- The next version of the internet needs to be open and a public good, not a closed for-profit system.
- The success of the internet is due to its decentralized structure and neutral governance.
- ENS Labs is a decentralized naming service that aims to be a public good rather than a for-profit company.
- Their vision is for every app to use ENS and for every asset to have an ENS name.
- They are working on L2 support and better UX to make ENS more useful for users.
- The ownership of names on L2 is still dependent on the owner of the parent name, but they are working on providing better functionality for trustless management of subdomains.
- ENS has received interest from wallets, exchanges, and TLDs for integrating ENS functionality.
- The primary benefit of ENS is usability and simplifying the user experience in crypto transactions.
- ENS resolution currently happens at the application layer, but efforts are being made to push it down the stack.

- ENS resolution occurs at the application layer and can be integrated into apps easily.
- Building on top of Ethereum rather than within Ethereum was the best choice for ENS.
- DAOs are good at reactive tasks but struggle with proactive planning.
- Funding public goods is crucial for building the next version of the internet.
- ENS has a treasury from registration fees and contributes to other public goods.
- ENS was built as a public good and not for profit, and there is a strong norm to maintain this status.
- There are concerns about extracting value and incentivizing profit-seeking behavior.
- There were discussions about demand-based pricing for ENS, but implementation challenges remain.

- The challenge is implementing a domain system that is not easily abused and reflects its usefulness.
- No proposal has been robust enough to be a viable alternative to flat rate pricing.
- The value of a domain to its owner may be lower than its value to others.
- ENSFerry is a cooperation that aims to get names to the people who make sense for them.
- Defining the rightful owner of a domain is challenging and may lead to legal issues.
- Indefinite registration allows squatters to acquire names and sit on them forever.
- Regular registration fees impose a cost on holding a name and prevent loss of names.
- Limiting maximum duration of registrations may not have a significant effect on availability of names.
- The current pricing model is $5 per year for 5+ character names, $160 per year for 4 character names, and $640 per year for 3 character names.
- Adding 1 and 2 character names may require a different approach due to their rarity.

- The speaker discusses the issue of promoting speculation and the expensive fees for distinctive names on platforms like Coinbase.
- Airdrops are considered controversial, but the speaker believes that if meaningful metrics are used to target actual users, airdrops can be effective.
- The ENS token represents ownership over a public good and is used for governance and funding.
- The number of ENS domains in user wallets is over 2 million, with a decline in activity reflecting the overall downtrend in the crypto market.
- The v3 name manager improves user experience and enables easier use of ENS names.
- The app is meant to be a decentralized profile page where users can update their information.
- The app was built with mobile as a first-class citizen to avoid missing functionality.
- The speaker acknowledges the growth of the organization and the need to let experts handle certain tasks.
- DAOs are progressing towards using service providers to contribute expertise and improve the DAO's operations.

- The best way to structure a DAO is to avoid a reporting hierarchy and instead focus on development organizations.
- DAOs can be used by individuals or small teams to fund and build projects.
- The speaker initially had concerns about Friend Tech but acknowledges that it could be a fun speculative game.
- The identity layer of crypto needs to balance privacy and accountability, and pseudonymous identities should be easier to create and manage.
- ENS is open to partnerships with other protocols and platforms to provide naming services.
- Privacy concerns can be addressed by creating tools that allow for multiple pseudonymous identities and clear visibility of transactions.
- Tornado Cash has provisions to voluntarily link inputs and outputs for privacy purposes.
- The speaker is interested in projects that leverage ENS and public goods funding.

- The speaker mentions several projects that are leveraging the technology built by ENS.
- These projects include Namebase, ENS Vision, and DM3.
- Coinbase has also made ENS the core of their digital identity.
- The speaker acknowledges that there have been clones of ENS, but believes that ENS is now the go-to naming service.
- The speaker hopes that ENS will continue to succeed through innovation and building the best technology.
- The host thanks the speaker for improving the user experience of blockchains and provides links to find more information about ENS.

- ENS Labs is a decentralized naming service that aims to be a public good rather than a for-profit company.
- Their vision is for every app to use ENS and for every asset to have an ENS name.
- ENS is working on L2 support and better UX to make it more useful for users.
- ENS has received interest from wallets, exchanges, and TLDs for integrating its functionality.
- The primary benefit of ENS is usability and simplifying the user experience in crypto transactions.
- ENS resolution currently happens at the application layer, but efforts are being made to push it down the stack.
- ENS has a treasury from registration fees and contributes to other public goods.
- There are concerns about extracting value and incentivizing profit-seeking behavior.
- The challenge is implementing a domain system that is not easily abused and reflects its usefulness.
- The current pricing model for ENS domains varies based on the number of characters in the name.
- The ENS token represents ownership over a public good and is used for governance and funding.
- The v3 name manager improves user experience and enables easier use of ENS names.
- DAOs are progressing towards using service providers to contribute expertise and improve operations.
- The speaker is interested in projects that leverage ENS and public goods funding.

In this week's interview Dan and Sam are joined by Nick Johnson, technical lead of ENS. The team breaks down ENS past present and future digging into its origins, the continued vision for a credibly neutral naming service, and scaling decisions in an L2 world. They also discuss key new features including the ENS Fairy and V3 name manager. They close out today's interview with a discussion on digital identities and how the ENS ecosystem continues evolving the naming service's use-cases. 

As always remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice.
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:32) ENS Vision and Future
(15:45) “Hexens Ad”
(16:50) ENS Business Model & Registration Fees
(22:00) ENS Fairy
(30:00) Reflecting on ENS Airdrop
(34:02) V3 Name Manager
(38:53) DAO Structures and Services
(40:38) Digital Identities and Social Platforms
(49:41) ENS Ecosystem of Projects
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Resources:
ENS Domains
https://ens.domains/
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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 0xResearch is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Dan, Sam, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

If we're going to build the next version of the internet, it needs to be open and a public good and not a closed for-profit system.

The success of the internet comes in large part because although many of the components of it are operated for profit by companies.

The internet itself, the protocols and the structure that knits it all together is not AOL, it's not some centrally operated network where a single operator gets to choose who connects and how it's used and so on and so forth.

And so I think that's an absolutely crucial aspect of why the internet succeeded.

And if we want to build a successful successor or even just successful additional infrastructure, we have to follow in its footsteps.

All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of ZeroX Research.

Before we dive into today's episode, I do want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor, Hexens, 1 of the most hardcore security teams in web3, pioneering in ZK and novel cryptography.

Hexens is trusted by tier 1 projects like Polygon, including the work on their Newsy KVM, Mantle, Risk 0, Lido, 1 Inch, Newbake and others.

Today's September 20th, and we have an awesome interview lined up with Nick Johnson, the founder of ENS labs.

Yeah, so you're definitely an OG in the space.

You've been working at ENS for what, 6 years now.

So I would love to just get a start of, you know, what you guys have accomplished and some of the challenges you've run into and maybe a little peek into what you're building going forward.

So as you sort of hinted, I joined less than a year after the launch of Ethereum, which at the time felt late, but doesn't now.

And I've been building ENS almost since that point.

It was 1 of the first projects I started working on at the Ethereum Foundation and then spun out to its own organization and we've been building it ever since.

I think in terms of what we've accomplished, the main thing is of course that ENS is the preeminent decentralized naming service.

And I think the fact that we've done that and that we're credibly neutral, that we're governed by a DAO, that we're minimizing the amount of human governance in necessary and that we're building it as a public good rather than a for-profit company, I think just enhances that accomplishment.

So I'm incredibly impressed with what we've achieved.

But, you know, it's only the beginning of what we're working on.

And so as we roll out into L2 support and better UX and more functionality, it'll become even more useful for our users.

So I want to get a little bit, dive a little deeper on exactly what the roadmap is for the future.

What are the biggest problems that are still kind of being at that pain point for the ENS now and how are you looking to tackle those?

So I think for ENS more broadly we've always had sort of a three-stage vision.

Every app should use ENS to the point where it's the assumption, you know, when a user comes to it that they can enter an ENS name, anywhere they can enter an address, and if anywhere an address might show up, an ENS name would show up instead.

And that they'd be surprised when it isn't supported rather than, you know, having to check that it is.

And I think we're close, but not there yet for that.

Our second vision has always been that every asset can have an ENS name and that it can be done transparently and cost-free.

And that involves rolling out on L2s for low cost registrations, making it easier for people to issue subnames, making it possible for organizations like Coinbase to use either an L2 or just host names entirely off-chain and basically giving name owners sort of control over the trust model of how their names are managed and their subdomains are managed and so forth.

And so we're focusing on that mostly at the moment by building tooling that makes it easier for people to work on L2.

It's been possible to host names on L2 since we launched CCIP read over a year ago, but what's been missing is the easy plug and play tooling that makes it trivial for someone to do that.

You don't have to be Coinbase in order to set it up, whereas at the moment, the integration overheads are a bit higher.

So that's our main focus on the back-end.

Then on the front-end, it's all corresponding work to make the usability meet the feature set on the back end.

So how does that work from a more technical level?

If a user mints a name on an L2, does the ownership reside on the L2 or is it ever settled back down to L1 at any point?

So that's a really good question, and it's 1 of the biggest things that we have to tackle.

So the initial version of our L2 support is you can create a name on L1, and then you can update it and set its records and so forth on L2.

And as an extension of that, you can issue subdomains and you can give those subdomains to people and that can all happen on the L2 without touching L1 at all.

The caveat for that first iteration is that it won't be trustless in the same way.

You're still trusting the owner of the parent name, the second level name, not to rug you, basically.

That person has no additional trust assumptions, they can use the L2 without compromising their security, but as a user you're dependent on them to maintain your subdomain.

And that's kind of, you know, that's an acceptable trade-off maybe when your counterparty is Coinbase for instance, because you're already trusting them with a lot of other stuff, less so when it's some random DGN who bought wallet.eth and wants to issue subdomains.

So the next step is providing better functionality for locking things in so that that person can credibly say I don't have the ability to take your name off you, in the same way that E&S can say that about names in general.

And the way we're handling that is by building out this general purpose infrastructure that makes it easy to put your names on L2s, and then we can set it up in a way so that people can effectively commit the power to upgrade things to the DAO, so that the DAO would manage upgrades across the whole ecosystem for anyone that agrees to do that, and therefore remove that node of trust of the owner of the actual name.

Of course, you could have other organizations that agree to manage the names as well, but it just needs to be made clear in the interface that who it is that you're trusting to maintain your name.

But the next step down from that is at least it's a large well-known organization that administers all of ENS anyway.

And so you also mentioned subdomains in that, of course, Coinbase launched Coinbase ID.

Are there any other groups or entities that you have really showing interest in?

You don't have to name names, but maybe just like the types of groups and entities that kind of like, hey, that's a really cool idea.

You know, if we had that, that would like really enable this new feature line for us.

We've been speaking to wallets who want to do this in order to issue subdomains for all their users, which has always been a long-term vision of mine.

You know, the wallet sign-up flow should include naming your wallet.

You shouldn't have to even know or care what your Ethereum address is any more than you do what your IP address is.

And we've chatted with other exchanges that are interested in following in Coinbase's shoes.

We're also not at the subdomain level, but at the top level domain level, we've had interest from various TLDs who want to either launch on ENS or add ENS functionality to their existing DNS names.

So zooming out a little bit too, like you say, you know, 1 of the primary goals of what you want to achieve is to be able to name any asset, give any asset an ENS domain name.

So what are the actual benefits for the users on that front?

If I asked you what Google's IP address was, you couldn't tell me because there's no reason you would know that and there's no reason you would want to know that.

And IP addresses are a lot shorter than Ethereum addresses, they're a lot easier to memorize.

And so really the same degree of usability ought to apply to Ethereum, to crypto in general, and so when you sign up for a wallet you ought to be able to pick a name.

Ideally it should be, you know, that it can be pseudonymous and disconnected from all your other wallets too.

The fact you're naming it doesn't mean you're doxing yourself.

It just means you're providing some handle to identify it.

Ultimately, we create accounts because we want to transact with them.

At some point, that involves giving that address to someone else or some third party or site or whatever.

This just makes that an order of magnitude easier.

You mentioned the wallet piece there as well and just really simplifying the user experience.

But Please correct me if this is wrong, but my current understanding is that the resolving an ES and ENS name has to actually happen at the wallet level.

It's not actually happening at the protocol level.

If I pulled up the CLI interface, I couldn't just send ETH to nick.eth.

Do you think like ENS has maybe grown to a size where it's actually worse UX for the application to not support the names rather than the other way around?

ENS resolution does take place at the application layer, which isn't to say you couldn't have a command line interface that does it of course, but you know it does happen in the apps and we've worked with ethers and web3.js and so on to push that down the stack as much as possible.

So if you're building an app on top of Ethers and you use Ethers address fields anywhere, they'll accept DNS names anywhere they accept addresses.

So often if an app doesn't support DNS, it's actually more because they were ignorant of the ability to do so than because they had to expend any particular effort to add support for it.

A protocol with naming built in at the base layer would look quite different from Ethereum, and so ultimately, having made the choice that Ethereum is the system to build on and is the platform, building it on top of Ethereum rather than in Ethereum was the best bet.

I'm a little ambivalent about whether it would be a beta system, if, you know, whether Ethereum would be a better protocol if it had naming base layer.

There are sort of pros and cons, it introduces a lot of, you know, protocol layer complexity.

And again, drawing the parallel to IP addresses, you know, the internet does pretty well with naming being an add-on.

It's just so universal that it looks like part of the basic infrastructure.

And I really like your approach as well of saying okay well let's not push it down the protocol stack itself but rather the development stack and just getting it in the hands of making it easier for developers to use it and as a result it kind of is this widely adopted platform which is just really exciting to see.

And so I want to talk a little bit about the DAO itself and kind of how you think about DAOs as a whole.

So after working in a DAO for 6 years, are you bullish on DAOs and their format and the ability to be decentralized and have everybody have these like active opinions or does the decentralization aspect stagnate growth too much or create too many roadblocks?

So first I guess I should just claim I've only been working in a DAO for about 2 years because when ENS launched it was administered by multisig and you know the sort of gradual decentralization has always been the roadmap.

I'm sort of, I have 2 minds about it, like I think the UNESDAO has done a pretty damn good job but also there is the inevitable sort of decentralization, I guess friction, that it generates in terms of making decisions and so forth.

I think DAOs are a lot better at reactive stuff, So somebody comes to them with a protocol upgrade or whatnot and they just, you know, they discuss the merits and decide to implement it.

Then they are proactive stuff like planning roadmaps and things like that.

And so for that reason, I think it makes a, you know, sort of the division we've got makes a lot of sense where you have a DAO and then you have 1 or more development orgs who basically come to the DAO and say here's the cool stuff we can do fund us and you know as long as they're credible they get funded and the fact that you don't just have to have 1 of those and that the DAO can independently decide which organizations they're going to fund makes it a lot more meaningfully decentralized than just having the company run things directly.

It also means that any actual changes still have to go by the DAO, which again is the, the reactive aspect where I think DAOs are quite good at sort of assessing changes and approving them and acting as a safety valve effectively.

I love to hear your perspectives on DAOs.

I feel like, you know, no 1 really has a silver bullet for the right way to operate 1.

And I'm glad to see that you guys are doing some kind of innovative attempts at being more efficient, but in the same vein, I'm curious, what are your thoughts on public goods funding?

I feel like that's been a pretty hot topic as of late, especially with the rise of like the OP stack, you know, Coinbase contributing sequence of revenue or profit to public goods funding.

The success of the internet comes in large part because although many of the components of it are operated for profit by companies, the internet itself, the protocols and the structure that knits it all together is not, you know, AOL.

It's not some centrally operated network where a single operator gets to choose who connects and how it's used and so on and so forth.

And so I think that's an absolutely crucial aspect of why the internet succeeded and if we want to build a successful successor or even just successful additional infrastructure we have to follow in its footsteps and so I think having well-funded public goods is essential I think having a route to actually like funding the public goods in the first place to be able to say here is this really important thing, everyone agrees we need it, will somebody pay for it?

And actually the answer being yes, rather than just sitting on everyone sitting on their hands is crucial and E&S is in a particularly good position to help push this forward because we have registration fees, they're necessary as part of the protocol.

If we didn't have registration fees you'd expect every name would be snapped up instantaneously and anyone coming along after would be out of luck.

And so we have to charge fees and then we have a treasury.

Well, part of what we do is pay for development and operation of the DAO and the development org and so forth.

And I think the most responsible thing is to contribute it back to other public goods that maybe don't have that same funding stream or are earlier in their life cycle and still building up.

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But without further ado, let's get back to today's episode.

the registration fees there because if you advertise the registration fees over the life of the registration period, right?

So, if someone paid, let's just make up a number here, $100 for a five-year registration, and you take that and divide it evenly across the registration period on a monthly basis.

So if you use that calculation across all of the registrations to date, you actually are still, like the revenue fees are not small, right?

This is a couple of million dollars a month.

And so you do have a lot of firepower to kind of make those changes.

The other side of the camp would probably come in and say, hey, you guys are making a ton of money.

Like what is your mindset around that discussion?

I mean, E&S was built explicitly as a public good and not as a business and when we launched the DAO we set some really strong norms about that.

We asked people to vote on a constitution that enshrined its effectively non-profit status.

Over 95 percent of people I think agreed to those clauses in the Constitution and we did our best to make it very clear, like you can claim your airdrop regardless of how you vote on this, we want your honest opinion, should the NS continue in this vein.

I think there is a very, very strong social and governance norm towards the UNS continuing to be a public good.

I certainly would be strongly opposed to any attempt to sort of extract value and partly that's because of my belief that public goods are essential and partly because it's it's part of my, down to my belief that once you start extracting value from systems like this you look for ways to make them more profitable but not necessarily more useful, you know, but they're only more useful in service of the profit.

And so sometimes that works, you know, with some things that's what we'll make a bit of more popular product, with other things that's well, everyone's locked in, we can double the fees.

And so I'm really concerned about the sort of incentives that pop up once you start doing that.

And I'd rather move in the other direction of abstracting away human control where it's not necessary and limiting it to the upgrades and the levers and so on that are absolutely crucial to have than going the other way.

So I remember Vitalik dropped a blog post about a year ago on ENS's pricing model and revenue model, if you will.

And he wanted to incorporate like a demand-based pricing aspect, if I'm recalling correctly.

And I'm a little bit surprised cause it does sound like you're like very much in the same ethos as Vitalik was in that article, but maybe you just think about revenue differently.

I think Vitalik and I see eye to eye on a lot of stuff, including, you know, public goods and a lot of that E&S.

The discussion was all about, like you said, demand-based pricing.

And the issue there is how do you implement that in a way that isn't easily abused, that actually honestly reflects it and its usefulness and so forth.

And by sorry by it I mean the domain and it's really tough.

I haven't seen a proposal yet including Vitalics that I believe is robust enough that it would be a viable alternative to just simple flat rate pricing because you can easily think of scenarios where the value of the name to the owner is actually or the value they accrue by actually owning it is much lower than the sort of value it has to other people.

So you can imagine a scenario where say, you know, imagine Evil Coinbase and they own cb.eth and you know they give out subdomains for free to all their users.

And so the value to them is the value of their reputation, effectively, on continuing to act honestly.

But the value to someone else of owning cb.eth might be now we can rug every single Coinbase user, or sorry, evil Coinbase user.

And so evil Coinbase might go, well hey, here's how we can get a really great Q3 earnings report.

We'll, you know, we'll sell this subdomain.

And that requires almost like a cartoonishly evil organization, but in a situation where you have hard urger based tax pricing and so forth, you almost automate that because the people who could make a huge amount of profit off defrauding every Coinbase user can now effectively bid up the cost of maintaining cb.eth.

And if they bid it up to the point where Coinbase can't afford it, because they don't make revenue relative to the number of users using it and the amount of fraud you could conduct if you took the name, then they lose it and the people who lose out the most aren't evil coinbase, they're the people who actually were using those subdomains.

So I think the big problem with all of these schemes is they don't really account for the fact that the value of the name to its users might not be the same as the values of the name to, you know, arbitrary others.

So it's kind of getting hitting home at the point of like, squatters or snipers as they're commonly referred to.

And so I think you pushed forward the idea of like ENSFerry, can you talk to us a little bit about what that is and kind of how that would attempt to mitigate some of these issues?

Sure, the ENSFerry is basically just a cooperation to try and get names to the people that they make sense for.

You know, I think 1 of the best ways to measure the success of a naming system is sort of the principle of least surprise.

If you pick a popular name of some kind and enter it, does it resolve to the entity you expect it to?

And the more often that's true, the better the naming service is.

And so, short of some like automatic way to do that, which is, you know, hugely problematic, ENS Theory is kind of just doing that on an individual volunteer basis, you know, by doing their best to acquire names that clearly represent 1 organization and then getting the names to that organization or person or, you know, whatever it be.

And just effectively, yeah, donating them to the people that would use them for their intended purpose.

So that kind of opens up Pandora's box in some regard, right?

Because it's like, how do you define the rightful owner?

So talk to us about the challenges of that and like, okay, maybe there's, you know, let's say that a company in or a big brand in America was also a big brand in the you know some eastern country and there was no relation between the 2 brands at all like how do you define who's the rightful owner of this term?

I think that gets right to the heart of why you can't easily alternate or enforce a system like this.

It really only works in the context of UNS Ferry because it's being done on a voluntary basis and because they're doing it for names that are fairly unambiguous and really getting it to any 1 of the people it reasonably represents is a win over it being unused.

Whereas if you tried to build some sort of system that arbitrates who should own each name, then you get into that tar pit that you just described where, if you have apple.eth, does it go to Apple Music or Apple Records or your local launch it?

There's really no perfect answer, and you need a perfect answer, otherwise Apple Music or Apple computers are going to come after you and sue you for giving it to the wrong person.

And I feel like that kind of also wraps in with the idea of like unlimited registrations, because these squatters or snipers will come in and just grab an S tier name, if you will, like let's keep using the Apple example.

You grab that, register it for 500 years, which is effectively forever.

Then they can have the ability to be like, all right, well, either you never get it or you pay me.

And that's, how do you think about the idea of like limiting or shortening registration periods or something along that nature?

It's, yeah, There's sort of 2 reasons that I think indefinite registration is a problem.

1 is what you described effectively, it reduces the cost to squatters because they know they can acquire a portfolio and then sit on it forever.

There's no incentive for them to relinquish names that aren't performing, that nobody wants, they can just sit on it.

And I should distinguish here squatters versus speculators, because in my mind a squatter is buying a name that they clearly know represents 1 other person or you know that is not a generic name and attempting to effectively extort the owner of that name for you know to purchase it off them.

A speculator is buying up say John Dolly and is like well there's about you know 10,000 Johns out there, 1 of them will want it.

And I feel personally a lot better about speculation I know about squatting because I feel like squatting is it's basically a tax on being late.

And you know in a in an entirely anarchistic system that may be okay, but I'd much rather our system, as I say, be less surprising.

So I think it's a problem for that reason.

It's also a problem because names get lost.

You know, that people will acquire names and then lose their credentials.

And eventually, a big part of your name space just becomes permanently inaccessible.

And you can get around that by having regular pings or whatever to retain the name, but it's kind of just discount renewals.

It doesn't really feel like a big difference.

I think regular registration fees are a good trade-off because they impose a cost on holding a name that isn't hugely significant if you have your name, but is if you have 20,000 names that you're hoping to profit off, you know, it sets a lower bound on how much of a namespace you can afford to sit on.

I don't think necessarily limiting a maximum duration is useful because for it to be meaningful the maximum duration would have to be fairly high, call it like a decade.

And at that point, it's long enough that I think it's difficult to say that it's having a big effect on the availability of names in the short term.

I quite like the fact that in ENS, you can effectively make a name immortal or close to immortal because there's no fixed limit on registrations.

I've even mooted in the past on the DAO what if we discounted longer registrations, you know, on the theory that a speculator is likely to only want to retain a name for a couple of years while they try and sell it and if it hasn't sold after that long they probably don't want it.

The remaining registration duration on a name doesn't seem to have a big effect on how much it sells for, so if we made it like really cheap to register for 100 years compared to registering for 2, maybe only 5 times as much, then people who actually want to keep the name would be incentivized to do that, and the speculators would still pay the same price, so you'd get a more useful system.

Safe to say, I'm not, that opinion isn't universally held.

So it wasn't uncontentious enough that I felt it was worth like really fighting for.

And just to kind of like hammer home on that point, what is the current pricing model?

So if I wanted to register a name for 1 year or 100 years, is the 100 year option just like actually 100x more expensive than the 1 year?

So it's 5 bucks a year for 5 plus character names, 160 a year for 4 character names, and 640 a year for 3 character names.

And those prices for shorter names are kind of a bit of a brute force solution to the fact that there's just not very many of those names.

And if they were 5 bucks each, that'll be set on forever.

And you all were thinking about adding, and maybe you already have, so forgive me if I'm off here, but 1 and 2 characters?

You know, just like it's a contract upgrade, it's definitely doable.

I think that 1 and 2 character names are so rare that we can't just be like, oh okay, you know, they're a thousand bucks a year or whatever, you know, or some outrageous amount.

We probably need a distinctly different approach to administering those names that recognizes that like particularly the single character names are always going to be in extremely short supply.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense, you're pretty much just kind of promoting speculation under that scenario most likely, but I mean that's part of the game right?

You know I don't want a situation where like Coinbase can afford the 5 figure fee to have cb.eth, but nobody else can have something distinctive because it's just way too expensive for them either.

You know, or the flip side where they're cheap enough that they're all instantly on the secondary market.

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ENS: Funding Public Goods, DAO Governance, L2 Scaling