A lot has been going on with Ethereum Name Service (ENS) in the last three months!

Since many people are busy buidling, we periodically have posts like this that quickly summarize the main developments. (You can see our Q1 summary here.)

Permanent Registrar launched successfully

The permanent registrar was successfully launched on May 4th!

Among other things, this means instant registrations of main .eth names (no more auction), there is now yearly rent for main .eth names ($5/year for most names; subdomains remain free), and all names are NFT-compliant (ENS names are already on NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Emoon).

You can register and manage names with our official ENS Manager app. We are also grateful to have had several partners supporting registrations on the permanent register right at launch.

The first week after launch saw a lot of activity, with 1867 years of registrations paid for.

Instant registrations

With the auction gone, it takes about two minutes to register a new main .eth name with our Manager app. We have a step-by-step guide to that process.

Names with emojis!

Did you know you can now register .eth names that have emojis?

Why rent?

We have two articles explaining why we decided to introduce yearly rent to ENS and what will be happening to the funds raised.

You need to migrate your old .eth name

You have until May 4th, 2020 (one year since launch of the permanent registrar) to migrate any .eth names registered prior to the launch of the permanent registrar. Any names not migrated by that time will be automatically released and made available for others to register.

All names migrated will get their first year of rent for free, after which you will need to pay $5/year in ETH to keep your name. You can also pay ahead for as many years as you’d like (so you don’t have to worry about renewing each year).

You can migrate your .eth names in one click in our Manager app. We also have a step-by-step guide for this process.

If you had a .eth name offering subdomains with ENSNow, we have special instructions for you.

First ICANN-accredited DNS registrar to offer .eth names

We are pleased to announce that ICANN-accredited DNS registrar EnCirca now offers .eth name registrations! As far as we are aware, they are the first ICANN-accredited DNS registrar to do so. And they do it all without the customer needing to handle ETH or have an Ethereum wallet, which can be helpful for people interested in ENS but not yet Ethereum-savvy. Learn more here.

If you are a DNS registrar interested in offering .eth names to your customers, you can find our documentation here, you can ask questions in our Gitter channel, and you can email us at brantly@ens.domains.

3–6 character .eth names

We now have a timeline and description of the process by which we plan on releasing 3–6 character .eth names over the next few months.

We decided to outsource the development and administration of the one-time auction part of the three-step process and are currently accepting proposals (deadline June 21st).

Integration spotlight

We’ve started periodically spotlighting dapps that make interesting or innovative use of ENS.

Argent is a model for wallets integrating ENS. They use ENS throughout the whole user interface, giving each user an ENS subdomain and hiding Ethereum hex addresses as often as possible.

Opera, a major web browser with 182 million monthly active users, is now natively resolving .eth names to IPFS content in their beta mobile app.

According to a video of an upcoming UI change, it looks like Coinbase Wallet will be supporting ENS soon!

We’ve been expanding our list of apps with ENS integration on our website (see “Apps Supporting ENS”). If your dapp is using ENS and is not listed, email your logo to us at brantly@ens.domains and we’ll get you added!

More hackathons!

We had a great response at the EDCON hackathon in Sydney, Australia in April, with half of the projects using ENS and five winning our ENS prize.

We’re also a 2019 Season Partner of ETHGlobal and saw some great projects using ENS at ETHCapeTown and ETHNewYork. We plan on being at the rest of the ETHGlobal hackathons this year — ETHIndia, ETHBoston, and ETHWaterloo — so look for us there and, of course, remember to integrate ENS!

Want to integrate ENS to improve your dapp’s user experience?

You can find our documentation here, you can ask questions in our Gitter channel, and you can email us at brantly@ens.domains for additional help.