The Great Releasing of Names, Chainlink Integration, New Homepage, and More
The Great Release
.ETH names registered before May 4th, 2019 that haven’t been renewed will be released for other people to register in just a few days on August 2nd. While around 30k of those names have been renewed, as of right now around 279k names (of around 446k total names of various sorts on ENS) are set to be released.
Since Ethereum already has high gas prices, to prevent a mad rush and “gas auction” (people paying extra high gas prices to get their registrations in before others for the same name) we’ve instituted a decaying price premium. You can read more about it here, but the gist is that all newly released names will have a premium of $2k dollars more than the normal basic registration fee to start, and the premium will decrease linearly for 28 days until it’s gone and the name costs the normal amount ($5/yr for most names).
This means that only names worth at least $2k will be registered right away, with other valuable names registered over the course of 28 days. If you think a name that was just released isn’t worth anything more than the normal registration price, and if you think other people aren’t also looking to register it, you just have to wait an additional 28 days to register it at the normal price. Think of it as though the name just wasn’t available for another 28 days.
If you have an old .ETH name and don’t want to lose it:
Chainlink Integration
We recently switched from the MakerDAO ETH/USD price oracle to the Chainlink one. This is used for both our smart-contracts and our Manager UI and allows us to price names in USD but accept payment in ETH. You can read more about it here.
New Homepage
We just launched a full redesign of the ENS homepage, ens.domains! ENS has evolved a lot in the last year, particularly regarding the scope of the project and what a person can do with their ENS name (multi-coin support, better decentralized web support, et al), and this new homepage reflects those changes.
Coming soon…
A massive expansion of our DNS namespace integration is coming soon, so stay tuned!