Cloudflare, Chainlink, +100 Blockchains, and More
Happy 2021! A lot has happened in the month since our last email update.
Partnering with Cloudflare
We are pleased to announce we’re partnering with Cloudflare to provide better service for eth.link. This Monday, we will transition our ENS + IPFS gateway service hosted at eth.link to a version developed and run by Cloudflare. You can read a description of how Cloudflare’s service works on their blog.
To be clear: We are not simply using a pre-existing Cloudflare product to better manage the eth.link service ourselves. Instead, we have been working with Cloudflare over the last year to help them develop their own ENS + IPFS gateway service, and on January 18th we will point our DNS domain eth.link at their new service. This will not only provide better uptime and scalability but all sites accessed through the service will now have HTTPS.
The primary purpose of the eth.link service is pretty straightforward: users can append “.LINK” to the end of a .ETH name to access an IPFS website at the name like a normal website, no special browsers or extensions necessary. For example, if you have MetaMask, Opera, or another ENS+IPFS-enabled browser, you can visit almonit.eth/ — but if you don’t, you can still see the website using eth.link at almonit.eth.link.
This is a great step to making the emerging decentralized web even more accessible to the average person.
Read more on our blog.
Chainlink’s data.eth directory
Chainlink has created an On-Chain Data Directory with the ENS name data.eth. Each individual price feed is named with a subdomain. For example, the on-chain address for the ETH/USD Price Feed can be found by querying the ETH address record of eth-usd.data.eth. Data.eth names can be queried via the ENS Manager App, block explorers like Etherscan, as well as directly from any full node.
We hope to see other protocols adopt this practice of naming their contracts with ENS names for better discoverability and readability.
Read more on our blog.
+100 Blockchains Supported
The ENS Manager App now supports adding the addresses of +100 blockchains to your ENS name’s records.
This means you can set up your one ENS name (whether it’s a .ETH name, or a DNS name on ENS like .XYZ) to receive the native coins of +100 blockchains, as well as any tokens or assets that live on those blockchains. For example, having an Ethereum address in your ENS name’s records allows you to receive not only ETH but also any ERC-20 token, NFT, or other Ethereum-based asset; the same is true for a BNB address, TRX address, et al.
ENS can in principle be used to store your address for any blockchain. However, our multi-coin standard stores addresses in binary to save on storage and gas. To handle encoding and decoding addresses, we have an address encoding library. Practically speaking, our Manager and most wallets only support the blockchain addresses supported in that library.
With this update, we now consider our multi-coin support to be deep enough to encompass nearly all blockchain assets that the vast majority of users would want to receive with their ENS name. Combined with the 172 services with ENS integrated, this is an important step towards our goal of enabling users to use cryptocurrency without having to deal with un-user-friendly addresses.
Read more on our blog.
ENSBot Twitter Reminders
We’re pleased to see so many people in the blockchain industry putting their ENS name in their Twitter profile name. But we’ve noticed these same people forget to renew their ENS names despite renewal notification services and the ability to pay ahead as many years as you want, and a significant number of names have been released recently.
Once the names are released, it becomes available for anyone to register with 2K USD premium which decreases over 28 days (this is to prevent bots to snatch all released names with little financial cost). This sucks if you accidentally forget renewing.
Trying our best to protect our community members, we have extended our Twitter bot @ensbot to @ you if you have a .ETH name set as your Twitter profile name that is expiring soon.
Read more on our blog.
The Growing Decentralized Web
And the ENS+IPFS decentralized web keeps growing! Be sure to check out the decentralized web search engine / directory to start surfing: http://almonit.eth.link/#/discover/
And here’s all the ways you can access the decentralized web right now.