At EDCON in Paris, I announced a “ready to deploy” date of March 14 — Pi day — for ENS, the Ethereum Name Service.

ENS aims to be a general purpose name registry for the Ethereum blockchain, and potentially for wider applications too. It aspires to be the last address you ever have to deal with, and as such, we figure it deserves a nice (vanity) address. For deployment on Ropsten, I wrote a little Python script that mined the vanity address we used there, which starts 0x112234455…. Pretty memorable, we figured.

For mainnet, we’d like to go a step further, and outsource finding a really cool vanity address to the community. I’ve put together a ‘vanity address miner’ tool called vaniteth. It’s written in go, and has a variety of scoring functions, including lowest address and longest ascending sequence. When you run it, it constantly generates new addresses, and outputs the best ones it finds.

The easiest way to run it is with Docker; if you’ve got Docker installed, you can simply run it like this:

docker run arachnid/vaniteth:latest --threads=2 --contract

Here’s the deal: post your best addresses in this Reddit post, and in the runup to March 14, I’ll select the most upvoted address and invite that user to deploy ENS, and transfer ownership of the contract to the root multisig. If there’s any problem contacting the most upvoted submission, we’ll go for the next best, and so forth. Don’t forget to save the private key for any submissions somewhere!

We’ve got most of a month to find a really nice vanity address. So let’s get mining!