EthCC 2: Chris Remus

who showed up if what I've learned is probably considered one of the earlier talks of the day depending what you got into last night or didn't get into so either way thanks for being here I appreciate it I'm Chris I'm the project manager for the etherium name service ENS I've been with project for I don't both different capacities for about two years today I'm hoping you go away from this talk with an understanding of where DNS is if you don't already know but I'm guessing most people in the audience have a pretty good sense for what DNS is right now after that I'll build on the timeline that Dean shared earlier today to give you an idea of where we started and where we are today and then after that I'll get into the main agenda the conversation which is an update on the permanent registrar and the shortname auction these are two pretty significant milestones in the evolution of ENS and I feel fortunate to have some time to share some of the details of the conversations we've been having for the past few months to prepare for these two events and then finally I'll wrap up with some information giving you an idea of how you can prepare for the launch of both so jumping into an ENS introduction again with the assumption that most people here have a pretty common understanding of what DNS is ENS offers a secure and decentralized way to address resources both on and off the blockchain using simple human readable names when I first talked to Nick Johnson the creator of DNS about this two years ago I asked him what the goal of ENS was and he said very simply that the goal of DNS is to replace every aetherium address essentially shown to a user or possibly to code with any Ness name so may not it may not sound like the most modest of goals but we feel like it's it's still a very achievable goal we feel pretty good about the progress we've made to date although 2019 we really hope we consider the euro VNS with some of this shift well with the shift that I experienced the DEF CON toward more of a user centric environment we truly believe that ENS offers an improvement to the average user and even the not average user when it comes to interacting with aetherium and we really hope that this year we see an increase in adoption and my colleague Bradley who's here was hired recently to help us see that through okay a brief introduction to the components ENS essentially has three components it's made up of a registry which is essentially the listing of all the ENS domains and subdomains and the metadata of those domains and subdomains the resolver domain owner and the time-to-live information for the domain or subdomain the resolver is simply translate names and addresses and then the registrar is the contract for allocating subdomains and in addition to I guess sub domain registrar's we have the route registrar which allocates the dot e dot eth top-level domain and that's controlled by a seven-person multi-sig okay so here's our timeline to date DNS was announced back in November of 2016 May 4th on Star Wars Day which wasn't a coincidence DNS was launched we've held a couple workshops since then usually in the summer of usually in August and the attendance from 2017 to 2018 was X you know the increase was exponential so we felt pretty good about that from an interest and adoption perspective another big milestone in our evolution was May of 2018 in May of 2018 the etherium foundation granted us a million dollars and with that true name is limited which is a Singapore nonprofit company but essentially we all are contractors for was formed and the initial team was formed as well and right now we're about 10 and part-time people and each of our involvement somewhat fluctuates with the amount of activity going on at any one point in time following the grant we also did a branding relaunch which some of you may have noticed in the new logo and the other thing that happened after May is that for the past year our work in our development and we feel like our progress became more consistent and then a couple technical milestones in September of last year we announced the DNS integration which my colleague Dean discussed earlier today and then earlier this year we relaunched the manager which allows you to manage existing names that manager that ENS domains we've added Brantley who's here to really help us with the outreach as I mentioned and then finally we also released support for key IP 1577 which is essentially a more flexible addressing scheme to allow us to address various content types okay so now getting into really the main purpose of the talk there are two things happening in 2019 that we felt are important for the community to know the first is the launch of the permanent registrar and then the second is what we're calling the shortname auction so the permanent registrar essentially is replacing the current registrar and then the shortname auction will be a one-time auction that is run to auction off names that are between three and six characters as some of you may know the current registrar only supports names that are seven characters or longer so I'll talk a little bit about the registrar I'll talk about how we made decisions and then I'll provide some details on both permanent registrar and the short name auction okay so as I mentioned before the permanent or the current ens system was launched May 4th 2017 it was always intended to be what we hoped would be as fair and straight forward interim step toward the overall longer term evolution of ENS and we were also hoping that would provide insight and experience into both how the system works and essentially how the community would use it and we feel like over the past two years it's it's done a pretty healthy job in accomplishing both of those for us okay so you know we've been having quite a few discussions both internally and externally with the community about the permanent registrar itself and about the auction there a number of design decisions that we had to make we had ideas on how each of the two should work but we didn't want to impose those ideas on the community so this is the process that we followed you'll see that we identified some key design questions internally we debated them pretty much at length and had pretty healthy debates around each of the the key questions once we came to what we felt like were reasonable solutions we proposed them to the community we took in the community's feedback we process that we updated the proposals and then ultimately presented those proposals back at the community and what we're trying to do here was really strike a balance between involving the community taking the community's feedback integrating the community needs feedback while also making sure we could make decisions and move forward so most of the long form discussions have been happening on our discourse instance which is discussed ens domains so if you're interested in any of the details behind the design decisions we've made or would like to participate in the conversations which are still ongoing to some extent you can find them here so for example I built a guy I developed a guide that essentially links to all the other conversations and as you could see from these next two slides if we put the proposals out to the community and it wasn't necessarily a set it and forget a kind of thing we're pretty happy to see that you know a lot of the commune oh a few of the key topics received in the hundreds to thousands of views so a lot of people took a look and then I also received a healthy number of responses you know 40 50 60 responses so we felt like these were pretty active conversations okay so as I mentioned the current system was intended to be an interim step and what we're looking to lunch now is the permanent registrar and the permanent registrar will essentially replace the current register on registry a key point here is that anything you have registered you know via the current registrar essentially must be six months old before you migrate it into the new register so that's the key point to keep in mind however you know until that name is six months old you're you're still able to use it as you would any other name so it's not as if you know that name is on hold the permanent registrar is intended to be permanent or at least to the degree of permanence that we can imagine so with that said it's intended to run until it deficiency is detected either by us or the community and then other key features and characteristics I'll get into will talk about the pricing which was it ought to go some pretty healthy debate we'll talk about overflow funds this will be a key point because today essentially funds the return to a user when you give the name back in the future those funds aren't going to be returned and they're going to be put to some use and then finally another reminder or another thing to keep in mind here is that there's a renewal requirement in the permanent registrar which essentially means that on an annual basis you'll have to renew your name in order to keep it where today you just told you name for as long as you want to a few more points of comparison so the registration method is going to change from a victory option to first-in first-out registration the Vickrey auction was always intended to act as somewhat of a clearinghouse for the most desirable names when we feel like it's served that purpose so now we're moving to a simpler what we hope is simpler first-in first-out registration process and with that the number of registration transactions is reduced from three to two the duration of the registration also has reduced significantly so rather than having to wait five days now depending on block times the new process should take less than fifteen minutes as I mentioned in the current system you don't have to renew your name you keep it as long as you need to or you want to in the new system you'll have to renew it to keep it and then finally also today if you use a variable and locked which means what you pay for a name you know changes depending on the auction the winning auction price it's locked you get the money back when you give your name back in the future it's gonna be a fixed fee and that money's gonna be spent in a way that's still to be determined okay so pricing the main goal for pricing was to not necessarily generate revenue but it was to discourage land grabs and squatting so we tried to set the names on a sliding scale based on the relative scarcity of names there are far fewer shorter names that there are longer names with those two things in mind we've decided that starting from the bottom up five plus characters will be registered at the price of five dollars per year moving up from there for characters 160 per year and then finally the the most scarce names the three character names will be registered at six hundred and forty dollars per year and if you want to see the details of how we came to this jump into the discourse channel and continued the debate because there is still some debate going on but we still feel pretty good about these numbers fees will be paid in eath the ithi exchange rate will be set using the maker Daud i USD oracle that may change down the road but we feel like that's the best best route to go right now and as i mentioned the use of funds in the near term the funds will be held in the ENS multi-sig which is controlled by seven people you can see there you can see them on the website the NS domains essentially what this does is give us time to decide what to do with them in the longer term there's significant tax considerations that we have to continue to think through a couple of the possible uses we've been considering are to fund the core team with the partially partially use of those funds and then anything we have in excess could possibly go to for example grants to other teams that are building on ENS okay so that's the permanent registrar permanent registrar will be launched we're hoping may fourth this year which would be two months they're two years to the day of the current system lunch and then we're going to do do something called the shortname auction the shortname auction is a one-time auction for three to six character names there will be a reservation process that happens before the auction and I'll talk about what that means I the auction again will be a Vickrey auction to serve the same purpose that it did the first time around which is to act as a clearinghouse for will what are probably going to be the most desirable names and then after the auction completes everything will be done through the permanent registry okay so this is the timeline for everything I've been talking about so May 4th Star Wars day again we're hoping the permanent registrar gets deployed after that yes 60 days after that the shortname reservation process will kick in that will run for 30 days and after the shortname reservation process the shortname auction will happen and then the shortname auction has two phases there's a bid period when the bids are placed there's a reveal period when you make your bids known and then after the reveal period ends names are awarded and then after that everything's happening in the permanent register okay so what's the point of this reservation process essentially the reservation process is a wait for DNS domain holders to claim their reciprocal name on ENS and we debated this quite a bit internally also with the community ultimately we feel like ENS is more useful the less surprising it is and to us being less surprising means that projects especially in the crypto space but not limited to the crypto space are able to get the name that best represents them so these are the key I would say driving factors that led us to the conclusion that offering this reservation process was the right thing to do so who can participate anybody that owns a DNS domain can place a reservation request with the caveat that the domain must have been registered before the 1st of January 2019 and if you're interested in the reasons I can address that my questions okay so how's it going to be done there'll be a specified github repo you essentially submit a public application claiming your name after that you'll be asked to create a txt record on the DNS domain to prove you own it and then finally if completing claims are competing claims are submitted the owner of the oldest existing DNS domain is awarded the name one caveat here you know we don't feel like there's any perfect system and there's no system that was gonna get this 100% right however we feel like this is the most objective least subjective way to increase the chances of essentially the right domain holders to get the names that best represent them as I mentioned this will happen 60 days after the permanent registrar launched and it's going to run 30 days before the shortname auction ok so what are the criteria so if you own a DNS domain the domain was registered before January 1st of this year the name you claimed meinian s has to match one of these three criteria so first-first would be an exact match with the date with the DNS domain that you own the second would be a concatenation of your DNS domain and the top-level domain and then finally the DNS tomato the suffix study through moved so our sponsor here has been asking about this domain and you know because they own SF FR they'd be able to get the domain they've been asking for okay so how can you prepare for the transition I'll talk about what you can do a few whole names today if you're planning to register new names if you're a third party that that has integrated or thinking about integrated with the NS and then point it to where you can go for additional information later so existing name holders the most important thing to know here is that you have to migrate the name that you hold within one year of the permanent registrar launched so if you hold the name today and you want to keep it longer than a year you need to migrate it into the permanent registrar sometime within a year after May 4th of this year if you don't migrate it say by May whatever it would be third of 2020 you would lose it but you can always reclaim the eath that was locked up and then where can you do this you'll be able to do this at our manager in s domains and then we're hoping to sign up a number of partners that will also provide the functionality and we'll announce those as the time gets closer okay if you're looking to register a new name if you want to register it now you can you would use the the current registrar either at our partners that you can find listed on the website the same place you would have done it regardless of the sub coming change as I mentioned before even though the name has to be six months old before you migrate it you could still use it as you would and then once the permanent registrar has launched again you'll be able to use our manager to do that and then our partners well enable the same functionality okay if you're an app that is integrated in us and we hope that some of you are and hope that they're a lot more of you this year if you're simply resolving a name there's nothing you have to do the resolution process stays the same if you're offering registration service and there's some third party registration services out there you'll have to migrate to the permanent registrar after May 4th after we deploy it and within a year after that and we're here to help and we want to help and Brantley's here to really help you so um if you have any questions about any of this you can jump in the getter channel that we have and either Nick or Brantley will will help you out there this course is where all these discussions that I mentioned are happening and then finally there's Brantley's email and he's here if you want to talk to him after the talk and that's it [Applause] ok no time for questions Thanks