NFTs, Domains, Tokens

Historical NFTs: A Look at the Linagee Name Registrar Contract Discovery and Gold Rush

… and it hit at the perfect time, given the recent ENS activity!

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

[UPDATES: Note that since the Linagee system has really taken off since I published this originally, I’ve made some updates below, especially to the important links area!]

Last night, just as I was heading to bed (naturally — my timing never being just right in the NFT space), I saw a really intriguing tweet by someone named Leonidas. I’ll link to it here, as it’s got a ton of useful info:

The TLDR version of the tweet is this: A researcher named Mason Keresty was looking into historical smart contracts and discovered one from 2015 by a dev named Linagee, who happens to be the person who deployed the very first ETH smart contract (which would’ve happened about a week or less prior to the one in question).

Moreover, the discovered contract was for a naming service, more or less similar to the massively popular ENS system (although not as tricked out, of course). And the super-cool thing is that, as expected, the code still works, meaning that, even now, users could connect to this ancient contract and mint out tokens for just the price of gas.

This is like finding a gumball machine from 100 years ago and, not only does it still work, but it’ll never run out of gumballs (so long as you ask for a different flavor each time).

I recall thinking, “Wow, that’s cool… maybe I should get up and look into this.” And then, being tired, I responded to this thought with, “Nah, do it in the morning.”

Well, by morning, the contract had been absolutely pounded by speculators jumping in and claiming anything and everything of potential value (largely based on all of the wild activity in the ENS world where, for example, three-digit numbers are selling for upwards of 40 ETH at the moment). (Yeah, I really should have gotten up and minted some of those, but I think those were gone even before I read that dude’s tweet.)

As of right now, it’s been about 24 hours since the discovery and subsequent gold rush. The contract has had 112,000+ claims made through it so far, with no signs of slowing down. Even now, still, it’s the #5 highest user on the Etherscan Gas Tracker.

The contract, which has been since named the “Linagee Name Registrar” (the renaming being a good thing because it may well mean that the OG dev Linagee has returned) is perhaps a bit quirkier than the ENS system you may be used to. Likely, this is because it may not have been envisioned to have needed all of the controls and functions that the more formal ENS system has. For example, in Linagee system is case-sensitive, meaning the “Jim” and “jim” are two different tokens, and must be registered separately. It also can take spaces, which can make for some really confusing names like: [space][space]Jim[space][space], which may be almost impossible to differentiate from just Jim.

Links (updated as developments occur):

The contract is here:

Original Minting App:

New Minting App (listed on Discord):

Check Your Registrations (if you forgot what you registered):

  • https://www.derpnation.xyz/myenr
  • Note: Linagee registrations won’t show up in your wallet or on OpenSea automatically, so it’s easy to forget what you registered if you grabbed many of them. As such, you can connect there, go to your wallet’s Etherscan and grab the block number from your earliest registration transaction (look for a function called “Reserve” in your transaction list), open that transaction, and grab the block number. Then pop that into the form and this site will scan blocks for your transactions and pull up records of what you registered. This is a rather slow process, but works. I believe there may be a better way now… will update this if/when I see one. The good news is that once you have your record, you can easily just copy/paste it into Excel or a Google sheet and go from there.

Linagee Discord

Linagee Official Twitter:

Linagee on OpenSea:

  • https://opensea.io/collection/linageenamewrapper
  • Note that within the past few days, the devs have managed to add some super filters to the OS interface. As a dev myself who has worked with metadata extensively, I can tell you that this was no small task, and they’re to be commended for all they’ve done thus far (and they’re showing no signs of slowing down). These filters are absolutely critical with this contract, as the contract included almost no filtering of its own, which allowed modern scammers to do things like register “123” with the addition of various invisivble characters, prepending/appending extra spaces, and all sorts of crap characters — the end result of which is that when these names first hit OpenSea, there could be 10 different NFTs that looked almost identical and a buyer would not know which, if any, of the NFTs was the actual one. Now with these filters, a buyer can set filters to, for example: NO SPACES, NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS, and 3 DIGITS. This should bring up actual 3-digit strings like 123, 234, etc. (Note however that, prior to spending any serious ETH on these, I personally recommend joining the Discord and learning about any potential for even these listings to be misleading. There are advanced methods you can use, if learned, to self-verify the

Wrapping Site

  • https://linageenameregistrar.com/wrapper
  • As this smart contract was deployed prior to the ERC721 standard, you need to “wrap” your names before you can get them onto OpenSea (if you want to sell them). That all happens at the link below. (Note: See the Discord documentation to first understand how this works — and note that there is a gas cost to this.)
  • For detailed wrapping instructions, see my next article:

Should You Mint Something?

Sure, why not?! As many advise, use a burner. All you need is a small bit of ETH to cover gas and you can mint names for about $1 USD each (give or take). I minted a whole bunch of absolute crap, just based on my knowledge of various things that have taken off in the ENS world. But, as I said, by the time I got to start minting, there were about 90,000 mints, which definitely wiped out anything of immediate high potential value (and, keep in mind, it’s ALL potential value at this point, as these tokens won’t yet show in your wallet readily, won’t show on OpenSea, and won’t be readily sellable/tradeable until the devs suss out a few tech issues that I won’t get into here).

By comparison, the ENS system has 2+ million registrations. So with only 100,000 or so, that’s 20x fewer registrations. And keep in mind that these 100,000 likely include a lot of “dupes” in that “Jim” and “jim” and “JIM” are all different — as are “JimDee”, “jimdee”, and “Jim Dee” (which, as I’m typing this, I’m realizing I should register those). So there are still plenty of cool discoveries to be made.

No one yet knows what, if anything, may come of this opportunity. But, whether they remain valueless or not, it’s still kind of neat to mint something (of your own choosing) right off of a contract dating back to just a week after Ethereum was first launched.

I have a feeling something more will come of this. As I said, the contract was renamed on Etherscan. And with 100k+ mints, the dev and the community both will want to see some revenues from this. And that means they’ll need to get these names onto the marketplaces where they can get royalties. So, I’m optimistic that there’s more to come with this story.

BTW, I’ve read a few rumors of a domain ending in the works here. For example, all ENS names end in “.eth”. Some are saying these names will end in “.og” — which would be pretty neat. But, I really don’t know what’ll happen with them. I grabbed a bunch of double-emojis, which I knew have value in the .eth ecosystem. Not sure what “🦝🦝.og” might fetch someday (which I *think* I registered), but surely that’ll be worth at least the $1 in gas I paid.

There are surely still some gold nuggets to be minted. You may just have to get a little creative and/or be persistent in your searching. (It’s not like ENS yet where you can easily bulk-search.) Good luck & LMK if you register anything amazing!

Jim Dee is a prolific writer, developer, and multi-media creator from Portland. You can find him, his businesses, his books, and more at JPD3.com. Thanks for reading! Cat image here courtesy of Midjourney AI.

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