Today I’m going to mainly focus on the awesome progress made by and the importance of the Ethereum name service and how they are doing so much to move the space forward in a similar way to the massive impact made by the switch from IP addresses to domain names for the internet starting way back in 1985 and eventually reaching mass adoption with the .com bubble explosion.

Their website is https://ens.domains/ and to actually go and get an .ETH address for about 5 USD go to https://app.ens.domains/

Before we dive in, I’d like to recognize some amazing decentralized applications, crypto-monetized platforms, and wallets that I considered writing about as well but felt ENS was the most important thing to focus on for this article. Steemit, DTube, LBRY, Publish0x, Minds, Brave Browser, Uptrennd, Metamask, and Ledger Live are simply amazing and deserve all the love and shoutouts I can give them. They are all doing so much to improve the functionality and usability of cryptocurrency and advancing blockchain technology across many fields.

For this article though we are going to focus on Ethereum name service which allows you to take your crypto addresses and replace them with a simple name like mine which is scottcbusiness.eth. Not only will this replace my Ethereum address which is long and impossible to remember or give to someone without copying and pasting, but it will also allow me to add many other cryptocurrencies such as ETH, Doge, BTC, LTC, ETC, MONA, XRP, BCH, RSK, and BNB. On top of being able to replace needing to type out these long addresses, after adding them on the backend, ENS will resolve these for you meaning that whether someone sends BTC or XRP to my .ETH address, ENS will automatically determine which address it should be sent to for you.

This is just the beginning. Imagine all the use cases. Say you value privacy so you change your BTC address every single week or even every day. No one will be able to keep up with you, but if you’re only changing the BTC address on ENS and everyone can still just send it to your .ETH address, then all of your posts don’t need to change. Say in every YouTube description or at the bottom of every article you had a Bitcoin address and then changed it. Well now, you’d have to edit all of those or hope people don’t send to the wrong address whereas now you can just write your .ETH address there and have no issues.

Again, as if that wasn’t enough you can also rest assured knowing that people won’t send to the wrong address for when you type in scottcbusines.eth (missing an s), Metamask, for example, will tell you that is not a valid address and you can go back and recognize you misspelled it. If you type in the wrong Ethereum address it will simply send and no one will get the Ethereum, so everyone loses. The only way this could be subverted is if people bought misspelled names which is unlikely for the average person.

It also lets you store other records like text such as email or a URL that people can find when looking up your address whether it be for documentation or say you bought several .ETH addresses and intended to sell them then you’d want people looking to buy them to be able to find your contact information. Lastly, you can also store content hashes which enable you to set up a decentralized website using IPFS, .onion, .tor, etc.

There are other projects like Unstoppable domains and FIO which are great, but they don’t have nearly the same rate of adoption and integration with wallets that ENS has achieved already. They currently work with more than 40 crypto wallets and are pushing to cover more. Also note that while Ethereum is in the name, it simply uses the Ethereum blockchain and isn’t limited to ETH as a currency nor is it limited to only Ethereum based wallets.

Aside from it being a tad bit confusing, the instructions are pretty easy to follow, and I’d say there really aren’t any drawbacks to this.

This will have a huge impact on the ease of use and rate of adoption for cryptocurrency making it easier for everyone. That’s why I think ENS is one of the best decentralized applications.

I also made a video on how and why you should get an .ETH address with ENS as well as some fixes for common issues that you can find here:

Publish0x: How & Why You Should Get An .ETH Address With ENS

I also had an interview with Brantly Millegan from ENS to talk a little bit about the project and where it’s headed here:

Publish0x: Interviewing Brantly Millegan From Ethereum Name Service

Let me know if this helped and if you plan to get a .ETH address or use ENS. Also, feel free to comment what your .ETH address to share that you’ve also got one for yourself and got it set up! Also, feel free to let me know what your favorite DApp is too.