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The next wave of NFT? Potential business opportunities behind decentralized domain names

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Each ENS domain name is actually an NFT

Web3 infrastructure: decentralized domain names

原文来源：白话区块链

On October 9, an unknown wallet bought the Ethereum domain name Paradigm. ETH for 420 ETH, the largest ENS domain name transaction to date.

What's the point of spending so much money on a domain name,How to register the specific operation, this behind also contains what kind of business opportunitiesLet's find out.

01 What is ENS?

A few days ago, some users used on-chain data and ENS to discover that a series of Ethereum addresses associated with one of the Analysts from Divergence Ventures were interacting with Ribbon products before Ribbon Airdrop was announced on May 25th. In the end, more than 30 addresses were airdropped, which was suspected to be "insider trading", causing a stir for a time.

Including earlier OpeaSea "mouse warehouse incident", in fact, because corresponding executives used their own public ENS address was dug out.

And the key to thatENS, or Ethereum Name Service, is a distributed domain Name Service based on Ethereum that provides a secure and decentralized way to resolve simple human-readable domain names into on-chain and off-chain address resources.

ENS was launched on May 4, 2017. Through a unique bidding mechanism, any user can register one (or more) Ethereum domain names ending in ". Eth "for their Ethereum addresses through the bidding process.

In simple terms, ENS can map a person's long and hard to remember "ethereum address starting with 0x" to a custom short address, such as Satoshi. eth, Vitalik. eth, and so on.

That way, in an Ens-enabled wallet, instead of copying and pasting long addresses, users can directly use the ENS domain name to bind various cryptocurrency addresses and receive cryptocurrency payments.

At the same time, ENS can be used with its own DNS domain name. Currently, ENS supports many DNS domain names, such as.com,. IO, and.

In addition ENS is built on the ERC721 protocol, alsoThat is, each ENS domain name is actually an NFT, so after the registration is completed, you can choose a price to be listed on OpenSea and other NFT trading markets for subsequent auction and transfer.

In some ways, ethereum's mix of alphanumeric and alphanumeric addresses of equal length (typically 42 bits) is not friendly to most users, nor is encryption itself popular, and huge losses caused by incorrect address typing are reported every year.

While & have spentENS replaces Ethereum addresses with characters that are easy for humans to remember, a key step in the spread of encryption, users can choose a friendlier user address to remember, making it easy to send and receive encrypted assets and reducing the risk of transfer to the wrong address.

02 Development of decentralized domain names

According to ENS 'previously published financial report, in 2020, it received about $310,000 in funding and $700,000 in revenue through ETH. In 2020, it spent $760,000, mainly in salaries, legal consulting, hackathon awards, bounty and hosting of websites and services.

Up to now, ENS has nearly 400,000 registered domain names and integrated more than 300 applications. From wallet, application to browser, it has gradually established a relatively complete ecology.

At the recent Shanghai Wanxiang Blockchain Summit,Vitalik also said that infrastructure is key for users, and ENS is a very important piece of infrastructure.

There are a lot of Ethereum users using ENS, and more and more people are expected to use ENS in the future. The problem with ENS right now is that all the functions are implemented on the main network, which leads to very high transaction costs, and that's the infrastructure challenge that we're facing.

So at the same time, in addition to ethereum-based ENS, there are other blockchain domain name systems that haveWith the advantage of low cost and high throughput of competitive public chain, it is temporarily inferior to ENS in ecological construction.

These include the well-known EOS short domain name and Nervos-based DAS, Terra Ecology's TNS, Solana Eco Domain name service, and more.

EOS account

The old EOS account itself is designed like an Internet domain name, with 12 characters that can contain numbers and letters: To register an account, a properly mapped EOS account is required. Once successfully mapped, the user is given an EOS public key and a corresponding private key, but EOS accounts shorter than 12 bits need to be auctioned, which is not only short, but also supports the concept of domain.

DAS account

Meanwhile, DAS (Decentralized Account Services), which is gradually emerging this year, is a Decentralized Account system developed based on Nervos CKB. All DAS accounts end with ".bit "and can be registered with various languages and even emojis. Each DAS is unique. DAS accounts with the same name cannot be created twice.

Meanwhile, DAS is based on the design of Owner and Manager, which provides rich gameplay possibilities different from ENS:

- Owner: indicates the final Owner of the DAS account and can transfer the account and set the administrator of the DAS account.

- Manager: administrator of the DAS account and can manage Records and sub-accounts of the DAS account.

Earlier, the auction price of "OK.bit" NFT was 44529.2 BUSD in Binan. On October 19, the trading market of DAS domain name was also opened, which means that a special liquidity market was opened for DAS and a key step of fair market pricing was taken.

TNS Domain name service

TNS is Terra Ecology's domain name service system, developed by Terra's Extraterfinder team to provide Terra Eco-domain names with suffixes like ".ust."

According to reports, TNS recently opened its preferred domain name service to all users who participated in the test before October 25.

SOL Domain Name Service

Solana domain name service aims to provide a decentralized and affordable way to connect domain names (.sol) to on-chain data. The on-chain data can be SOL addresses, IPFS content ids, images, text, or anything else.

One clear advantage of domain name services is that they can be mapped to SOL addresses, which can be read easily and can replace using SOL addresses for on-chain transfers and payments. Currently, English, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, emoticon domain name registration is supported, and all USDC received will be used to buy back and destroy FIDA (Bonfida project token).

03 ENS registration experience

Next, we take ENS as the main object, through the actual process of registration, reverse resolution, use and so on, to understand the characteristics, comparative advantages and possible role positioning of the next centralized domain name in the WEB3 era.

For example, the domain name xxxxx.eth is registered in the following three steps:

First, we need to confirm a transaction in our wallet. This is the first of two transactions required to complete the domain name registration. If step 2 is not completed within 24 hours of step 1, we need to restart from step 1.

Secondly, after approving the transaction in step 1, wait for about 1 minute to make sure that the whole network does not choose to register the domain name as well as protecting our registration request.

Finally, we need to confirm a transaction in the wallet again. Only after the transaction is confirmed can we confirm whether the domain name has been successfully registered.

If you register once for a five-year term, which expires on October 18, 2026, you can choose to renew it at that time, similar to the rules for traditional Internet domain names.

At the same time, the main cost of the whole process is the on-chain operation cost of contract interaction. As a 5-digit domain name, the actual registration price is not expensive ($5), and the main cost is the on-chain operation fee of a series of contract interaction during the period.

Of course, this is only the address of ENS with five digits. Most of the other domain names with shorter or more meaningful digits may have been registered, just like paradigm. Eth mentioned above, with the development of the industry contains huge commercial value, you can also go to have a look at your desire or plan. Maybe the future is a big opportunity to pick up the slack.

A few days ago, I also saw a new news, ethereum Foundation, ETHEREum ENS, digital identity company Spruce jointly launched tracking & NBSP;Sign-in with Ethereum is a set of technical specifications for logging In to third-party Web applications through Ethereum accounts,Enables users to control their digital identity through ethereum accounts and ENS profiles, rather than relying on traditional middlemen.

It is already used in Web3 and aims to standardize with best practices to make Web2 services easier to adopt,At the same time, ENS and other decentralized domain names are not only used for addresses, but will also cover all aspects of DApp services in the future.

On October 8, ENS announced that it supports setting NFT profile pictures in personal profiles. Users can set any NFT they own as the profile picture of ENS profile, and then DApps can display this profile picture next to the name of ENS.

According to the current development momentum of NFT and the increasing popularity of Web3, ENS and others are also likely to become the next hot wave of NFT, and even become the key carrier of users' digital identity in the Era of Web3, which deserves our special attention.