ENS founder: Not just .eth, we want to be the domain name service provider for every digital resource in the world

After 2019, the concept of Web3.0 was mentioned again and spread rapidly. Just a few days ago, Internet KOL Pan Luan hosted a discussion on Web2.0 and Web3.0, with a peak traffic of nearly 200,000. Obviously, Web3.0 is no longer only focused on the blockchain industry, but has begun to tell a new story in the global Internet technology industry.

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is one of the important infrastructures of the Ethereum network, and of course it is also an important infrastructure of the Web3.0 network. In the Ethereum ecosystem, more and more protocols are beginning to support ENS. Using ENS as a name, using NFT as an avatar, using mirror to record life, and using AR to store content has become a standard feature of Web3.0 people and the basis of many Web3.0 social applications.

How does the founder of ENS view the ENS vision and the story of Web3.0? A few days ago, he was a guest at The Defiant and talked with the host about his story and original intention of creating ENS, as well as the future of ENS. BlockBeats translated the full text as follows:

Camila Russo (Host): Nick is the founder and lead developer of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), which is Ethereum's version of domain names, and he'll talk about all the specifics later in the interview. ENS allows Ethereum users to link readable domain names to their Ethereum addresses, making it easier to send and receive Crypto. However, this is just the starting point for the ENS roadmap and future goals. Basically, any domain with .eth that you see on Crypto Twitter comes from ENS. So, before we get into the story and development goals of ENS, I want to know what made you create ENS in the first place?

Nick Johnson: I remember it was in 2016, when I was still working at Google as a software engineer, and a well-known financial services company contacted me and said, "Do you want to find a job on Ethereum?" I replied, "No, but Ethereum sounds interesting." After that, I wrote some code and created a few libraries. Later, I received a call from the Ethereum Foundation, and they asked me, "Would you like to work on Go Ethereum or Swarm?" This sounded more exciting because I had never worked remotely or contracted, so this would be a complete challenge for me, but I resolutely chose this job.

I had just started working on Swarm, and one of the projects needed a name service to provide names for decentralized content, like what you see on Swarm and IPFS. So I started as a side project to build what is now ENS, but it quickly evolved from a small side project to my full-time job at the foundation. Then we spun it out as its own organization and created what is today ENS.

CR: Can you tell us a little bit about Swarm?

NJ: Swarm is a decentralized content storage similar to IPFS. It is an Ethereum native program and has built an incentive system on Ethereum. They recently launched a token distribution mechanism, but even though they have put a lot of effort into it, it is not as popular as IPFS.

Ethereum Foundation provides funding for ENS

CR: Was ENS initially funded and bootstrapped by the Ethereum Foundation?

NJ: Yes, it started as an authorized side project of mine at the Ethereum Foundation (EF). But as it grew, I couldn't do it all by myself, so the foundation suggested that instead of forming a team within the foundation to run ENS, we should form our own team, and they gave us a sizable grant. We used that money to recruit the first group of people who were willing to work with me, and these people did some volunteer or paid work for us when ENS was still owned by the foundation. Then we grew step by step, and now we have a stable registered income.

CR: Is this common in foundations, to spin off an internal project into its own company?

NJ: I think they want to encourage it, but we haven't really had anything like this happen before because sometimes it's just not practical, like core infrastructure like Go Ethereum doesn't seem to benefit from being separate. It's hard to see how they would benefit from a completely separate organization. But in other cases it makes sense, like for us, the initial funding from the foundation allowed us to get our feet under us and get everything going, and we made significant progress in the first two years.

ENS has never considered the issue of revenue. The registration fee was set to reduce the amount of spam and illegal occupation, but it did bring us considerable income, which was a pleasant surprise.

Nick Johnson

CR: That sounds very interesting. I would like to ask how much funding the foundation gave you?

NJ: They gave us a million dollars. The situation was that they asked me to draft a grant proposal, and I thought about how many people I needed to hire, how much I should pay them, and what else I needed. In the end, I calculated that the operating expenses for the first year would be $500,000, but the final decision was made by Vitalik, who said, "That's not enough, give them a million dollars."

I'm really grateful that they gave us so much grant money, which helped us get through the difficult times and kept us on our feet. Without this grant, we might not be where we are today. They later gave us a special grant, which was also very meaningful to us.

CR: Does the foundation now own shares in ENS?

NJ: No, that money is purely a grant from them. The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit foundation, so the grant they gave us is purely to ensure the normal operation of ENS.

How ENS works

CR: Can you talk about your business model and the revenue from registrations? You mentioned earlier that when you separated ENS, you didn't consider the issue of revenue, but your company does have stable revenue, so what is your vision for the future? Do you want to build it into a for-profit company? Can you talk about how much revenue you actually have now?

NJ: I always wanted to build ENS as a public good, not a for-profit enterprise or to make money from it, because I wanted to make the domain name system accessible to everyone. But when you build a domain name system, the first problem you need to solve is how do you make sure that names that people find interesting or useful aren't immediately snatched up by speculators and resold on the secondary market.

When you're building a neutral system, you can't completely eliminate this, but what you can do is put in some costs that make it not cost-effective to snatch up names, and force speculators to focus more on what they think is the most valuable. Systems like Namecoin have been corrupted by speculators to the point where it's very illiquid - it's hard to find a name you like because speculators have already resold it at an extreme premium, and the secondary market is very inefficient. So we want to try to avoid this as much as possible without affecting ordinary users.

In the first version of ENS there was an auction-based system, and if you won the auction, you couldn't get your deposit back as long as you held the domain. Of course, this wasn't meant to be profitable, it was just the cost of using the domain, which in theory would have a positive effect.

The problem is that squatters and speculators know they will sell the name and get their deposit back. This is exacerbated by the fact that any long-term investor in the project assumes they can’t get their deposit back because it’s not realistic for them to give up the name. So we decided to move to a model where we charge a yearly registration fee, and the fee is nominal. For names longer than 5 characters, the annual registration fee is $5 – Ethereum transaction fees are now several times higher than that. That said, this model does limit speculation to some extent, as unused names are returned to the registration pool, and it has also provided us with higher revenue than we expected.

At today’s ether price, ENS has about $40 million worth of assets in multi-signature and the DAO in the near future, of which $20 million is money we have already earned. For example, if someone registered a domain name for two years a year ago, now that the first year has passed, half of the money has been received, and the other half will be recognized as income in the future. When the DAO is launched in the future, it will also have its own token to reward people for participating in governance or completing some projects that are in line with the development ideas of ENS.

CR: So the 40 million is pure registration fee income, and this income is separate from the ENS Token treasury?

NJ: Yeah, about 10 million of that is USDC and the rest is currently in ETH, but of course once the DAO takes over, they will take over all management.

The road to decentralization

CR: Can you talk about the vision or goals behind creating the DAO?

NJ: From day one, our goal was to build a decentralized system, which meant we needed to get rid of human control as much as possible. I firmly believe that this is the most feasible way to build a decentralized system. At the same time, we also wanted to minimize the number of trusted parties to execute the system. To do this, we built a system that is cryptographically managed with certificates and gradually removed some permissions that will no longer be used. Therefore, even the ENS root key holders who use ENS for administrative work cannot affect existing registrations because they no longer have this permission. Even if we eventually take over by the DAO, they will not be able to do this.

The second thing we are going to do is to move from our original model of being managed by 70 holders to a more decentralized model, where the future DAO will control the overall development. We have currently raised sufficient funds, and we will use the funds beyond our operating expenses to fund other public welfare and other causes in the Ethereum ecosystem. Secondly, we will also continue to upgrade and adjust ENS to ensure its normal operation.

When we started, DAOs were still new and I didn't think they were mature enough, so I was reluctant to hand over ENS to a nascent DAO. But since then, even in the last six months to a year, the ecosystem has matured, not only has a lot of tools been built, but there are also rich practices, smart contract systems such as the OpenZeppelin component we are using (which is a composite model based on DAOs), and we have successfully removed human manipulation from the management function, so we are confident that we can return control to the community.

CR: It’s interesting for a founder to have the confidence to entrust the organization he has built over the years to a decentralized group of token holders. You just mentioned that management no longer has management authority, which I find a bit unsettling because it means that no one can influence the operating model of ENS. How will you deal with these risks, and why do you think decentralization is the right decision?

NJ: Part of the reason is that ENS has been like this since day one. Since launch, we have had seven key holders, which is certainly not decentralized, but better than me holding all the power. Also, we are not a small group of people from the same company, we are from the entire Ethereum community, and we are a group that is trusted and respected.

We hope that if someone (not necessarily me) proposes an upgrade or change to ENS, they will look at it critically and evaluate whether it is a good idea. This mechanism not only prevents someone's keys from being compromised, but also serves as a way to self-regulate. This committee or board will be responsible for reviewing any proposals and ensuring that they have the best interests of the Ethereum community at heart.

So in a way, moving ENS to a DAO is just another step in that direction. I no longer have control over where things are headed, and I still have to convince others that this is a good idea. However, as more participants continue to join, we may inevitably make some serious mistakes. But at the same time, there are many DAOs that are currently doing well and have achieved success in decentralized governance, and we have regained confidence in the process of learning from them, which allows us to confirm that we are not putting ENS at risk.

In my opinion, the worst case scenario we could encounter is the misallocation and misuse of funds, but this is less important than ensuring the safety of ENS users and that domains remain in use and not misappropriated.

CR: Can you talk about how and why you designed the ENS token distribution?

NJ: The design of the token allocation mechanism is also crucial to achieving our long-term goals. As the first public welfare product serving the community, our goal is to provide users with the most effective and convenient services. In terms of how to allocate tokens, we mainly look at the number of domain names registered by users or the number of years of registration. However, there will be a problem with this allocation. Some people who want to seek personal gain through the system will receive a large number of governance tokens, which is not conducive to the development of the system, while those who have been using the system will not receive much reward.

So we want to set up a set of parameters that can identify those who have been using the system and distribute the airdrops to those who are actually using the system. Not only that, but these parameters must be difficult to forge.

So we split the airdrop in half, and half of it is based on the number of days the account has owned a domain. So if you've owned the domain since day one, you get the biggest airdrop. But if you signed up the day before the snapshot, you get nothing. It's hard to fake that number of days, you would have to have been thinking about the airdrop on the day ENS launched four years ago to fake it, so it's a very good allocation.

However, this model ignores those participants who have just joined ENS with enthusiasm, so the other half of the airdrop will be distributed according to how long your last expiring name has been registered. We think this is a good indicator, because if you don’t think ENS can achieve long-term development, you may not register for ten or eight years, at most one or two years. So, if you are willing to register for a long time, it means that you believe in ENS and believe that this domain name can be valid for a long time. But the registration time cannot be as long as you want, at most eight years, because if someone wants to register for thousands of years, then we have to transfer the entire DAO to him.

The last point is whether you have set your domain name as the primary DNS domain name. If this domain name appears when you log in to your Apple account or vote, it means that you are actually using this domain name, and we will double the amount of the other two parts of the airdrop.

CR: Of the total token supply, how much is allocated to users and how much is allocated to ENS name holders?

NJ: 25% was distributed to domain name holders via airdrops, and 50% remained in the DAO treasury and was managed by token holders.

CR: What is the token economy of ENS? How is the value of the token accumulated?

NJ: The token is designed to be a governance token, and the DAO can add additional functionality to it, but our main goal is to get those who have helped ENS succeed to participate in governance and ensure that they can help manage the entire system. So its function is that if you get an ENS token, you can delegate your voting rights to someone else, and then that person can vote on proposals such as how to use the treasury funds to fund other public welfare projects, and can also vote on how the system should be modified.

CR: How will the tokens in the vault be distributed next? Is there an inflation mechanism? What is your plan?

NJ: 5 million tokens in the vault are available at any time, and the remaining 45 million have a four-year redemption period to prevent all 50 million tokens in the vault from being transferred out one day in the future. The token has a 2% inflation rate, which means that the DAO can vote from November next year to allocate 2% of the total tokens to an address, and this behavior can be done once a year.

CR: So you have a built-in 2% annual inflation rate?

NJ: Yes, and up to 2%, and they can choose to exercise it or not.

CR: Then token holders can decide the specific issuance amount at any time?

NJ: Yes.

ENS Airdrop

CR: Has the airdrop been going on for a month?

NJ: We announced the airdrop on November 1st, and the actual airdrop was on November 8th, and today is November 24th, so it has been about three weeks since we announced it.

CR: What interesting governance proposals have you received during this time?

NJ: I’m really happy to see things starting to fall into place. As we expected, some of the discussions leading up to the Article 0 bylaw basically explained the bylaw and why the ENS DAO should be outside the rules system. Although this is just a draft proposal, I’m happy to see the community actively participating. We would also like to see a proposal to move the treasury from multisig to the DAO, and this would be a formal petition proposal from multisig key holders.

But there are some that we didn't expect, for example, we encountered a subtle problem in calculating the airdrop multiplier. If the account receiving the airdrop has a primary ENS domain set, then the account can get the airdrop multiplier, but some people pointed out that some people's ENS domains are likely to be other people's domains. I know a lot of people do this for security reasons, but these accounts still can't get the airdrop multiplier even though they also use ENS.

So there’s a popular proposal going on right now where we plan to send an additional airdrop of about $200,000 worth of DAO tokens to these users — about 2,000 of the 137,000 users who received the airdrop received that additional airdrop.

Next, I will think about how to set up working groups and give them a certain budget so that they don’t need to seek approval from the entire DAO for 5 ETH of funds, because if this is the case, the management of the DAO will be difficult to carry out.

CR: That sounds very interesting, what is your role in this?

NJ: I also run True Names, a development company that builds most of the infrastructure for ENS. At some point, we ask the DAO for budget to continue operations. I also participate in governance to ensure that things run smoothly and that people's proposals are actually taken seriously and voted on and finally implemented.

CR: Do you think your development company will be the only organization building ENS in the future, or will other development companies compete with your company or ENS now that it is a DAO?

NJ: I certainly hope we're not the only company, but I think if we do well, then we can collaborate with other companies instead of competing with each other, which is more effective. But if we don't do well, then I also hope that others will step up. And I hope that no matter what, I hope that someone will step up and say, "If you give us a part of the budget, we will definitely do a lot."

CR: I’m very interested in these emerging business models that are growing out of DAOs. I know it’s only been three weeks since the airdrop, but I wanted to ask you what lessons or initial gains you’ve made from the process of adding tokens to ENS?

NJ: Our head of operations, Brantley, tweeted something that has now become an internet meme. He said, "You are not airdropped a token, you are airdropped a responsibility." I thought it was hilarious, and of course it resonated with people immediately. I joke that this tweet has done more to help people understand ENS DAO than all our previous efforts combined.

Many people now choose to entrust others to handle their token-related matters, so we have established a corresponding claim process to encourage people to delegate. It remains to be seen how token delegation will develop in the future, because it depends on what functions the DAO wants to give to tokens besides governance.

CR: I once posted a thread on Twitter for people to ask me questions, and one of the questions was, "Will this token require staking?" Is it too early to think about this now?

NJ: Yeah, I don’t have any idea about that. In my opinion, we should first figure out the development goals of ENS and DAO, and if staking is required to achieve those goals, then we will let people stake. One of the more interesting suggestions I have seen is that we can change the current voting mechanism to allow the mechanism to recognize how long you have held the vote, which can encourage people to keep their ENS to participate in voting. So if they are long-term users of ENS, rather than those who just vote because they are interested in something, then they will have more of a say.

ENS as a digital identity

CR: What is the long-term vision for ENS?

NJ: Our long-term vision is that we want to be the domain name system for all digital resources in the world. We are improving on the basis of DNS technology to make it more decentralized and more convenient. So what we want to do is not only the Ethereum domain name service, but also to make the domain name part of your decentralized identity, such as the Sign-In With Ethereum service we have launched, which allows you to use your Ethereum account as your personal identity on the website and display your name and personal photo, which is well integrated with ENS.

CR: So you want to provide domains for all blockchain addresses, not just Ethereum addresses?

NJ: Yes, we already support more than 100 popular blockchains.

CR: You are working on making ENS a digital identity that will replace Google or Facebook logins, so will you use your own blockchain address to log in in the future?

NJ: Exactly, and unlike those systems, you manage your identity with your own encryption keys, without having to rely on a third-party provider.

CR: How do you see this user experience improving? Do you think people will have their own digital profiles with all your assets, NFTs, and a history of interactions with different DApps? What would a blockchain user profile look like?

NJ: We released some images of a redesigned manager a while ago that included a lot of this, and it's very much like what you said, it can manage a user's profile and make updates, but it can't generate history yet, but that's something we'll build in the future.

CR: I think the avatar is an NFT in the user’s wallet, right?

NJ: Yes, you can use any image you like, but we are more interested in NFTs and we will make it easier to set up NFTs as avatars.

CR: Do you think this new user profile will be integrated with Web 2.0 in the future? Can I log into Twitter using ENS and my profile picture will be my avatar? Will this integration work smoothly?

NJ: That’s exactly what we’d like to see and that’s what Sign-In With Ethereum is working on. We’re building an OAuth gateway that’s basically the same authentication provider that Google, Facebook, and GitHub use to log in, which means you can just deploy any of those and then update your existing Web 2.0 applications to use this specific gateway for login and integrate with all the existing protocols that use it.

CR: That sounds interesting, what would be the impact of doing that? Continuing with the Twitter example, maybe sending crypto tips to other Twitter users?

NJ: Yeah, the idea is that you have one unified profile across all services, so you only have to set up your profile once and it will appear everywhere, and people who want to follow you can see which services you use. Twitter has the option to automatically make profiles available to their users, so your existing Twitter login can be used as an ENS profile, with the domain being your username plus .twitter.com, and you can use it in any other service, and it will automatically pick up your Twitter avatar and your profile.

CR: I am very much looking forward to it. Once we start using DeFi and Web 3.0, and use MetaMask or Ethereum wallets to log in to different DApps, the Web 2.0 login method will be completely dwarfed. Because in that method, we have to reveal our email addresses and personal information, not only that, but also have to remember passwords over and over again. But if we can all log in with Ethereum wallets or blockchain wallets, everything will become much easier.

NJ: That's natural.

Integrating ENS with Web 2.0

CR: How will ENS integrate with Internet domain names and website names?

NJ: I think there are two aspects to this. One is that with ENS today, you can host a website on IPFS or other content storage and link to your ENS domain. For example, if you are using a browser with MetaMask, you can just type in the .eth domain and add a slash to the ENS domain, and it will load in your web browser just like any other DNS domain. If you don't use such a browser, or you want to link these words to somewhere else, you can add .link or .lambo to the end of the ENS domain, and it will be resolved by a gateway service that is available to people all over the world.

On the other hand, ENS also integrates all DNS namespaces. So in the twitter.com example that I mentioned earlier, Twitter can claim the twitter.com domain in ENS so that they can use twitter.com as the ENS name instead of twitter.eth. So they can set it up with a wallet address, but what's more interesting is that they can host a website on it, so they can create subdomains for all of their users.

So every user can have their twitter.com address, or whatever other domain name they want to use. So we're integrating all of these existing DNS namespaces into ENS because we believe that improving existing name services is the starting point for building the future system efficiently.

CR: So now, any Web 2.0 domain owner can set up their .com, .org, or whatever domain on ENS and link their existing domain to a blockchain account?

NJ: Yes, that's the case for most of them. However, there are some top-level domains, especially those with country codes, that cannot be set up, but the remaining 97% to 98% of domains can be set up and linked freely.

CR: So I can use TheDefiant.io and search for it in ENS and link it to my account? I think I already have an email address for TheDefiant.eth.

NJ: Yeah, then you can already do anything.

CR: That’s great, so what can I do with it once I’ve linked it to my account?

NJ: Basically, anything you can do with native .eth domains. You can link them to IPFS content or personal wallets, and you can use contracts to issue subdomains so you can assign subdomains to users, or you can manually assign domains to yourself for other purposes.

If you want to give out subdomains of TheDefiant.eth to people, they can keep the domain forever, which gives them a sense of security. This is not the case with DNS domains, as ownership depends on external DNS registrars and the actual owner of the DNS domain. However, when using other applications of ENS, you can also create a personal profile on TheDefiant.io. This will be displayed when you log in.

CR: So if I could give all users of The Defiant their specific ENS URL name, then that would exist as a profile on TheDefiant.io?

NJ: Yes, that’s right.

CR: So they can keep the domain permanently? And they also said that different profile pages have different functions and attributes, such as paying users will get special domains that allow them to access paid content, and the website will be able to recognize these names and give them access?

NJ: Yes, of course.

CR: Brantley Milligan, ENS Operations Director, once posted a tweet that caught a lot of people's attention. He said, "I hope everyone understands that most of these crypto domain suffixes do not recognize the global namespace and will be used by different people on DNS and ENS in the future. .ETH has been taken, so it can't be used by people, but its .sol, .crypto and other domains are available to everyone." Can you explain this tweet?

NJ: So when we think of domain names with suffixes, we think primarily of the existing DNS namespace - .com, .net, .org, but over a thousand new top-level domains have also appeared. And these are issued and managed by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). The reason these domains exist today is because a few years ago they held an auction where bidders could bid to register a new top-level domain, and then they issued the domains to the winning bidders. And they will almost certainly hold another auction like this in the next few years.

These domains are recognized in every browser and application in the United States. As a result, other blockchain domain name systems are also launching dozens of different top-level domains, and sometimes there are many top-level domains in one system. This will cause a problem, that is, the sources linked to two identical domains are not the same. Crypto is very hot now, and .crypto domains will also be very popular in auctions, so it is still unknown who will eventually win the domain name among the many decentralized domain name systems.

The .eth suffix is ​​not so lucky, because the three letters ETH are still the country code of Ethiopia, but we have no intention of giving up this domain name. We are still working hard to cooperate with the network community and assure them that "we need our own namespace, but we will not harm the global namespace. On the contrary, we are integrating with it to provide more functions for people, and I think we are doing a good job in this regard.

CR: Okay, but that's a little confusing. So while you'll be able to consolidate all the existing Web 2.0 domains on ENS, link them to your address, and link regular DNS domains to blockchain addresses, will that still be possible with existing Web 3.0 domains like .sol and .crypto? While they exist on Web 3.0, will they be able to appear on Web 2.0? Will there be another auction? And it's not clear that if you own a .crypto domain on ENS, do you really own it?

NJ: So ENS is committed to only issuing .eth names, so if I can issue a .crypto name to someone, then that becomes a top-level domain within ENS and is managed by that person, not by the blockchain naming system that claims to own the .crypto name.

CR: OK, so what does this mean for the owners of .crypto today?

NJ: I mean, it's very possible that there will be two competing servers that claim to own the same domain name, but they're actually on different servers, and that could cause a lot of confusion for people. For example, people might think they're using the same system as .crypto, but they're actually using something else, and they could get hurt. It's dangerous, but it's also inevitable because ICANN can't ban people from using domain names that they've issued. So some domain names will definitely have more than one owner, one in the DNS and one in their own proprietary domain name system.

A lucky coincidence

CR: So how do you plan to deal with the coincidence of .eth appearing?

NJ: It is indeed a coincidence, because eth is still a country code, and many countries currently use country codes with only two letters, such as .uk, .ch, .nz, etc., so although this country code has been retained, it is impossible to issue it. We hope to cooperate with Ethiopia to reach an agreement on how to deal with .eth.

CR: That’s really interesting.

NJ: Yes, that's right. I think for any naming system, these collisions should be minimized. And I think we can't issue top-level domains with buzzwords because it will inevitably lead to conflicts among Internet giants.

CR: When you just talked, you mentioned that the Gas fee for Ethereum is now many times the actual registration fee of ENS. How do you plan to solve this situation? Will you consider using Layer 2?

NJ: Yes, we do have plans for this, we discussed it at some conferences, listened to Vitalik's advice, and extended it on it. The basic idea is that we want people to choose the Layer 2 protocol they want to host, rather than having to use ENS's Layer 2 protocol uniformly. It can be a secondary domain like TheDefiant.eth, or it can be Optimism, Arbitrum, or any network you think is suitable for.

In the long run, we will look at how to transfer registration of new secondary domains like .eth to L2. But in the short term, we will focus on how to get L2 to manage and create subdomains. We expect many users to obtain subdomains provided by wallet providers or third parties through L2 instead of registering their own secondary domains.

CR: So what will be the next step for ENS? What kind of products are being developed in the near future? What kind of products are you looking forward to going online in the near future?

NJ: We hope to launch the L2 project we just mentioned in the near future, at least for private deployments, and then maybe first to go live in Optimism. We have made a huge improvement to the manager to effectively improve the user experience and provide some new features. At the same time, we have also improved a large set of smart contracts, which will make the Name Wrapper easier to publish subdomains under a limited license. We have also improved some core contracts, improved their availability and reduced Gas fees. These improvements have effectively improved the user experience of registering and managing domains in ENS.

CR: When do you think Web 3.0 login will become popular?

NJ: I think there will be initial signs in the next two or three months, because Sign-In With Ethereum is rapidly growing and mature, and many websites will start using this program. I also heard that some large Web 2.0 companies will also start adopting and deploying it, and bringing us more relevant talents. Just like ENS and anything else, Web 3.0 login will never be done overnight by everyone, but we have a good start and I hope it will produce a certain snowball effect to achieve more efficient and rapid development.

CR: This reminds me of a tweet from Discord's chief operating officer, and he hinted that people can log in with Ethereum in the future, but this has also been boycotted, and I would love to hear what you think about this.

NJ: I think the appearance of Sign-In With Ethereum is really exciting, so I'm very disappointed with the resistance of some people. I find that some people are already happy with hating Crypto, they are indiscriminate and hateful about all the development of Crypto. Admittedly, the Crypto community and Crypto itself have a lot of problems to be solved, but it also brings us a lot of convenience, so I really don't want people to fall into a dead loop - if they don't like something, they think everything about it is sinful and meaningless.

CR: I agree with you, it's really disappointing, and I hope more people can see Ethereum login as an empowerment tool that manages our digital identities. I also have a question, what is the most misunderstood or underestimated thing in ENS?

NJ: I think the most misunderstood thing about ENS is that people think that ENS has only .eth, and ENS actually has DNS domain names. Also, people think that ENS can only be used to provide domain names for wallets, but you can actually use it for IPFS content, or use it for data information, user discovery, digital identity, etc.

CR: This conversation is very exciting. You make us look forward to the future of Web 3.0 and ENS, and we also hope that more people are willing to learn about ENS.

NJ: This is my honor, thank you.