Week 6, and we’re 75% of the way through the soft launch! How are things looking?

Names and bids

Bids have stabilised since our last report at week 3, and are now fairly steady at between 3000 and 4000 bids and reveals per day.

Overall, the stats now stand at :

296,433 auctions started

68,597 auctions finalised

145,092 bids placed

129,799 bids revealed

7,976 unique bidders

141,000 ether locked in names

If .eth were an ICANN gTLD, it would be the 48th largest, between .solutions and .news.

There’s been a lot of high-profile registrations since last time, with darkmarket.eth taking top place, with a highest bid of 28,555 ether, and a final value of 20,103 ether — nearly 15% of the total ether locked up in the whole system.

Some people have suggested mass-registrations by squatters have decreased lately. In that event we’d expect to see a decrease in the average number of bids per bidder:

This largely appears to follow the total bid count histogram — with dips in one corresponding to dips in another. This implies that the variance in bids per day is largely due to users who engage in mass registrations varying their activity, rather than changes in the overall use of ENS.

Speaking of which, how many bids does the average bidder make?

We’ve got a pretty classic long-tail distribution here (note the logarithmic vertical axis!). The vast majority of users (over 70%) make between 1 and 5 bids, with a long tail of users making ever greater number of bids.

Prices

The odds of getting a domain not in the preimage list for the minimum bid remain stable around 90%, while the odds for a domain in the list have risen slightly to approximately 70%.

Lost funds

Several people have asked for stats on how many bids, and how much ether has been lost by failures to reveal. To determine this, we took all bids placed at least 19 days ago, and checked whether they had been revealed or not just before the cutoff for doing so ended, recording the count of such bids, and the sum of such values in either case. The results:

8.3% of bids (5710/69103) were not revealed

4.5% of ether (5171/1,155,585) was lost due to failed reveals

These figures are surprisingly (some would say depressingly) high — though it’s reassuring to see that small bids are more likely to be lost than large ones. If we restrict the period considered to exclude the first 14 days, figures are significantly lower — 6.4% of bids and 2% of ether — providing a hopeful indicator that better documentation, client support, and user support is lowering that figure over time.

Usage

24% of all gas is spent on ENS at present. The ENS registrar is now the fourth most invoked contract, with nearly half a million transactions to it.

11.3% of registered names (7728/68644) currently have resolvers associated with them. Since squatters are not likely to bother with setting up resolvers, this gives us a fairly good lower bound on the number of names registered by users who intend to put them to use.

Adoption and ecosystem