We are pleased to announce today the launch of a project to better link ENS and DNS with the folks who run the DNS TLD .KRED.

The Ethereum Name Service is the leading blockchain-based naming infrastructure project with over a hundred integrations, multi-coin support, decentralized websites, and even DNS records. Open-source and community-driven, ENS is managed by a non-profit and has been supported by the Ethereum Foundation. One of our goals is to complement and expand the capabilities of the current DNS with the Ethereum blockchain (which is why we recently joined DNS-OARC). This project is a major step in that direction.

There are three major parts:

1) If you register a .KRED name on DNS, you automatically get the same .KRED name on ENS

The owners of the DNS TLD .KRED have claimed their TLD on ENS. This allows them to automatically create an ENS record (for the .KRED name, not a .ETH name, which is it’s own namespace) for a user when they register a .KRED name on DNS (which you can do right here).

That means users have one .KRED name but the benefits of two systems: traditional DNS and Ethereum-based ENS.

2) Ownership of the DNS .KRED name follows the ENS version of it

They have created a special NFT on Ethereum that grants the owner control not only of the ENS records of the name, but also the DNS records.

This means the DNS version of the name follows ownership of the name on Ethereum, with all the benefits in speed and liquidity for trading that come with it.

3) DNS records are stored on ENS and IPFS

Working closely with Jim McDonald, who manages the EthDNS project (which also makes ETH.LINK work), they have deployed a system that stores your .KRED name’s traditional DNS records on IPFS and the IPFS hash in the records of the ENS version of your .KRED name.

They then have a server that tracks if that IPFS hash in your ENS records changes, and, if it does, will update your DNS records on their traditional DNS servers based on the information on IPFS. In other words, the DNS records stored with ENS+IPFS are canonical for your .KRED name.

They are building an interface to make it easy for users to update their DNS records on ENS+IPFS, and we may add functionality for this in our Manager at some point in the future.

Conclusion

“The DNS+ENS system is the next generation of domain names,” says Jodee Rich, creator of .KRED.

“The .KRED domain name addresses both web pages (DNS) and wallets (ENS). It is therefore ‘informational,’ by resolving to websites and other services, and ‘transactional,’ as it can be used for financial and other transactions of digital assets.”

We think this is a really innovative project to more closely link traditional DNS with ENS, and we are grateful for what Jim McDonald with EthDNS and the folks at .KRED have been doing.

All the work on EthDNS on the ENS side is open-source, so we’re interested to see how other TLDs may use this project as a template and follow the lead of .KRED!

Get your .KRED name here