2020 is an important year for the Ethereum Name Service (ENS)! We fixed a bug in a core smart contract, expanded the functionality of the ENS domain name, and the usage rate has increased significantly. Summarized as follows:
Bug fix
ENS kicked off 2020 with an important event: We publicly announced that Sam Sun had discovered an error in the ENS registry smart contract. All domain names are safe, and as far as we know, this vulnerability has never been exploited. Nevertheless, our team spent three months of intense work to solve all the problems. We released a complete repair report in March. Fortunately, we took this opportunity to add new features to ENS, simplifying the process of registering and setting up a .ETH domain name.
Integration
The role of the domain name system is closely related to the number of applications that use it. At the beginning of 2020, we had about 86 integrations, and in June 2019 there were less than 30 integrations. As of July 2020, we have achieved 150 integrations, and as of this writing, we have 172 integrations. Thanks to all the communities for their support!
You can see the complete integration list in the "ENS Ecosystem" section of our website. These integrations include wallets such as Coinbase, Trust Wallet, and My Crypto; dapps such as Uniswap, Tornado Cash, and The Graph; and browsers such as Brave, Opera, and MetaMask extensions.
You can click "See More +" on our website to browse the complete list.
ENS seminar
We held the annual ENS seminar in September. Before, we held exhibitions in London (twice) and Osaka, but this year it is a virtual exhibition. Our turnout rate is very high. A total of about 40 participants represent the top projects in the blockchain industry, even those in the DNS community. Vitalik made a proposal to extend ENS, which later evolved into our current Tier 2 plan. You can watch the video of the discussion and read a summary of what happened here.
The development of decentralized networks
The first search engine/directory to include ENS + IPFS websites, called Almonit, was launched in January 2020. You can access it through almonit.eth (or almonit.eth.link), and browse the directory of its decentralized website on its "Discover" page.
Browser support is going well! Now, you can access the ENS + IPFS website on the mobile version of Brave, Opera, Status, MetaMask, and any browser that supports MetaMask extensions. IPFS services now also support ENS.
Fleek has launched an excellent service that enables users to merge new codes and automatically deploy them to IPFS and update their ENS domain name records. We will provide more information on this soon!
In April, the ethereum.org team website also released the ENS + IPFS version on ethereum.eth (or ethereum.eth.link).
Mass renewal
In May 2019, the .ETH domain name was converted from an auction, lock, and fund return model to an instant registration and annual fee expenditure model. All .ETH domains that existed before this time will be free for the first year of use, which means they will expire in May 2020. In addition, there is a built-in 90-day grace period in the system. The original owner can still renew during the grace period. After that, the domain name is finally released for registration by others, which means that the unupdated domain name will be released in August 2020 .
To help people make this transition, we have made the renewal of .ETH domain names (including batch renewal) easier, and can optionally add email and calendar reminders. We have created a widget that can be embedded in a dapp, which can remind users to update their ENS domain name, and can even send renewal reminder emails to users with dapps such as OpenSea and imToken.
About 280,000 .ETH domain names were released in August 2020. In order to prevent frantic buying and "Gas fee auctions" (the person who paid the highest gas fee wins the registration, and the gas fee was already high at that time), we have added a mechanism for reducing premiums for newly released domain names.
L2 plan
Vitalik proposed a way to make a part of ENS compatible with L2 and introduced it at our annual seminar. We held some community meetings to discuss. Then, our lead developer Nick Johnson proposed a plan based on these discussions and hoped to implement it by the end of 2021.
Other new features
- Now, both the ENS homepage and the ENS manager support 10 languages.
- We now have a dedicated tool that can be used to recover deposits for .ETH domain names registered in the system before May 2019.
- The ENS manager now supports custom text records, which means that users or projects can use ENS to store arbitrary data.
- We have greatly expanded the number of blockchains supported in the address coding library to more than 110. We now believe that the support for multiple currencies is deep enough to include almost all blockchain assets that most users want to receive using their ENS domain name.
- We have expanded the way users connect their wallets to the ENS manager, not just injection providers like MetaMask, but now also includes WalletConnect, Portis, Torus, Authenticreum and MEW wallets.
- We released 2 versions of the JS library ensjs. There are already 12 top-level libraries that support ENS, but not all libraries can support all ENS functions. Our library supports most operations.
- The user now uses the ENS manager to set multiple records through a transaction.
Other things worth noting
- We have completely updated the ENS homepage.
- We have enabled email subscriptions. You can receive regular updates of ENS through subscription.
- We held an ENS-themed NFT art competition with MakersPlace.
- We attended the VR-based conference ETHVR0.
- Rocket LP DAO issued the world's first ENS domain endorsed loan.
- DNS TLD .KRED has launched the deep integration of DNS-ENS.
- We support the launch of ETH2 by pointing depositcontract.eth to the ETH2 deposit contract and Web UI.
- We updated the Blue Membership eligibility for DNS-OARC and attended their last live seminar OARC 32 in February before the COVID-19 closure.
- We explained why ENS uses Ethereum and ETH instead of custom blockchains and tokens.
- We switched the price oracle machine used by ENS to Chainlink's ETH-USD oracle machine, and Chainlink started using data.eth as the decentralized address table of its price oracle machine.
January 2021
Since we will release the 2020 retrospective at the end of January 2021, I will also mention some updates this month.
- We cooperated with Cloudflare to use it for back-end management of eth.link's ENS + IPFS gateway service. This service not only provides better uptime and scalability, but also all sites accessed through the service will now have HTTPS.
- We have updated our Twitter bot. For those users whose Twitter username contains the .ETH domain name, the bot can @ them when their domain name is in urgent need of renewal.
- Now, our extended DNS namespace integration is on the Ropsten testnet. We are very grateful to the Ethereum Classic Lab for sponsoring the research work of this feature. We hope to deploy to the mainnet as soon as possible, so stay tuned.
Beyond
For us in 2021, an important project will be the implementation of the L2 plan, which will enable users to put resolution records and subdomains on the L2 of their choice, thereby greatly reducing the gas cost of these operations and management. We also plan to improve the functions of the subdomain service and ENS manager, and of course support the continuous increase in the number of integrations.
You can read and discuss our 2021 roadmap on our forum. ENS has always been an open source and community-driven project. We are very grateful for all your help, suggestions and contributions!