How ENS is taking Ethereum to the rest of the Internet by Brantly Millegan (Devcon5)

I'm talking about how ENS the ca3 name service is taking aetherium to the rest of the Internet okay so our name obviously is the etherium name service so I want to explain what this means this is going to I think explain a lot so how is it a name service naming services or things that people don't think about very much you know it's it's it's a kind of something in the background and a lot of people actually misunderstand how they work so naming services naming service is just a lookup system that's it it doesn't do what anything else okay you provide a name it provides with information that's it people overcomplicate this okay your computer might then do something with that information but that is separate from the naming service so for example with the NS a lot of people think that if you're sending to an e NS address that ENS like sends the transaction on to them for you or something like that nope all ENS does is it tells the wallet which address to send to and then the wallet sends the transaction that all happens in the background the user doesn't see that but that's what's really happening so why do we have naming services obviously computer identifiers x' what makes sense for computers what makes sense for humans don't mix the internet already has a naming system domain name system so even for blockchain things why don't we just use DNS a lot of people that I've talked to you haven't even thought I haven't thought about this DNS could provide naming for cryptocurrency dresses it's a naming service it can provide naming for anything so so so why don't we well it is because DNS launched in 1985 it's fairly insecure it's fairly centralized and so it kind of doesn't go along with the values of blockchain world I just want to point out that DNS could do all these things for the blockchain world if we wanted to use it for that so ENS is a naming service right it has names owners of names as records that can store any information if you have a name you right can look it up you can do something with that information but this is key you can store any information it's not just for aetherium so why is it the etherium name service it's not because it's a naming service only for the etherium ecosystem it's because it's built on aetherium this is common confusion if you're thinking hmm if it's confusing why don't you rebrand well we're thinking about it but right now this is very important to understand so just it it's called this right cuz the logic and records are stored on the etherion blockchain but it can store information relevant to anything right so aetherium is just like the infrastructure in the background that it happens to run on but that doesn't restrict the types of information you could store on it right you could store phone numbers you could store your app your your home home address you could store a Bitcoin address you can store anything it's a common misconception that it can't write we have this right on our website it's been there all along so why do we use etherium as our back-end it's a good question right there's other blockchains out there even if we want to have a blockchain naming sort a naming service built on a blockchain here's some advantages aetherium has a very high security built into it you know if you were making our own chain or something like that we have to bootstrap security would be low security it'd be in and be probably less decentralized aetherium we can build on a theorem it has high security decentralized right out of the bat we commend benefit from all the ecosystem infrastructure it's like meta masks and fear I mean tons of services that we benefit from right right away we don't have to reinvent those things we benefit from standards so all dot 'if names are actually ERC 2721 compliant so you know a dot eath names can just plug into and if two markets that's a benefit that we have for from from being on aetherium programmability so you know you'd have things like conditioned ownership of name or something that's time locked for a certain period of time and also interaction with other contracts on the theorem this is extremely powerful the fact that NS can do this you know if we were building our on our own chain or on different chain we wouldn't benefit from the etherium ecosystem in this way so so we think this is why a theory emitting a blockchain based naming system so to kind of sum up ENS uses aetherium to serve the Internet including and beyond the etherium ecosystem and as a result ENS and their if our goal is to make ENS and therefore aetherium a basic piece of Internet infrastructure used widely by people whether they are part of the blockchain community or not and the rest of this presentation is about how we are doing that so of course we do support the etherium ecosystem I don't want to give the impression that we're moving up beyond the atheneum ecosystem that's still a core thing that we do that's kind of our bread and butter but ENS does much more than that and many people don't know that ENS does much more than that so I'm going to be talking about more in detail all the non directly etherium related things that we support okay so ipfs the interplanetary filesystem ipfs is a peer-to-peer decentralized file file system file sharing protocol ENS is a decentralized naming service so together they are the decentralized web we actually have a partnership with protocol labs of building out infrastructure on this and promoting this kind of duo of protocols we already have native support for this pair of protocols in the in Opera and brave says they are also working on adding this so we are getting a native browser support but if you're using a browser that doesn't have native support we benefit from the from meta mask meta mask supports this so if you are using Chrome Firefox edge brave or even the tor browser which we'll be talking about here in a second you automatically support this decentralized web and you can try it right now actually so we recommend this is a great starting place I'll monitor 'if if you have to put a slash at the end of here if you're doing it in meta masks so it'll recognize that it recognized it if you type this in it'll it'll load up and this is a directory of websites decentralize websites this is a great place to start this works right now we also have a project called if DNS which is a bridge between DNS and en s plus IP FS there's much more that can be said about this we have she just published a blog post yesterday with more details to go to our medium check it out but for users the bottom line is we've we own eath link on DNS we've set up a special server there so that if there is a decentralized website and you don't have meta mask you're not using opera you can still access it just add dot link to the end of it and it will resolve like a normal website so this is a great way if you if you want to put your your daps front end on ipfs to make it accessible via ens but you still want normal people to be able to be able to access access it use this as two tore down onion addresses so toward on an onion web sites I've been around for a while they have a naming problem they have the same naming problem that normal websites would have that they have you know an address to find the server they need a naming system but they don't trust DNS because DNS is insecure it's centralized right and tor is all about security so right now if you wanted to go to a dawn onion web site in the tor browser you have to go to something like this right this is very non user-friendly ens solves this problem so ens is obviously a decentralized secure naming solution that works today and we've added support for denim dresses in our in our records and you can use this in the tor browser if you have metamath so so the tor browser is Firefox based and if you add in the put in the add-on meta mask and you type in a dot eath name that has a tour down any addresses records it will resolve to that toward onion websites so this works today you can try it right now so we actually set up ten ten of these addresses I to kind of show off this functionality so like DuckDuckGo tour death Facebook toured eath and all these here and we actually set these up and then we gave up control of them so we can't change the addresses here so this actually is showing off another functionality of ens this is to prevent phishing you know if I if I set this up I I could set up correctly you could start using it and then I could if I really wanted to be bad I could then change it to a different address and then you might not know that I changed it so you're going to and I could go to a phishing website or something like that I can't do that so actually nobody owns these addresses but they still work that's something you can't do with DNS by the way somebody always controls the DNS records who is actually just launched this with text records in our manager you can now to put it to any ENS naming put like an email address website a link to an avatar a description anything you wants like if you're trying to sell a name or if you just want people to know who you are or however you want to use it this works right now and that we're going to be adding the ability to put custom text records very soon this is what it looks like in our manager other cryptocurrencies so you heard would have heard about this yesterday if you saw Nick Johnson our Lee developers presentation but we just added multi-point support on maintenance it works right now at least on DNS protocol level and basically it works the same way as with aetherium addresses you just store like the Bitcoin address or EOC dress or something like that in the record and then the the wallet if there's someone types in the name can grab that address and then the wallet sends the transaction right some people are like well how does that work as you know it's on a different chain well it's only it's just that where it's being stored see so for any cryptocurrency any arbitrary cryptocurrency this works for and we have a wallet that's actually just about ready to launch this they said that their beta version of this would be launching either today or the next couple days and then in normal production mobile app by the end of the month descent wallet this is a hardware and mobile wallet based out of South Korea this is their website decent welcome they support a bunch of different currencies and they were really great to kind of partner with us to kind of build this new functionality and actually I want to show a video of this darn it okay we're not a different computer so we had a video of this working a demo on main net you can imagine how it works exactly the same ways the theorem addresses but with Bitcoin addresses in this video sorry we had to switch computers okay but we have commitments for more than just decent wallet we actually have commitments from seven other wallets to add this functionality either in the next couple weeks or months they are on board with this coin base wallet trust wallet I am token Haven my crypto Portus and opera and we are also in discussions with others other wallets so we'd really like this to be the standard for all well in aiming and if you are involved in another multi coin wallet please let us know we'd love to work with you on this and this new functionality was actually funded by a grant from BA xx so thank you to you by Nantz X we really appreciate the support okay we are also working on DNS namespace integration so this is this is really important to understand a lot of people think that ENS is da teef it's not like banish that idea from your name banish the idea from your mind okay ENS is not da DS names ENS is a naming system infrastructure da teef is just one top-level domain that happens to work on it but any name could run on the ENS infrastructure this is completely separate things that you need to have separately in your mind so in this this distinction also holds true for DNS so there's like the DNS infrastructure and then there's the DNS namespace completely difference the namespace name space could remain the same even if the infrastructure changed okay and so ENS could support in principle any name and this is exactly what we're trying to do so so we've actually devised a system so that if you own a name on DNS only the owner of that name can claim use of that name on ENS not with da teef but with the same top-level domain so for example a theorem Dorothy the EF could if they used our system which is coming out here very soon could have a DNS record an DNS record for 3mg org not etherium DS aetherium dot org and we use something called DNS set to do this I'm not going to explain this in detail but it's a pretty clever system that Nick Johnson came up with here and we actually this actually works right now for dot XYZ so like argent wallet uses this the dot XY Z was kind of our test case and we're now confident in the system we're gonna be rolling this out to all other DNS SEC enable DNS top-level domains which is all the ones you've heard of we also have some special use cases for these other top-level domains dot luxe cred art oh yeah so so some people said well if you're gonna integrate the DNS namespace why do we need da teef well because because dot e is native to e NS it has special properties so so DNS names will still be subject to DNS controls because ownership goes only one direction so whoever owns the DNS version of its owns the ens version of it but because da DS names are native to E and s they have their you have individual ownership or in are not subject to those same controls some people ask about our relationship with ICANN I'll say a few words it's friendly we've gone to their their conferences we've given presentations almost everybody is very open and receptive to ENS in fact people approached us to hey we want to work together so we've we think there's a lot of potential to working together also this is a key thing to know ICANN is not monolithic some people will say this is what I can things or I can does I cans a lot of different people who think different things they don't always agree so keep that in mind I'm gonna skip this running low on time new DNS are are type we are working on getting a new record type in the DNS system for a theme addresses so we can standardize our the our process for claiming DNS names on ENS but this could be used beyond DNS just want you to be aware of that and we're also working on getting each darpa darpa domains are used for a basic internet infrastructure and we are working on getting this for use for the whole etherium community this would be another kind of a semi-official link etherium to the legacy internet and then we're also working on traditional DNS records are our public resolver actually supports this right now but we have a project going with dock cred credit a dns top-level domain they have agreed to work with us to build a system to use e NS and IP FSU host all of their DN a-- traditional dns records for their a whole namespace which would be an incredible kind of first step towards having ENS be used for that use case so we are very excited about this it's really it's amazing they've agreed to do this with us we've talked to lots of other top-level domains who are kind of interested but they tend to be very conservative so they're willing to experiment with us on this and we're very we're very happy about that so that's it thank you very much here are some important links and we have one minute if anybody wants to ask a question yeah so just just run up to the mic here and we have time for maybe one or two I could also talk we can also talk afterwards we have some of our developers here as well what happens if DNS want to add or eath names are they going to mean in in the DNS root it's currently reserves as a three letter country code for Ethiopia although they are not using any three-letter country codes they're just like reserves in defense and I've to people who say that they're actually probably not going to give them to the country's so at some point we might be able to get da teeth as a gTLD but that may or may not happen okay so it's probably unclear that ENS would ever be able to get the the ddotty TLD so the main issue is that for you to be and I can't approve TLD you must abide by something called the what the Uniform domain dispute resolution policy or UD RP which basically says things lessons that look like let copyrights and trademarks are enforced and we're not we're not really going for that a technologically can't do that without ease yeah yeah so so I imagine that's probably be like just a non-starter we so crime can open the idea that you could have you know some some I can approve TL DS that that that do enforce trademarks and then some that don't but they have a very strict requirement anything within their route does enforce trademarks right I mean we'll see how that goes right yes last question about the hardware wallet integration does the hardware wallet actually display the dot e Thames when you confirm the what well an integrate with hardware wallets that are using it Hardware yes like well on the device it displays I don't know if it's on the device good question but in their mobile app that uses their hardware wallet okay I was just gonna ask cuz it's it's very hard for hardware devices to authenticate ENS entries because they can't see the blockchain so they don't know the current state of the NS name and because you can't do multiple function calls inside of a single transaction you can't just assert that the the address is actually an e NS name so I was curious how you saw oh yeah I know it's all on the mobile app okay you guys seen that in the video I'm sorry the video didn't work okay thank you very much [Applause] you