, Metamask, Opera, Status; as well as apps like Aragon, Bitfinex, Etherscan, Swarm, Universal Login, OpenSea and others.
ENS Subgraph
The ENS subgraph is live on the Graph Explorer, including the registry, the Auction Registrar and any resolvers that are created and linked to domains.
In the above query, we can see a list of domains that have been registered, ordered by the names in counter-alphabetical order (descending). We can also learn about:
- Each domain’s resolver and TTL
- Ethereum address mapped to each domain
- Domain auction data like bid count and bid values
- Other domain and transfer event data like when a name is transferred, new owners, resolvers or TTLs
In ENS lifetime, there have been 795K auctions, 12K names registered and released, and over 170K ETH has been locked (~$32M USD!). In the last year, 75% of the 12K names were released and there were 16K auctions. (Source: CuriousGiraffe)
In this query, we see the subdomains for Argent Wallet’s argent.xyz parent domain. We can also view the owners, resolvers etc. and sub-domain event data. There are no auctions for subdomains since they’re managed by their domain owners.
As the remaining Short Name Auctions close, we’ll be able to discover more interesting data about ENS holders through the subgraph — like the names chosen, which holders have several names (and may be squatting on them!), which names had the highest bids and bid counts and general naming preferences. The ENS subgraph will become richer as registrations and auctions rise and as ENS names become more integrated with other applications.
Use The Graph today!
If you’re looking to build an indexing and querying layer to support your dApp on top of Ethereum, deploy a subgraph! You can also leverage subgraphs to create better UIs that track Ethereum data, to conduct analysis or track your dApp’s usage.
Live subgraphs include Uniswap, Compound, Synthetix, MakerDAO, MolochDAO and many more! Check out The Graph docs to learn how you can run a graph node, create a subgraph and query other subgraphs.
You can also join the Discord channel to chat about launching a subgraph and join The Graph community.
