The Grand Vision for ENS

[Music] [Applause] [Music] and the next talk is going to be about ens a lot of people don't know this but ens domains are the rc 721s and there's so much that you can do on top of this thing and makoto is here to tell us about the possibilities of ens and how this fits into the broader identity world in crypto so without further ado let's welcome makoto and i'll let you take it from here i can't take uh thank you for introducing us and uh i'll just gonna start now can you hear me okay everything's great cool and let me shift okay uh sh let's start okay so uh yeah so hello everybody uh so yeah this is about ens and i just wanted to do a quick introduction and in the ethereum world we have something called like ecm wallet and address so according to in kind of on chain world i'm known as zero x five a three eight four two two seven rubber back but obviously no one remembers so we have enos for that hence i have a well known e s name called mathog.is my actually my real name is makoto but yeah in the same world i am east and i'm a developer ens team and i've been working in unsteam since 2018 and today i want to talk about so it was a grand vision it was a title my colleague bradley put and he unfortunately have some like white schedule chance so he can't give his grand vision so this is my interpretation of the grand vision uh we we as a unes team we kind of share the same vision and uh yeah but i get because i i kind of watched ems to kind of start and they're just kind of foolish so i wanted to quickly like recap how he when he came where we are right now and also like we have a kind of a new vision like we used to say like because ens uh you know came heavily borrowed from the name dnf you know domain name system so we we keep thinking yeah we are the kind of internet uh ethereum kind of name service which is almost like a domain name system but we kind of start realizing that self realizing that it's actually it would be more than that we so we started talk telling ourselves as a web 3 username so we wanted i want to kind of start talking about that transition and the journey just started and we need to build lots of stuff and we also need a lot of help from you guys so i want to just end my talk with like you know where is the area we have to focus on and how you can help okay and so the handle beginning is that so back in 2016 this was june's nice in london so ens the idea of enos was kind of inventive from the guy called nick johnson he is a founder of ens and he now he is in new zealand but back then he was in london and uh incidentally that i give i got into ethereum ethereum back in 2016. about the same time as nick got in and i got i went to the foster ceremony back in april and when i went to the third meetup and nick was actually presenting him about ens interestingly if you look at the june 9 i think this is the time he was about to join from i think he used to work for google somewhere then like he uh decided to join uh ethereum foundation as a guest developer and uh yeah ten minutes after this uh the dow blows up so uh you know the dow the original doubt would raise like 150 million and then it got hacked and the 30 percent of the east got like drained that kind of stuff so his first job was to basically rescue this serve but he at this point he had no idea what's coming we need that and what at that time i don't know how many people were there when ethereum you know that time but we we had that vision at the ecm oh as a whole that that vision was the world computer that like you know whole thing is about the ethereum we we use you know we are the ones who kind of compute all the wild things do something and we also have some idea like kind of triangular system that ethereum is a computer then you also need a storage system which will swap uh swarm is basically similar to very similar to ipfs uh for the distributed storage system and uh but like it was kind of nate he integrates natively to ethereum and also there's another thing called whisper which is a network system uh layer which is not really actively developed but i think status is taking over the idea and they're doing something called watson or something but so as part of the swamp because one had that kind of content id which is a hash of the basically the content you want to upload image or like all that stuff then obviously they had that issue also to have the issue of like you know very like huge machine friendly but human unfriendly name so when he started he i think he was having the idea of ens and the first use case was let's use it there so that that was a very very uh starting point but yeah at that time he just joined the uh en as our ecm foundation and he was kind of doing on his side of while maintaining the uh go ethereum client and then about a year later uh made the force actually i think he he initially tried to launch in the uh uh fourteenth of march which is a pie day but as soon as they he launched he had a he hit the bug so he had a retreat and he did another launch back in may uh made a force uh that's easy to remember made the full speed with you so that was a the actual launch and on this kind of tweet it says like you know it's 1d i think kartik said like yeah ens is one of their uh nft project and it is actually one of the kind of all oldest uh non-fungible token may 2007 so this is was kind of months before even the punks was born and uh like the standard 71 didn't even exist and during that time also it was a kind of peak of so-called ico initial coin offering and there's a lots of companies doing uh yeah raising lots of money and that it was the first time he sam as a community hit the like network spike that whenever people do i think brave did the browser did that token launch on like i think about the same time and then during that time there was a huge spike so what we did kind of well nick did kind of interestingly is exactly because the name based on that i think something like a i think if it's a hash of the name or something he basically kind of spread the name uh with this mint period over the three months so if some names can be meeted uh auctions are auctioned like a on this day whereas the other name is this day so and it because uh spread over the three months just so that you we can prevent that you know people just jumping into one specific moment so that was i think it was quite innovative in a way like even it was like four years ago but he was already thinking about how to make sure like it's not gonna like you know like include the network uh so i i wish like more nft project actually do something like that but yeah so some names are actually like auctioned off during the even before the uh punks uh was minted and uh yeah uh 180 thousand names were auction over three months and another interesting thing is it was a so-called bakery auction that like a fast highest bidder paid the second highest spend so like some of the name uh people the highest bid was east phoenix which was over uh someone barefoot like two hundred thousand it's a humongous amount but they're actually like no one bit as high as it so i think that person only paid like 0.01 east or something whereas something like a dark market open market it was more like you know many people bit so that that that's actually the price that they acquired which was about twenty thousand uh it was a lot but well in total i think yeah 168k is at that time it was about 50 million now it's all probably like over half a billion it's quite a lot of money but the thing is i think it was a fast time people kind of saw the opportunity similar to the kind of dot-com boom like people just like you know uh squat on it just holding it and it was designed to make it easier because it was more of the lock system so you put the deposit and you can only while there's a deposit there but like if you uh if you're going to release the name you get the money back and the the reason behind he did it is that because he was a kind of interior registrar he didn't know how all things works so he wanted to make it temporary and if something happens last case scenario people can get the recent name and just get the money back so like i think it was more of a safety mechanism that was the initial design but again like that was auction was three like seven days auction so like it was very very difficult to uh basically like for every name even after those three months period every time people want to buy the new name people had to wait like uh yeah five days uh to like kind of bit and then reveal that kind of stuff so that was really difficult so in 2019 after two years we actually did this so-called parliament registrar where instead of like depositing the uh money to uh kind of get the name we decided to more similar to how dns naming system work like you know you pay fixed amount uh for something yeah so that's kind of 2019 and then like that was basically two years ago but it was even after he transitioned it was kind of gross wasn't really you know kind of was kind he wasn't really growing so this is a growth of the mastery registration period is that like it was going somewhere between like thousand names to 5000 names a month except the spike in november that's when we released the short names which was between three to six characters but uh so in 2020 there's a d5 summer and in 2021 we became nft summer and people realized actually ens is also an fe and also like it another thing is like it when people start seeing like an e e s name as a on the kind of open c and stuff people start realizing oh this is more not just normal like you know jpeg he has some utility so we finally started getting kind of momentum and this is where we are right now and uh yeah let me go to the next slide yes so from domain to web3 username uh so i just briefly mentioned it uh initially so ens started as a kind of some of the ut functionality to help the visual world computer and the architecture is heavily kind of inspired by the dns so like we have a kind of so-called domain name system it has a name but it has a hierarchy right so eta is the top level domain i have my token.es and you can also have this notion of subdomains so these are very similar to how dns internet domain works but one thing uh i later found out i think when we were all in the twitter space uh about talking about like ogns and then bradley my colleague was asking to nick like how did you come up with this called rebus record uh is that itself so normal name you map matoku.

edh to dx13 but there's a notion for reverse record if you go if you purchase the egh name and if you go fasting after registration is done it actually prompts you to say something reverse record where you can basically select your primary name which associated to your ecm address that's why we call it replace so in this example i have multiple names like i am talking about and then i can associate which name represents my same address by doing that now if you go to somewhere like a uni swap you can so if you connect the wallet to that app they they look use the reverse lookup to see which name represents this is same address and it shows to you and this is a convenient way especially if you have multiple addresses you don't want to miss mix up which which address you're you're trying to do swap tokens and stuff that's useful for yourself but it's kind and then yeah that's when nick said like yeah he just kind of added as an afterthought so because we he kind of the afterthought it's kind of actually quite hard he was one of the hardest things to set after you passed the cns and even now i think uh still like only like somewhere between 20 to 70 percent of people uh these names have a reverse record set so not everybody using it but for people who uses it it's very convenient that you can almost use it as a login system and it's not just uh instagram for example openc openc you can actually look up your name using your donkeys but like if you look at the artist's page in this case uh it's a people pleaser so people please have picked people pleaser uh as a user they bring openc but if you go to different like uh nfc platform it may not it might not be necessary you know available so for example my facebook user name and the twitter username not necessarily saying a git coin is only why i was able to secure my code because i was early but you can't have a kind of consistent user name whereas uh if the market some nfd marketplace uses uh it connects with this same address you you kind of share the same same address then it suddenly becomes a portable uh kind of platform agnostic username that's where people start discovering and they even become more useful when about three months ago open c integrated this reverse record feature so that now if you go to scan the c transaction you can start seeing that like from where to who uh it's sending the uh basically uh sending transactions and this is the uh scan is the address of a please add down uh which is formed around like you know purchasing uh initially purchasing people pleased as uh any swap uh art but now they've formed its own doubt and you can see that you know jamies and andy are doing something you know like it's almost see you showing your own change history that's now really really becoming ubiquitous and that one thing we didn't really expect people do is uh uh yeah like people started putting into uh not just for three systems but we started putting web too that's when i tweet that like uh nixon nick is the one the first person who said did this because that was his that his creation then i think that was about 2019 or 20 uh someone like vitalik started doing and then now like so many people if you like such.eph on twitter there's so many people doing it it's just becoming it doesn't really prove anything but like it's almost showing you're kind of hey i like i i like walk living breathing ethereum well people start becoming just a convenient method to each starting time as your ethereum identity that's that's the way it starts coming again this is not something we i i'm just guessing what nick was thinking i don't think nikki really did expect that this is going to happen and another thing what's happening is we have a structure so this is a small point of of the ens system you don't need to know everything but so ens is like huge uh phone book like where you there's a name and there's a phone number kind of stuff but rather than that this is called registry but the registry doesn't actually hold your same address but it also just has a pointer to something called resolver where you can kind of customize what to show and how it show and then primarily when we start the majority of the use case was for the is to show the same address but you can actually send something else such as uh ipfs content hash or like swamp uh which i showed the primary primary use case and also just a random you know text record and that's so like this is yeah brownlee's uh ens page and he basically puts everything his entire life is in basically on chain and that's how his use is using text record and then with this space construct i think about a couple months ago uh that was the zapp started showing the profile photo to their website but it's great but like i think i don't know exactly where they they store this uh you know nft association information so we just said like you know okay why don't we just you know the text record doesn't stop like you can actually put any key and body but we just said okay yeah let's come up with a format so like you can share uh if you store one cens you can basically should be able to be used in different doubts so are we just integrating a very basic version like so this is if you look at the text record page on the uens name and if you say avatar and you can put like you know it says eip155 column one is a net changing id so if it's mainnet it's one it's so if it's polygon one three seven i got stuff then you pick it's either c721 or 1155 then the contract is basically collection equipment control address is basically equivalent to collection and the 243 is it there 2430 is a token id by putting this kind of format we as a basically this ens manager page can actually go into chain and to see uh not only to see which image it represents but i can the program i can also program to see who owns it and if it's owned by the actually this ens name i can't even put that like say this nfd is actually owned by this you know es name or now so i can put something like owner label so this this is another things we started adding like we didn't even have it until three months ago but we started doing it and then i think we there's a couple uh team already started creating avatar like jazz library and he's going through like so many taps to integrate so this is i can see that this is coming to many dubs very very soon and so this is a kind of alpha league apparently did i think about two three weeks ago that uh yeah so we are almost transitioning into almost like so social network not not yet or like basically showing your online on-chain identity this is kind of new uh vision we start realizing not just that we had it back in 2016. it's very hard to predict what what's going to be you know four or five years afterward but we kind of like watched how users are using ens and this is a transition we're going for so far okay so i think yeah so two that was this is by the way this is a mock-up and then we still have a month away to actually implement there but not just the ui change we need we need still a lot more so this i mentioned you know this wasn't kind of the left side was the kind of vision in nick 2016 too this is a vision of like the new kind of direction we are going in five years later but one of the huddle which didn't really exist at that time but now this is a scaling issue and how do we need to tackle and how you can help you know solving this problem i'm going to spend next like probably two three minutes uh is that so this is a uh how much gas you have to spend to register ens name and uh until yeah d5 summer hit you use it it was literally one of the cheapest uh nft to buy that like registration only cost five dollars and it used to cost only uh less than a dollar on gas to register but now east price went 10x and the gas price went like 50 100 x so now you start seeing that uh when gas is cheaper it still costs like 20 30 dollars lots of yeast on gas and then when gas is very expensive it's going to go 100. i saw that like someone's a few weeks ago when uh root and all the circuit went nuts there's a 6000 gas way and i saw that someone spent about two two thousand dollars just on gas that's crazy so we kind of have to sort it out and the obs solution is going to uh basically l2 and we have a some unique uh proposal some framework called during which is kind of general purpose of chain data which repo mechanism and there's a diagram but i wouldn't explain this because you don't probably understand if you don't understand the architecture of ens but the visual representation is that what we're thinking is like uh so registering the edh name will remain on layer 1 very long time and we are no other state to choose which layer 2 is a is a winner so that we should move but what we want to do is we want you to pick the layer two you want to have your data associated and we have a way you know that i mentioned resolver so resolver is something that another smart contractor decides how to resolve your name and currently it's just directory returning data but what we want to do with this during model is uh point let resolvers point to some web services where it returns the data and then and most of l2 relies on security or on the l1 that means there's a ways to prove the data's on l2 to be el1 and to be able to verify because they they uncut all the data back i want so we have a way to we know there's a way to do it and so what we want to do is i if you have my token is you want to change change the resolver to point to specific l2 and then rejuvenated there but this is still i think highly advancing what we really want to see is adapts or once we want dabs to point their resolver to their choice of uh you know l2 so like if it's uni swap you need to obsess let's say hey we we issued a sub domain to all the users on optimism so that users don't have to buy the name uh especially the new user don't have to buy the register name on l1 but rather just use a sub domains under their favorite app and if like you know dydx want to issue some domain they they are already in software so let's issue the subdomain software and we have a ways to people update data on lt of their choice and they should know how to do it because they already use that but we have a unified way for for people who's not on l2 if we don't have locally app for for example food.you id right diy dx we have a way we came up with some ways to basically read the data uh through this during framework we saw you that you know switching metamaska to change the network all the time so this is kind of idea stage we have a proof concept but so that means how dumb uh adopt this new layer 2 system and integrate it becomes very really key and we have currently have 286 that's who already does like some level of integration but we really want them to start paying attention what's happening what we want to to go to l2 and the easiest way if you unless if you you know manage one of these steps or if you're building something for uh you know uh like it's online hackathon uh after i think we get the actually following day of the east global hackathon we are having enos workshop for inviting the builder and the developers to talk about all these technical aspects and i think we'd like to invite someone uh the people who are in hacking and who hacked with cns to kind of present in the end of what you achieved and all this stuff so if you're a builder or if you're hacking something right now please apply for its online workshop uh but i mean this talk is you know aiming for non-technical people so i am aware that not everybody's uh fits for this workshop but like one thing you could do is for example example is a punk's a level of page have a quick punch page and which has a now link to you know he is resolved who owns the punks and it shows the ens name and i had a i had from from the disco conversation that there is some community member in a crib punk's disco channel they kept pushing to the level of the guys to integrate and then after he pushed so much they finally added it and now it's getting the most traffic to our site so what you could do is like yeah uh just if you have a favorite app and if you're the dow member and if you are active please please propose uh to integrate with cns and also like you know if you you don't you're not an active member uh the past uh community to maybe join could be the ems disco channel as well like so we were very very bothered of community management like we were very very small team but now alicia dawg is joining team and she's doing fantastic job like you know managing all the discord members so maybe you should pop in to ens discord channel just say hi and just show off your you know twitter with your eth name so that's probably the easiest thing you can do to help ens to kind of get more integrated with uh you know different apps and then it becomes more useful as a user name it's it's really username is only become useful if everybody else use the same web represent their user name and that we hope that we dns becomes the one that's by yeah so yes workshop i you can check out more detail on the medium page please follow enos domains twitter and they'll join this code and just join our website thank you very much thank you so much makoto um we don't have a lot of time for too many questions but uh just uh two recurring themes that sort of showed up and i'll try to see if we can get them sorted quickly the first one is um for the layer two integration what does the timeline look like for people to be able to uh make their ams changes on on nail too could you talk a little bit more about that yeah uh it's still earlier to be honest so we already have a kind of working example in optimism so i was so nick did it with just like on its own and i just was working on porting that example using the durian framework so that's there but uh yeah still i think yeah for optimism they were also doing the network relaunch right so i think it's not ready to deploy immediately so it's not necessary to be honest and also it also it's not just a platform support but also we need to have a support on like something like esa.

js with the library and the meta mask all the tools so again like i think we want to make uh next workshop to be the place where people can discuss about what other adapts are ready to adopt even you know so yeah so too soon yeah so um another sort of uh one big theme here is that from the diagram you showed around how the layer one ens can let people spawn different user names on different layer twos does that mean people can have a different username across different answers on layer two or does that mean like the identity will simply preserve and the same username maps into uh yeah just seems to be like yeah so i mean kind of ens is non-fungible whether it's elc7211r so if you have one name on l2 for example if you have one demi arbitram points to different address and another name in polygon or like optimism pointed to different address you can't basically look it up what we want to do is like you uh i think what we that one we're still thinking but what we're kind of thinking is probably uh there are two ways if it's known eth name one thing we didn't discuss is like you can now use a uh you know like dot com mode or xyz using so-called dns security that one uh basically you can prove so i i think uh so it becomes so the resolver on l1 dictates which name it points to so whichever like if this resolver says this name i'm using optimism whatever the names resolved any optim is becomes a canonical one so you may have something else and then if you do that and if you then say oh actually i'll do an arbitrage you could have it may have the same name on the same different chains but it's a l1 which decides which ones points to so it's always one yeah great well hopefully that clarified the questions from the audience and makoto thanks again for doing this talk and uh being part of the summit thank you [Music] [Applause]