$600,000 for an Ethereum domain name? ENS plans to make .eth a top-level domain

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) project seems to be attracting a lot of capital attention after it was relaunched this spring.

Thousands of people are vying for a new set of ethereum domain names, with some bidding for nearly a million dollars.

Even though these bids are more like deposits (meaning you can withdraw your funds after a year if you choose to give up the domain), the enthusiasm for bidding is still amazing.

So far, the exchange.eth domain has been auctioned for 6,660 ETH (about $609,000), foundation.eth has been auctioned for 300 ETH (about $27,000), and weather.eth has been auctioned for 101 ETH (about $9,000).

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is similar to the Domain Name Server (DNS) system we know today, which creates human-readable names instead of those difficult machine languages. The difference is that traditional domain names point to websites on the Internet, while Ethereum domain names point to Ethereum resources, such as wallets, content on the decentralized storage system Swarm, and so on. In addition, the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) itself is also decentralized, which is implemented through smart contracts.

On the first day of the re-launch, players were not very enthusiastic about participating in the auction, but as the week went on, the pace of the auction began to accelerate. As of press time, the system has launched 27,800 auctions, with thousands of auctions per day.

Among them, there are also some domain names with strong entertainment nature, such as ethereumclassic.eth, winklevoss.eth and donaltrump.eth.

Private Auction

You might be wondering how these auctions work.

When you participate in an auction, you need to enter a bid for the domain name you want. When your bid is higher than others, you can get the domain name. In theory, if there is no one competing with you, you only need to pay a minimum of 0.01 ether to get the domain name.

Note that you only have one chance to bid for a domain name. In addition, all bids are sealed, so you don't know who is competing with you and how much they are bidding. Everyone bids the highest price they are willing to pay, and the one with the highest bid wins.

Because there’s no central service to hold on to the bids — smart contracts can’t hold these secrets — users must reveal their bids themselves. (Nick Johnson, a fellow at the Ethereum Foundation and the lead on the ENS project, recommends that people set a date and then immediately reveal a name so they don’t forget and lose their bid.)

A bumpy ride

However, the first week after the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) was relaunched was marked by some minor bumps, including what Johnson referred to as a number of “low-impact” vulnerabilities.

For example, one bug caused users to bid on the wrong version of a domain name (the name they entered mixed capital letters). This bug has now been fixed and the program automatically converts capital letters to lowercase.

Additionally, Johnson explained that some people lost the opportunity to reveal their bids because after they placed their bids, they restarted their browsers (clearing their data) without backing up their data to a JSON file.

After the three-day bidding period, you’ll have 48 hours to manually reveal your bid, otherwise any amount of ether you’ve offered will be burned. You’ll now be prompted to download your bid immediately, so users will be alerted.

Wallet Support

In addition, since the launch of the ENS system, third-party players have entered the game, which has also brought more choices to users.

First, if you wanted to bid on an Ethereum name, your only option was to use the official dapp (decentralized application), which required a blockchain browser or command line. Now, you can use MyEtherWallet.com to do this, and Ethtools.com has also integrated the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).

However, Johnson said that just as most users on the internet don’t buy their own domain names, most ENS users will likely not buy their own ethereum domain names. Instead, he believes users will use their favorite wallet, which will then immediately give them a domain name, such as alice.myetherwallet.eth.

Johnson told reporters:

“I think once wallets start using their own Ethereum names, we’ll see this system really take off. Then anyone can instantly define their own payment address. Suddenly anyone can own an Ethereum name without having to go through the whole auction process.”

Next step?

The ENS team's current plan focuses on getting more wallets to integrate and support the system. Johnson said he also wants to expand the capabilities of the ENS system and add more standardized components.

“One of the things we want to do is add proper support for DNS records. We can use an alternate DNS layer to offer .eth as a top-level domain,” he said.

It is reported that the ENS team plans to upgrade the system to a more stable system within two years. By that time, people will be able to bid for domain names with more characters (no more than 7 characters).