What is ENS & Ｗhat problem it Solves?
Ever since blockchain and cryptocurrency become a trending topic, people began transferring their digital assets through their crypto wallets. However, one of the biggest challenges crypto market faces is to achieve easy-to-use interface. One of the most specific problem users are facing is the long public key consisting of 32 digits. And this is where ENS comes in.
What is ENS?
ENS is the abbreviation for Ethereum Name Service. By registering this open, extensible decentralized Domain Name Service based on Ethereum blockchain, users can interact with smart contract and buy a unique, customized, human-readable domain name for their crypto wallet address.
The goal of DNS, the centralized Internet Domain Name Service, is to provide human-readable identifiers that can be used to specify servers. DNS is like a phonebook for the Internet. People access the information online through domain name, like “www.portal.network” or “web.portal.network”. Then browsers interact through Internet Protocol addresses (IP address) such as “69.89.31.226” (in IPv4) or “2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334” (in IPv6).
DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can reach and load Internet resources. Each device connected to the Internet has unique IP address that machines use to locate the device. The main evolution of DNS servers is that eliminating the need of memorizing IP addresses.
Just like DNS, ENS has similar goal to DNS, but with obvious difference in architecture: the properties of Ethereum Blockchain. The primary goal of ENS is to provide human-readable decentralized domain names, like “protalnetwork.eth”,and translate this decentralized domain name into machine-readable identifiers composed of 32 digits such as
Ethereum addresses, IPFS, Swarm content hashes, and so on. The second goal of ENS is to provide metadata about names and whois information for user to find domain name’s owner. More concisely, ENS is the Ethereum-based smart contract.
According to EIP137 by Nick Johnson, ENS has two principles components: the registry and the resolvers.
The ENS registry consist of a single central contract that maintains domains and subdomains. It also stores three essential pieces: the owner of the domain, the resolver for the domain,and the time-to-live for all records under the domain.
The owner of the a domain may be either a user’s account or a smart contract. A registrar is a smart contract that owns a domain and a list of subdomains that follow a set of rules defined in the contract.
The resolver for domain is responsible for translating Ethereum domain names into addresses. Each smart contract that follows related rules may act as a resolver in ENS.
Conforming to the Collision resistance, Ethereum domain name is designed in 32 byte hashes. It simplifies processing and storage. The algorithm translating domain names into hashes is called namehash, defined in EIP137.
The methods of time-to-live records under the domain are defined by each record type such as Ethereum address ,Swarm content hash ,or other smart contract based on Ethereum blockchain. The new record types may be defined in EIP standardisation process at any time without making changes to the ENS registry to support them.
There are more technical details about how the namehash algorithm of ENS works via EIP137.md
What problem it solved?
The primary purpose of ENS is to provide more effective solutions in Ethereum. Even if Ethereum has basic functionality, it suffer in several shortcomings that will limit its long-term usefulness. In the basic functions that Ethereum provides, users and developers can’t register the subdomain, like “blog.protalnetwork.com”. With ENS, developers can host multiple services under a single domain, such as a DApp hosted in Swarm, a Whisper address, or a email server.
One of the obvious and mainstream user-case that ENS permits is that users’ decentralized domain address can be used as a human-readable alternative to a standard hexadecimal cryptocurrency address.
But the ambition of ENS is far more than that. ENS Team believe that to improve the fundamental features of the domain name service will continue to be useful as the Ethereum platform develops and matures. Some systems, such as Swarm, may require a well defined interface for updating domains and records, and that is ENS anticipating the development of a standard for this. Like DNS is the crucial pieces to centralized internet, ENS is the primary cornerstone to the Ethereum network.
