Nick Johnson gave a glimpse of what is upcoming for ENS. Here are the highlights for those who can’t wait:

DNS Integration via DNSSEC

Soon, you will be able to go to your favorite wallet/client, type in “amazon.com”, send ethers, and magically amazon will receive their payment. No need to first look for the ens name of the business. This is enabled though a mechanism called DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions)

More about DNSSEC here:

This is worked for .xyz domain first, more will roll out after that I guess.

Makes us wonder, why bother buying an ENS name at all?

But if you take a long view, this is a bold yet very good first step, to bridge block chain to traditional internet, even at the expense of losing exclusivity. All of a sudden, hoarding ENS names isn’t attractive anymore, freeing up the platform to meet its true goals of name resolution. This should also make adoption much easier, now any .com website can start accepting ether payments with just one setup in their DNS Registry.

New Name Registration Process

Current registration process requires you to first start bidding, then reveal, then finalize. Once you start bidding, people can potentially snipe. They will definitely snipe if you are bidding on a dictionary word (or one of the top 1 million famous .com domain names). Sniping is made even more easier when you bid through MEW (since MEW default UI does start auction and bid together always, without any decoy bid) I personally have lost several good names I was bidding due to sniping (as well as sniped others, you just can’t resist).

This is changing with the new permanent registrar. There will be a rolling 48 hour window, you can just bid on a name instead of starting an auction first. And you reveal in the next window. If a person bids later, they will get full refund.

Note: A tip if you are bidding right now for a dictionary name. Go check if ensbot tweeted your bid. If it did, submit another bid for the max ether you can afford for that name, but using a different wallet (different wallet is the key). So why not bid initially with max ethers? That gives options for others to outbid you. Why making two bids work often? Say you made your first bid with 0.011 ETH, and then made a second bid using different wallet for 0.08 ETH, the sniper has no way to know that the second bid is for the same name, so, she will try to counterbid you by posting a bid for 0.012 ETH (or higher based on their cryptowealth). You are at-least making her think harder, and even if you lose, atleast you made her pay 0.08 not 0.011.

Client Adoption

Excellent client adoption already, however not much support from exchanges, that will be the focus of ongoing ens efforts to improve adoption.

Dispute Resolution

Will be supported through a second layer solution, basically a blacklist registry

Permanent Registrar Decisions

Annual renewal fee, same for all names irrespective of popularity

Fee will be determined based on deregistration rate (if more people deregister names, then lower the fee dynamically)

ENS Now

Subdomain rentals! Anyone can list their name for subdomain sales, specify the fee, and start earning ethers as subdomains get registered. Also allows for a small referral fee for websites (dapp) that drive users to the contract.

One caveat: Once you are in, there is no way out. You are giving away control of your name permanently in order to gain subdomain revenue. You can still sell the name to others, and the new owner can start earning the revenue, but you cant repurpose the top level domain for anything.

You get one chance once the permanent registrar is setup to pull out your name (to upgrade), but don’t plan on exploiting. I am hoping that the community will demand you to transfer the domain to a trusted multisig wallet that will take care of upgrading, making the domain more trustworthy. More on that on a future article.

This is in testnet now.

Shameless plug:

ENSListing will support subdomain rentals through this contract once it is available in mainnet.

And I will be donating the name thisisme.eth, that would be free (free subdomains, just pay gas), and will list buymecoffee.eth for 0.005 eth (half the price of top level domain).

ENS Foundation

Not for Profit ENS Foundation going to be formed, an independent legal organization whose goal would be to support the goals of ENS, help promote adoption and standardize things among other things.

No ICOs

That’s so refreshing to hear! Need to say more?

You can download the slide deck at

Listen to the talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMs0wAFIu7I&start=14667

Mano Samy

Founder, ENSListing.com