ENS, NFT, LOL, WTF?
ENS Domains as NFT Sets: Looking at Some Niche Investing Opportunities
They’re kinda-sorta NFTs with utility, but also kinda-sorta domain names.
ENS domains continue to fascinate me, and also millions of others in the NFT/web3/crypto space. As an NFT guy, I tend to see them as a giant, almost limitless set of mintable NFTs with quite a bit of interesting and unique utility (e.g., serving as wallet address aliases and/or serving as one’s online identity). You can even give them images so that they display as you like on OpenSea, etc. Perhaps I’ll do a separate article on that sometime.
Limitless as they may be in terms of mintable combinations (just like all of the .com, .net, and .[whatever] domains), they stand apart from other domains in that they’re so enmeshed within the Ethereum ecosystem and thus are looked at in distinct ways that only NFTs, crypto coins, or other kinds of crypto tokens might be analyzed.
Most obviously (and most similar to the NFT space), they’re being actively categorized. For example, the screen grab above shows the 999 Club which would be the “collection” of all ENS domains from 000 to 999. While the point of inventing ENS domains was not to create such “clubs,” today’s collectors quickly began to recognize that such things could be categorized in these ways…
