Mar 19, 2020
New Custom Text Records Means Every Project Can Have Its Own ENS Record
We’re pleased to announce we just launched custom text records in the ENS Manager. This simple feature unlocks the power of ENS for permissionless innovation by any project or person.
We first added text records to the ENS Manager last October. The idea of text records is it’s a generic field people can use for whatever they want. This way, people can use ENS to store a wide range of information without us having to add a new record type for each new use case.
In addition to the data stored in the text record, each text record has an additional piece of information called the “key” that identifies what the data in a particular text record is for. For example, you can have a text record with the key “URL” with a URL in the data field.
While on the contract level you’ve always been able to use any text record key you wanted, our Manager UI initially only supported a few pre-determined text record keys suggested in Richard Moore’s EIP for ENS text records.
With this new release, we’ve added the ability for users to easily create any text record key they want right in our Manager.
Here’s a quick demo:
Why this matters
ENS already has dedicated record types for things like Ethereum addresses, Bitcoin addresses, IPFS hashes, and more — all of which are significant use cases. But in many ways we’re most excited about the ENS use cases we haven’t thought of.
Does your project have an identifier that could benefit from a decentralized naming service like ENS, so that users could interact with human-friendly names rather than your non-human-friendly identifier? No need to write an EIP, ask for permission, or try to create your own naming system. Just decide what you want your ENS text record key to be and start using it! It’s that simple.
We look forward to seeing what people do with this! In fact, if your project uses text records for something, please let us know at brantly@ens.domains; we’d love to help promote it.
Try it out now in the ENS Manager → app.ens.domains
As always, if you have any questions that aren’t answered in our docs, feel free to reach out to us for help anytime on Gitter or our forum.
Happy text record-ing!
