Ethereum Name Service Plans Overhaul to Cut Fees and Improve User Experience
The naming service wants to deploy on L2 blockchains
Ethereum Name Service, the decentralized application the blockchain’s inventor Vitalik Buterin has called its most-important non-financial use, is planning an overhaul that would allow it to operate on so-called L2 blockchains.
The change, which must be approved by a vote of ENS DAO members, promises to cut fees and give users more flexibility in how they manage the naming structure. The vote is planned for sometime in the next voting cycle that begins in June and will ask for $4 million more per year to implement the new structure, known as ENSv2, Nick Johnson, lead developer and founder of the project, said in an interview.
“The really big picture is improving scalability and usability as a result,” Johnson said. The host of changes reflect what ENS has learned over the past seven years of its implementation, he said. No L2 has been identified yet, Johnson said, though “right now ZK rollups look particularly attractive because of their fast finality, which is a really important criteria to us because of the way ENS does resolution.”
A naming service like ENS makes dealing with blockchain wallets simpler. Instead of an address such as 0xA7D65e7348e1736CE93E3ceC7E1292595E3B16E5, ENS allows for a user to simply type in matthewl.eth, which redirects to the 0x address. ENSv2 follows comments earlier this year by Buterin, who said the naming service “is super important. It needs to be affordable!”
Johnson said Buterin’s comments are “really encouraging” and that the larger point Buterin is making is that naming is one of the building blocks of decentralized identity, a long-standing but very complicated goal in the Ethereum ecosystem. A more cynical take on Buterin’s view is that “it also reflects a lack of innovation in other areas relating to non-financial applications,” Johnson said. “I also feel like there could be more interesting and valuable non-financial primitives. It would be nice to be winning ahead of a more crowded field.”
If the changes are approved and implemented the first thing .eth holders will notice is a step drop in the price of transactions, Johnson said. That should allow for all sorts of new implementations of ENS that have been too expensive.
“The number one thing people will notice is the reduction in gas fees,” he said.
lead image: Nick Johnson