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The development funds for ENS come from funding and income from the registration and renewal of the .ETH domain name.
Ethereum Domain Name Service (ENS) is a public facility belonging to the community. Therefore, we hope to provide more transparency in the source and flow of funds. We plan to perform regular financial updates, and this is the first time.
Organization
To understand the financial status of ENS, we must first understand the composition of the ENS team.
ENS is an open source project, so to be precise, no one "work for ENS." The team listed on the Organization page of the ENS homepage works for True Names LTD, a non-profit organization in Singapore dedicated to the development of ENS. Although True Names LTD was established in Singapore, the True Names LTD team members are located in New Zealand, Taiwan, Europe and the United States.
The ENS root domain is managed by a 4/7 multi-signature contract (Multisig), and its key holders have also been listed on the Organization page. Only one of the multi-signature key holders is engaged in ENS development: Nick Johnson, who is the creator and main developer of ENS. The remaining holders are members of other projects in the Ethereum community. This mechanism where most root key holders come from outside the project can be better responsible for the project.
Managing the ETH obtained from the registration and renewal of the .ETH domain is one of the tasks of the ENS root domain key holder. If the ENS development team of True Names LTD wants to use these ETH, it must first submit a request or suggestion to the holder of the ENS root domain key, and they will decide whether to allocate the ETH to the development team. So far, True Names LTD has neither requested ETH from the holder of the ENS root domain key nor received it.
summary
ENS is an open source project. The actual management and development of ENS is a non-profit organization called True Names LTD. The income generated during the registration and renewal of the .ETH domain name is received by a 4/7 multi-signature contract that manages the ENS root domain and is received by the contract The key holders will decide how to use it.
Sources of funds
There are two sources of funding for the development of ENS: (1) funding and (2) income from .ETH domain name registration and renewal.
Grant
True Names LTD has received funding from the Ethereum Foundation (the main source of funding), Chainlink, Protocol Labs and other organizations listed on our website.
.ETH domain name income
In May 2019, ENS changed from the deposit model (here withdrawing the deposit at the time) to the annual fee model. As mentioned above, all income from the registration and renewal of the .ETH domain name goes to the ENS root domain management contract instead of True Names LTD. True Names LTD plans to apply to ENS root domain key holders for regular expenditure of these funds as long-term funds for ENS development, but currently True Names LTD has never required ENS root domain key holders to provide ETH. (In the traditional Internet community, this kind of long-term funding has a precedent: IETF and other organizations use the cost of registering and renewing the .ORG domain name on the DNS as the source of funding.)
At the end of 2019, ENS opened the registration of 3-6 character .ETH domain names (previously, only .ETH domain names with more than 7 characters could be registered). For the first open registration of such domain names, we organized an auction in cooperation with OpenSea. The ETH raised in this auction (5699 ETH, valued at about $1100,000 at the time) was handed over to True Names LTD. Last year, True Names LTD sold some Ethereum to support development work.
The short domain name auction and the first and a half year fee model of .ETH domain name registration and renewal occurred, and the price of ETH was significantly lower than the current one (in the range of $100-$300). True Names LTD and ENS root domain key holders keep most of the funds as ETH, and ETH has recently appreciated sharply, thus greatly increasing the value of ENS development reserve funds.
summary
So far, the ENS development team of True Names LTD has received funding and sold some ETH raised from the .ETH short domain name auction since the end of 2019. The long-term funding source for ENS development is to apply to ENS root domain key holders to regularly withdraw the income from the registration and renewal of the .ETH domain name.
Income and expenses in 2020
2020 income
Received various grants of USD 310,000
Sell ETH to get 700,000 USD
2020 expenditure
- US$760,000: Mainly salary, but also financial expenses, accounting, legal advice, hackathon bonuses, bounties, travel expenses (before the COVID-19 ban), and hosting fees for websites and other services.
True Names LTD has 3 full-time developers, 1 full-time operations director, 2 part-time developers and 1 part-time graphic designer.
Year-end balance
- 362,000 USD: True Names LTD's bank account balance at the end of 2020.
Current fund holdings
The following are the balances of various Ethereum wallets controlled by True Names LTD and the ENS root zone contract at the time of writing, as well as True Names LTD bank accounts.
The ETH valuation in US dollars provided in parentheses is based on the market price of $1700/ETH at the time of writing (the price fluctuates).
True Names LTD
True Names LTD hot wallet, hotwallet.ens.eth: 169 ETH (~$287,300)
True Names LTD cold wallet, coldwallet.ens.eth: 1730 ETH (~$2,941,000)
True Names LTD bank account balance: 1200,000 USD
Most of the balance of the current bank account comes from the transaction of selling ETH at the end of January. At that time, 720 ETH was sold at a price of approximately $1350/ETH, and approximately $1 million was obtained. Nick Johnson made the deal public on Twitter.
ENS root zone multi-sign contract
- ETH controller, controller.ens.eth: 5,626 ETH (~9,564,200 USD)
Initially, this is the ETH paid by users for the registration and renewal of the .ETH domain name (here refers to the ENS fee, not the Ethereum Gas fee received by the miners). These are controlled by the multi-signature contract of the ENS root domain.
- ENS root zone multi-signature contract (Multisig), multisig.ens.eth: 2,272 ETH (~ 3,862,400 USD)
This is the multi-signature contract itself for the ENS root domain. The ETH it currently holds was obtained from the registration and renewal of the .ETH domain name before the error repair and migration in early 2020.
summary
Funds held by True Names LTD (ETH + USD): ~$ 4,428,300
Funds held by ENS root zone multi-signature contracts: ~$ 13,426,600
The sum of funds held by True Names LTD + ENS root domain multi-signature contracts: ~$ 17,854,900
Plans for the future
We are building ENS for a long time. We hope that ENS will remain a new core part of the Internet infrastructure in the next few decades.
Given that there are more and more resources to support ENS, we want to do two things:
Expand True Names LTD's ENS core development team
The ENS team has completed a lot of work, but there is still a lot of work to be done: DNS domain name space integration, Layer 2 work, other expansion work, ETH2 preparation, ENS manager user interface improvements, registration and management improvements, new Record types, documentation, support, integration, extensions to users and older Internet communities, etc.
If we can find suitable candidates, our core full-time team may increase from 4 to 8. The types of roles we want to fill are roughly in this order (a person may have more than one thing to do):
Can build senior developers who can solve complex problems and build new technologies
Front-end developers who can make the most user-friendly UI in the industry
Full-stack developers who can fill the gaps in fast-growing projects
Business developers who can fully integrate ENS into various projects
Support staff who can provide people with all kinds of help about ENS with sufficient knowledge and patience
Community managers who can help us better communicate with excellent users
We may post more information about this in the future, but if you are interested in the content listed above, please send us an email to [email protected] .
Funding
We are very grateful for the funding we received, especially at the critical moment in the development of ENS. Our situation is better now than in the past. We are willing to support the ENS ecosystem and other aspects through funding, and may seek support from the ENS community.
We are still considering how we can better achieve this goal, so please stay tuned.