Another week, and more progress. We’re now nearly 40% of the way through the soft launch, and the huge bid we saw in the last update turned out to be only the first of several, with another large bid on consensys.eth, and several significant sized bids since then.

Names and bids

Approximately 136,000 auctions have been started — nearly double the number from week 2 — and there’s been 64k bids from 4647 bidders. Most of this uptick appears to be due to a few mass squatting operations starting up; the median account has only two bids, while the busiest 5 accounts account for over 15% of all bids in the system!

46k bids have been revealed — more than double last week’s total — and 21.6k names have been registered — more than three times last week’s total!

Total ether per day seems stable once we discount the outliers from occasional enormous bids. Let’s see if last week’s hypothesis about bids-per-day stabilising is correct:

In fact it was not, and the all-time-high on the 16th now looks fairly insignificant compared to recent activity.

When it comes to funds held, the amount locked continues to grow — nearly 50k ether at the time of writing — while the total held in bids is more or less stable after a big jump just after last week’s update:

Prices

The odds of getting a domain not in the preimage list for the minimum price remains stable at around 90%, while the odds of getting one on the list has recently increased from its earlier figure of 40% up to a current value of about 65%. I hypothesise this is because of the startup of a couple of bidders scooping up large numbers of names from the list that were otherwise going unbought.

Adoption and ecosystem

I announced proposed improvements to reverse resolution that will make it easier for people to define ‘caller ID’ for their addresses.

Aragon announced that they have acquired company.eth, and plan to use it to underpin their system of companies and projects.

imToken released the ‘ENS pro Dapp’, making it easier than ever for people to bid on ENS domains on their mobile phones.

Reddit user kainzilla wrote up an excellent guide on buying an ENS name.

MEW released a useful tool for debugging ENS reveals.

Ricmoo proposed a new ENS resolver profile for text records.

I was in the Bitcoin Podcast and Epicenter.

Disappointingly, MEW was outbid for myetherwallet.eth by a squatter, but Taylor took the opportunity to write up an amazing infodump on why they don’t care and what their plans for MEW are.