What are they for?

Text records are for any arbitrary data you want to attach to an ENS name. At the moment, we are supporting the keys defined in the original text record EIP by Richard Moore, which include keys for an email address, URL, social media profiles, and other meta data of your choosing.

In the future, hopefully you can use ENS names to add profile information to each app you use as easily as adding in your ENS name, similar to Gravatar, but entirely decentralized. When you change your profile on ENS, it will automatically update on each app.

How can I add a text record?

In the ENS Manager, once you have the Public Resolver set on your name, you can just add a record by clicking the ‘+’ button in the ‘records’ tab:

Once you have clicked that, you should see some drop down boxes appear that will allow you to choose to add a “TEXT” record, the kind of text record (e.g. “URL”), and then enter the information for that record:

Once you’re ready, click save to send the transaction, and once it’s mined you should see it appear below.

Note: Text records, like all ENS records, are publicly available.

What’s next for text records?

We would like to see how people use them, and once the basic version is in use, we plan to allow arbitrary text record types to be set in the Manager.

This will mean you will be able to add your own custom text record keys that we haven’t thought of. However if you have an idea for a great text record type right now, please let us know in our forum, as the most useful text records are the ones used by everyone!