Lots has been going on in ENS-land. Here’s an update:
ENS on L2
Ethereum is growing, and gas costs have been skyrocketing this year. This has impacted ENS significantly since every part of ENS runs on-chain: registrations, renewals, subdomains, and even records are stored on-chain.
In September, Vitalik proposed an idea that would allow some parts of ENS to run on a L2. Vitalik presented his proposal at our virtual ENS Workshop later that month and generated a good discussion.
Since then, we’ve had a few additional public meeting (see here and here) with representatives from various wallets, L2s, and other teams. Those meetings helped us to refine Vitalik’s idea to something that has now been proposed by our lead dev Nick Johnson.
This would allow users to store records and issue subdomains on any L2, which in turn would allow things like users updating records with very high frequency and wallets issuing very large numbers of subdomains to their users.
It could also be used by other projects that need to store their data on L2s in a reliable way, and may be able to be generalized to support simple token transfers as well.
Solidifying the specification and building this system out will be a major focus for us in 2021.
ENS Workshop 2020
As mentioned above, we had our annual ENS workshop in September. Previously, we’ve held it in London (twice) and Osaka, but this year it was virtual. We had a great turnout, with around 40 participants total representing top projects in the blockchain industry and even people from the DNS world.
You can watch videos of the discussion and read a summary of what happened here.
WalletConnect et al
We have expanded the number of ways users can connect their wallet to our Manager app. Previously, we only supported injected providers like the MetaMask extension, Opera, Coinbase Wallet, Status, et al.
Now, we also support: WalletConnect, Portis, Torus, Authereum, and MEW wallet. This should particularly make it easy for someone to use our Manager on desktop even if they store their wallet on mobile.
This has been a highly requested feature for a while, and we’re pleased to finally get it into production.
ensjs
In October, we released version 2 of our JS library ensjs. ENS is supported in 12 of the top libraries, but not all libraries have support for the full range of ENS features. Our library supports a majority of operations.
You can read more here.
ETH2 launch: depositcontract.eth
The ETH2 beacon chain launched last month, which is of course a huge milestone for the Ethereum community. We were happy to offer a small bit of support by making the ENS name depositcontract.eth resolve to the deposit contract address, as well as redirect to the deposit user-interface. (Thanks to the Ethereum Foundation for the shout-out in their blog post on the deposit contract.)
You can visit the latter by going to depositcontract.eth/ in a browser with MetaMask, Opera, Brave, or any other ENS+IPFS enabled browser. Or, if you don’t have any of those things, you can go to depositcontract.eth.link.
And to ensure that the records of this name can’t be changed for phishing, we set the Registrant and Controller of the name to 0x00…dEaD - or, put in another way, to an Ethereum account no one owns.
You can read more here.
NFT art contest
In October and November, we partnered with the NFT art marketplace MakersPlace to hold an ENS-themed NFT art competition. There was $1k in prizes available, and we got tons of great submissions. You can read more about the winners here.
The winning art NFTs were given away on Twitter here, here, and here.
171 integrations!
There are now 171 services with ENS integrated! You can see the full list in the “ENS Ecosystem” section of our website. This includes 44 wallets, like Coinbase and Coinbase Wallet, Trust Wallet, MEW, Argent, MyCrypto, and more.
If your favorite dapp doesn’t have ENS, feel free to politely request it. If your dapp already has ENS integrated but isn’t listed on our website, let us know at brantly@ens.domains and we’ll add it. Or if you’re thinking about adding ENS to your dapp, see our docs and Discord channel for help.