Ethereum Name Service (ENS) turns human-unreadable Ethereum addresses (0x7f3a…) into human-readable names (alice.eth). Founded by Nick Johnson and launched in 2017, ENS is to Ethereum what DNS is to the internet — a naming system that makes the underlying infrastructure usable by normal people. But ENS has evolved into something more: a decentralized identity primitive that represents who you are onchain.
ENS domains became digital identity in Web3. Your .eth name appears in wallets, on social media profiles, in dApp interfaces, and as a marker of crypto-native identity. Owning a short or meaningful .eth domain (like brantly.eth, vitalik.eth, or 000.eth) became a status symbol. ENS names sold for significant amounts — the domain paradigm.eth sold for $1.5 million, and three-digit .eth names regularly traded for five figures.
The ENS token, distributed via airdrop in November 2021, gave governance control of the ENS protocol to the community. The ENS DAO manages the protocol’s treasury, sets pricing, and determines technical development priorities. ENS governance became one of the more active and contentious DAO environments, with debates about name pricing, subdomain policies, and protocol upgrades generating significant community engagement.
ENS expanded beyond Ethereum. ENS names can receive tokens on other chains, resolve to decentralized website content (via IPFS), store profile information (avatar, email, social handles), and serve as a unified identity across dApps. The protocol also enabled DNS integration — traditional .com domain owners could link their DNS names to ENS, bridging Web2 and Web3 naming. By 2024, over 2 million .eth names had been registered, and ENS had become default infrastructure — virtually every Ethereum wallet and dApp integrates ENS name resolution. The vision of your .eth name as your universal digital identity — your wallet address, your social profile, your website, and your onchain reputation, all in one — is gradually becoming reality.
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