[Music] want to bring in our second last talk of the day. And for this one, I'd like to bring on Jeff from the ENS team to tell you about the future of Ethereum naming service. Please give Jeff a big round of applause. Hello everyone. I'm Jeff Laauo.
I'm a co-founder of ENS. Um I'm actually based here in Taipei. So it's fantastic to be able to give this talk in my my kind of my hometown. Uh and that's my baby over there in the middle. So, uh, um, today I'm going to be talking about the future of ENS and my view on how we're going to be taking simple naming to becoming the foundation of decentralized identity using programmable cryptography and namechain.
But first, can I get a show of hands? Uh, who here owns an ENS name? Wow. Who who doesn't own an ENS name? And no one dares puts their hand up.
Okay, fantastic. Um, it's really amazing to see the adoption of ENS over these last eight years. It's it's really been eight years since ENS started. So, uh, thank you all for your support. So, first I'll give an introduction to ENS.
So, ENS is a user experience protocol. That means we put users first. And this means many things. The first it means that we really want to take blockchain and make it really understandable to everyone and make it really easy to use. The second is we really want users to be in control of their identity.
So we do this by empowering with the true trustless ownership over their names. And lastly, our protocol is built to be credibly neutral and permissionless. So anyone anywhere can use ENS. ENS's humble beginnings has started with, you know, one of these fundamental blockchain and cryptographic problems, which is everything is a random hexodimal number like this. Really, how are we expected to scale to millions or even billions of users if the first thing you see is when you when you enter the blockchain system is this kind of scary hexodimal number?
ENS transforms that hexadesimal value into something we all understand, a name. We're all given a name when we're born as humans and that's forms part of identity. And whether that hexodimal address represents a wallet or decentralized website, a name is far more meaningful than that. ENS is built on a few core principles. The first is that we're decentralized.
That means that no single party or person owns and governs the protocol. The second is that we're permissionless, meaning that anyone anywhere can use ENS without having to go through KYC or having to give up personal or sensitive information. And the last thing is we're credibly neutral meaning that no single party has um a controlling interest over ENS. And so we can make it a very public protocol, public good for everyone to use. Over these last eight years, we've managed to create over 40 million names.
People have made 40 million names with over 30 million users and several hundred,000 decentralized profiles. But over these last eight years, we've also run into problems with scaling and um and cost on Ethereum L1. So in 2024, we announced our plan to go to namechain, which is our new passive spilt L2 with the new L2 and our new versions of the contract with ENS v2. This is going to create the foundations for the next version of ENS for years to come. So, namechain is a ZK rollup, which means we use zero knowledge proofs to create validity proofs to batch up transactions to make it cheaper and easier for people to use ENS.
And because they're validity proofs, it means once they're put onto Ethereum L1, those transactions are finalized. And so, we don't need to wait around for any kind of finalization period. And so um you the ENS you know and love on L1 works just as it does on namechain. So namechain will be the home of names. You'll be able to register your name.
You'll be able to set your records on namechain. You'll be able to set your subdomains. It'll be easy as using an L1. But my vision for ENS is more than just names. Names just as you as humans are the beginning of your life.
It's just the beginning. But actually, it's your experiences, your journey through this world that really creates your identity. And that's what I really want ENS. I really want namechain to be that home of identity. And I'm hoping with the help of programmable cryptography and namechain, this will be um the foundations of decentralized identity.
So what is programmable crytography? Well, programmable crypto programmable cryptography is a family of cryptographic primitives that allow you to apply these uh primitives to arbitrary computational functions. And this means that you don't need to uh create new verification methods every single time there's a new use case for a new crypto crypto a new cryptographic primitive. At namechain, we use zero knowledge to batch up transactions with with ZK roll-ups. But actually, that's only a small use case of a very very powerful um cryptographic primitive like ZK.
So, what are ZK proofs? ZK proofs prove something about some data. And when you're doing that proof, you're also able to redact sensitive information or private information. Traditionally, it's been hard to prove, but easy to verify, meaning that it's more computationally expensive to prove, and so you would usually do that offchain, but it's easy to verify. So, it means it's very, very quick and easy to verify.
And at the end, you're you're left with a very small and compact proof where you can put anywhere you like, which makes it perfect for using on the blockchain because that proof is so small. You can put that quickly and easily onchain and verify it on chain. And obviously that's validated with mathematical certainty. So, I was introduced to programmable cryptography in 2021 when I um took the first cohort of the Xerox Park um ZK education um uh residency and at that time I was doing these lectures with Brian Goo who was working at Ethereum Foundation in Xerx Park at the time and he was teaching us about zero knowledge and at that time everything was specific circuits for specific problems such as to cache. Everything was kind of slow and it was really impossible to prove things on mobile.
And the pro kind of problems we were solving back then was like how to do 256-bit mass in a 254-bit prime field like really low-level tasks. But fast forward four years, everything has kind of changed and zero knowledge has really, you know, come to the forefront where we've got generalized circuits and we have ZKVMs that can prove many many things, not just single things. the improvement in terms of speed and mobile proving is now actually possible today which is super important for some of these identity use cases for zero knowledge proofs. So, some of the protocols are actually using this right now. Um, Sysmo back in 2021 was using ZK proof for ZK Density.
Um, sadly, they're no longer around, but that dream of ZK identity is still alive with protocols such as ZK email and TLS notary. And ZK email is doing verification of email contents and ownership. I believe the founder did a small talk today. And ZKTLS is this idea of proving properties of secure web connections. So anywhere there's a TLS connection, you can also package that up into a ZK proof and make it portable.
So the bottom line is is that these kind of protocols allow you to package things in web 2 and put them onto web 3 and make them portable. So it's this idea of portable credentials. Once they're in that proof, you can put that anywhere you want, such as onchain. But traditionally these credentials have been kind of minted to a token or address and honestly like credentials are really meaningless without some kind of identity related to it. So that's where I see ENS and programmable techn um programmable cryptography together creates this foundation for verified credentials that we haven't really seen yet.
So, traditionally, ENS is this idea of mapping a name to a record, any record. It can be your Twitter, it can be your GitHub, it can be your Ethereum address. And this is still really, really useful, right? If you want to point um someone to your Ethereum address without giving them a long hexodimal number, it's great to have an ENSA to point to that or to your decentralized website. But ENS really transforms when you take this idea of the record and turn it into a verified record.
It creates this web of trust that we really haven't had before that is attached to your identity. So today the only two-way linked verifiable and permissionless record is the primary name. So the primary name is this idea of taking an ENS name and pointing it to an address and having that address point back to the primary name. And this is all done using you know ECDSA signing. So you sign obviously to to attach your address to an ENS name, but then you also sign again to show to prove that you own this address and that you're pointing back to this ENS name.
So you can create this two-way link between your name and your address. And that means on your favorite applications like Etherscan or your wallets, you can safely, you know, switch out your address for that ENS name. But this has been the only verifiable like two-way linked record that exists on ENS today. But in the future with programmable technology, programmable cryptography and CK proofs, it means that we can add things like Twitter or GitHub and LinkedIn and have these verified records or even things like um proving you worked at a particular company or you attended a particular event like here in ETH global. You can all add these to your ENS names in the future.
So how does this work in practice? So what you would do is you would take the record and the ENS name and then the ZK proof and you would package them together and put them as inputs to the ENS resolver contract. So the ENS resolver contract is a contract that maps the ENS name to a record. And so when you set up your record, you would put all these as inputs to the resolver and the resolver will be superpowered with this ZK verifier that essentially verifies the ZK proof when you are setting your record. And that means the record is verified when you're setting the record itself at at set time, not at read time.
So that means that anyone reading your ENS name later on knows that it's already been verified. They don't need to do any verification. They don't need to check with you. It's all been done by the ZK proof. So in practice, if you know ENS, it means that at ENS name resol resolution time, meaning when they're reading the name, they don't need to do any verification.
It just works out the box. And so if you know ENS, ENS is integrated in all your favorite libraries, whether that's VM or Ethers or your wallets or Ether Scan. So it just means that out the box you can get verified credentials directly in with your ENS name without your developers having to do too much changes to their code. So what are the use cases? Well, the first use case would be spoof prevention.
Think about when you're paying someone to an ENS name, but you may have typed it incorrectly or they someone might be spoofing you. You can quickly check their social media accounts if it's verified already and check whether oh, I've actually interacted with that the account before and that that Twitter account, I remember that account. It means you can easily check whether or not it's some kind of spoofed ENS name or not. The same can be done with things like websites. So maybe if it was the the safe wallet front end, you can put that onto ENS and have it have it direct to an IPFS content hash and when you are resolving that that name in a website, it means that you can check their social media accounts to check if they've attached their company GitHub or their company Twitter and that means you can be more sure that this is the this this is the correct website that you're using.
Civil resistance. So an address on Ethereum by itself doesn't really have any civil resistance. It could be, you know, um it could be anyone. And an EN uh an address with an ENS name attached to it has a slightly higher civil resistance because obviously there's some value attached to an ENS name. But ENS names with credentials are even better.
If you attach a verified record like your social media accounts, like multiple social media accounts with multiple real world usage, it's more clear that this is a a real human, real individual. So, you know, um DAPs can use this for things like airdrops or things where you want there to be only a single human that can can do this private verification of data. So think on if you are looking for a job and you want to show to your next employer that you worked at this particular company but you don't have a reference or you don't want to give them a reference to your previous company. What you you could do this without ZK proof right now by getting an old email and proving proving like showing them that email from your old company subdomain. But the problem with that is that you know that email might have potentially sensitive or private information and you're revealing that to your new employer.
So you could to to to stop this you could use a ZK proof to essentially verify the email um and check the DKIM signature and that's how you could prove prove um that you worked at a particular company without actually you know revealing any sensitive information and or giving them a reference that they need to call and you can also you can redact any sensitive information or data similar with something like ZKTLS or TLS notary You can also do this with your um like your bank account. You could confirm you have the amount of assets for a mortgage without revealing the exact amount you actually have in your bank account. This can be all done using CK proofs and you can attach that to your ENS. And once you've attached that to your ENS, you can use it in multiple different places, not just that one place. So it's portable conditional access.
So once all these credentials are added to your ENS name, it means that you could use this to gatekeep an event or a discord or a forum and you combine this with other onchain assets like NFTts or tokens or po apps. And lastly, ENS names have we've always had this narrative of this uh the web 3 username where you would use your web3 username once on one but then you can use that same username over you know your far caster or other web3 applications. You can take this idea and you can use it with portal reputation. So once you prove and attach it once to say your ENS name, you can use it in multiple different places or use it to apply to a different company without having to like reprove and reattach all your proofs again. So these are just a few use cases of what can be done with um ENS and programmable programmable cryptography, but I'm sure you guys have will come up with more innative use cases that we'll see in the years to come.
I really believe that these verified records give meaning. It really gives meaning to an everinccreasing AI dominated world and it really creates this foundation of this web of trust within ENS and the decentralized ecosystem. ENS started in 2017. We were really trying to solve this idea of the human readable name and getting rid of hexodimal. And four years later with our first two-way verified record, the primary ENS name, we invented this idea of the portable web web3 username where you can take your ENS name, your identity, and go to different places.
But that identity was just the name and some records that weren't verified. I think in 2025 the new narrative for ENS is turning your ENS name into a portable identity that you can take with you and verify some of your credentials. Even businesses can have their own identity and they can show you that they have you know proper reviews from proper customers. So here's just an example like gflow has all these verified records. I can use it in DAP one in DAP 2 and this will be all part of namechain but when you zoom out the other names like businesses might have verified reviews on their DAP and then you can interact with that DAP and see like oh this business has all of these reviews that are that are from actual users because there civil resistance because they've got credentials you know you might be able to provide your credential to a shop to prove that you're over 18 or that you you know have the right token to be able to get these assets And then this all becomes this big um chain of identity of namechain.
And then on top of that all the other chains that need to use kind of identity rel related and credential things can hook into namechain and use those credentials themselves. So this really brings me full circle to the idea of names. Like names is something we are all given a name when we start this journey of life and it's really just the start of our identity. It's it doesn't make us who we are. Like I said it's the journey and those experiences and those credentials those things that you experience through life that really create the identity who we are.
So identity is the destination and that's where I really believe ENS is going. We started with names, but that's just the foundation. And as you build your identity through your experiences, this is what makes a really meaningful web of trust that and that's the foundation of what I believe decentral identity to be. So thank you for taking me on well coming with me on this journey between names identity. Thank you.
[Applause] [Music]
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.
