State of the ENS 2019 by Nick Johnson (Devcon5)

my name is Nick Johnson I'm the lead developer for the etherium name service and I'm here today to give you thank you very much here today to give you an update on what we've done in the last year and what we're up to now so first for the few of you in the hall who may not already be intimately familiar with the etherium name service what is it the ENS is a naming system that is solds what we call Zuko's triangle it's a trilemma that says no naming servers can be human meaningful decentralized and secure all at once and for a long time people believed that was probably true the advent of consensus systems with block chains has made that untrue and following a named Queen's footsteps we've been able to launch ENS which is satisfies all three of those properties and so Ian is the etherium name service it's a naming service built on etherium but that doesn't mean it's just for etherium it's not for naming just aetherium resources you can use it to name ipfs content swarm content you can use it to insert text records you can use it to point onion sites as I'll show you later so we really want it to be the new naming service for the internet that satisfies all three of those important properties so today I'm going to talk about what we've done in the last year and how things have been going I'm going to talk about our migration process to the permanent registrar I'm going to talk about the short name option process which is underway currently then about DNS namespace integration which is how we're making it possible for you to use your DNS names inside ENS our IP Affairs and onion integrations and then a brief preview of the things we're working on now and what we're looking forward to launching in the next year so first of all the last year at a glance this is the number of names registered on the NS how it's evolved over the time since we've launched the top line there and the blue is the total number of names in the system the second line there in the red is the number of names with resolvers set and the third line is the number of names that resolve two addresses so as you can see we've had steady growth in the nearly three years since we've launched and let's drill down on that a little bit October 2018 so this time last year we had two hundred twenty-four thousand names registered and this year that's up to three hundred and ten thousand but I think the other two figures are the more interesting ones first of all we've got the number of names with resolvers and so this is the first step and setting up your name you first by the name and then you set a resolve a contract for it and if you're buying the name just to speculate on it to sell it to somebody later for more there's no reason you'd set this up so this is a reasonably good metric for actual adoption and use for ENS in the wild and so it's gone up from twenty-eight thousand at this time last year to sixty thousand now and it's not just an increase in absolute numbers it's an increase in percentage from twelve and a half percent all the way up to that twenty percent so we're really pleased with that and we want to keep monitoring this and we hope it'll continue to grow likewise names sorry addresses aren't the only thing you can translate ENS names to but they're probably the most popular application at the moment so we can monitor similarly the number of names of the dresses and that's up from eight and a half percent a year ago to twelve percent today so we're really encouraged to see that this growth in ENS isn't just more people speculating on names more people died hoping to make a profit off reselling them but it's more people actually using them for their intended purpose so next up I'm going to talk about a migration process so a in May on May the 4th we launched the new permanent registrar that replaced the option registrar which required a lengthy auction process in order to register names with the new instant registration so jus when we launched that there's a one-year migration period during that period anyone who owned a name on the old registrar can migrate it to the new one and when they do that they get their registration extended until May the third 2020 and they get a full refund of the deposit they put down to originally register the name you also have the option to just release the name you can do that and you get deposit back but then the name becomes available for registration by others so there's a one-year migration period the new registrar supports instant registration with just two transactions and in order to keep your name you have to pay five dollars a year per the name rent and there's no limit on the renewal periods so for instance some of these registered Walmart ah teeth and protocol leaf and they've paid the registration all the way out to 2040 which means the bet name is absolutely solidly locked into the system at least until then so we've had 10,000 new registrations since launch and the migration process is interesting look at - so on migration day E&S had three hundred and nine thousand names registered in it and there was a hundred and seventy-six thousand ether locked in the deed contracts so when you bid on the name on the interim rich Australia to put a deposit down and you get that deposit back when you release the name or you migrate it to the new register so how are we doing today today we're down to two hundred and forty-one thousand that haven't been migrated or released we had four thousand about one percent were released and fifty-nine thousand thousand nineteen bussines have been migrated in terms of the ether it's actually even less the thirteen percent have been of the ether deposits have been returned and eighty six percent are remaining and you can sort of see the progress here with the exception of a blip around the middle of the year it's been reasonably steady but it's actually tapering off a little bit so if you have ENS names that you registered before may the fourth twenty nineteen there is free money sitting there waiting for you to claim it back release your name or my gracious which is the better option to the new registrar you'll get your registration extended and you'll get all of your deposit back and we can stop sitting on all of the sefer that's doing nothing so next up the shortname options we have been moving on with making shorter names three to six characters available via open sea and some of you probably most of you will be aware that we had a slight pickup a week or two ago where somebody managed to obtain a number of high-value names without paying full price for them so I'm going to go into a bit of detail on just how that happened and what you're seeing here on the screen is an example of an open sea order message so open sea works by people placing bids by signing a message offline and sending it to the open sea API and that message contains a number of important fields such as which exchange contract to use who the maker is the person making the bid who the taker is that's our contract how much they're willing to pay and so forth it also contains the target address the address that should be called if the bids accepted and the call data for it and we believed that open seas API was validating all of this data we also had a series of additional checks of our own against many of these fields unfortunately we were mistaken and they were mistaken and neither of us was verifying the target data which is embarrassing the result was that somebody was able to place birds that were ostensibly against one low value name that ended quite soon but in actual fact would finalize another name so by bidding on fubar death they were able to finalize defy Dottie's before that option should have ended so that resulted in them obtaining 17 names and for very small birds in each case so what we did we obviously we stopped the contract we made an offer to them we said if you want to return those names to us we will re option them the way they were supposed to be optioned and we'll provide you with a bug bounty of 25% the final sale price and I'm pleased to say that they accepted the offer they returned the 17 names to us and those are now back on auction so if you are here thank you very much if you want a security consulting job please talk to us there was a second smaller issue with the options that we've also resolved while we're paused and it was that some that is were given the wrong information in terms of what fields to fill out in the bids so if you were using the user interface by your web browser this was absolutely fine but if you were using the SDK integration if you are sending bids yourself automated with an automated solution you may have been submitting bids with the wrong target field we identified the roughly 30 or so options that are affected by this where the top bid was a bid that didn't have the right target field and those options have been extended a little further to give those users an opportunity to play spell of bids replace them and if you were affected by this you will have received an email because a full description of how to do that and so the short name options in general we auction off all three six character length domains in partnership with open C we sort of looked at all the effort we put in for the original option contract and we went well we're not an option business where we're trying to do naming we're trying to build a naming system we don't want to put hundreds of our hours into building a system that somebody else has already built and or they already know how to operate it so we partnered with them in order to do the name allocation so most five to six character names all of these names are on option now the five to six character ones are ending between the 15th or 22nd of October for characters a week later 22nd to 29th and three carrots character names the shortest ones ending between the 29th from the 5th of November if your interest is in getting a name that represents you some of these are quite contentious but many of them are going for the minimum of 5 packs a year you know the auction process exists in order to make sure names are fairly allocated but that doesn't mean that necessarily your first name or your last name is going to be popular amongst a lot of other people so if you want to get it go there have a look and maybe snag yourself a name that represents you so next up I want to talk about the DNS namespace integration so ENS is more than just da teef da teeth is the namespace that is native to aetherium that we sort of completely control we can enforce strong contractual guarantees on it but it's not all there is we believe that ENS exists as part of the global namespace the same namespace that's inhabited by common expose even TV and so forth and so we're doing abs to integrate with that and there's two ways we're doing that one is a permissionless integration via DNA stick and the second is bespoke integrations with top-level domains that are working with us so first of all how does the dns tech integration work it permits anyone who has a dns domain like my site com to register the same domain on ENS so that means that if you have my site calm in DNS it's your website you can also have my site calm in nearness and people can pay you by typing in my site comm they can load up your smart contract by typing in my site comm into any wall for any application that supports ENS so to set this up this is deployed right now on dot XYZ and that's our sort of test domain we're going to roll it out to weigh more top-level domains like most of the 2300 top-level domains early next year but right now if you have a dot explosive domain you can go to ApS top domains which is our new URL for the manager you can enter your domain name and it will provide you with a series of instructions setting it up the second sort of integration we're pursuing is the the individual bespoke ones so these are top level domain providers who have decided to work with us directly to make it easier for their users to integrate with the NS and the first of these was dot Lux they launched a bit over a year ago they have first pass support for ENS which means that if you register a name with them using one of their supported registrar's you can go into the control panel into your ENS seria theory murderous hit go and it's just done it's you know several steps shorter than the DNA stick integration it's as simple as it possibly could be so if you're interested to get one of those and you can instantly start using it anywhere that a DNS name is accepted the second integration slightly different we're working with doc creates the the TLD to support DNS record integration the idea is that we can host the DNS zone for doc Reed on the blockchain and effectively this turns every aetherium node in the world into a secondary name server for creator it means that if you have a doc read domain it can't be taken out by all that the DNS service can't be taken out by denial of service it can't be taken out by a service failure because anyone in the world can replicate those records and serve them up and verify them for themselves finally we're also working with dart you might be familiar of the art digital twin this is their project to have physical artworks that have a corresponding existence on the blockchain the form of the non-tangible token we recently enabled their namespace on Enes so they'll now be able to offer domains by a aeneas next up we've been working with the IP affairs team we've got a generous grant from them and we've been working with them and Jim McDonald to build integration closer integration between IP Fes any the way this works is you can point any ENS site on da teeth or anywhere else at an IPF es content and if you use it right now in Musa mask it will just resolve but you don't have to be running meta mask for this to work we the EMS team operate a DNS and a nearness and IP at this gateway on East dot link so if you did dot link to any eath domain and that domain has IP at this content it will load in any browser anywhere in the world no special integration supported so as an example go to El mono teeth link and it will load you a directory of decentralized websites that you can access anywhere you can operate your own gateway you don't have to trust us to correctly serve up the right DNS records and ipfs conch content you can run this yourself and finally something that we got working just in the lead up to this we have a DNS over HTTP gateway if your browser supports that you can point it at our servers and your browser with no plugins with no special support we'll start resolving dthe domains in the browser as if they were top-level domains in the global root and we're also been doing some integration with the Tor network so we had a hackathon project and if New York a project called East or gate and building on that ENS can now point at onion hidden services which means that you can take in yes yes the main point of any onion hidden service for instant example Facebook tor death was set up by Asti in its team and when you go there will load the Facebook hidden service if you load it in a browser that has both tor any any support such as the tor browser with meta mask and if you look at the records for Facebook tor teeth on our manager or on anther scan you'll see that they're actually owned by nobody and what this means is that once it's been set up it is permanently that way you don't have to trust that whoever set it up is not going to redirect it to a phishing version of Facebook tomorrow because that resolution is now locked in and set in stone so last up finally what are we working on next so the first and biggest thing that we're working on right now is multi chain support an DNS that's eep to 304 if you want to read the standards document but what it means is it's a way for encoding addresses for multiple chains for Bitcoin based chains for theory based chains real space chains for whatever you want in an e NS record and that means that NS can become the naming service not just for a theory and not just for internet resources but for every single blockchain out there so in supported wallets if you have a Bitcoin wallet you'll be able to use my name da teeth or my name comm or my name dot XYZ to load your Bitcoin address or your ear surgery so your like coin or dogecoin or whatever suits you and we really like to thank Bonanza X for giving us a grant that helped us get this past the line so we wrote the CIP about two weeks ago we started sort of talking to wallets and so on and I'm delighted to say that we already have so much support decent were the first to launch support so thank you very much and and I want to I want to specifically call out Brantly our outreach person because some of these have arrived just now like literally minutes before the talk we now have coinbase wallet trust wallet I am token Haven my crypto Portus and Opera have all committed to add support for this and their wallets which i think is amazing and if you're building tooling and you want to do this yourself the e NS libraries on JavaScript will support it but ethos Jas is adding support almost immediately so if you don't use it already I suggest taking a look at it if you do then you will just be able to use this straight away what else are we doing so as I mentioned we're rolling out DNS support to most TLDs that's effectively every internet top-level domain that has DNS SEC enabled which is about 80 to 90% of them we're working on more manager improvements of course that's our ongoing work we want to make it for instance easier to do multiple operations updates to resolvers and a simple single transaction we're working on improving the manager interface short name registration again fewer transactions and of course once the auctions are over you'll be able to register three to six character names just as you can see them plus character names today adoption adoption adoption it's unsexy in a way but our main job now is make ensure that ENS is as ubiquitous and Universal as it possibly can be and that means making sure livery wallet supports that every toolchain supports that it should be the default you should be able to write a DAP and not even know about ENS but just have it work because your underlying tool chain already has support for resolving ENS addresses so want to hear more we have a little more detail if you'd like to see more about how we're reaching out past just a name resolution on aetherium then come see grant these talk tomorrow it's 935 in the convention room and we're talking about how ENS is taking aetherium to the rest of the Internet and that's all I have today for you thank you very much [Applause] [Music] you