Ethereum Name Service Founder Details Project's Growth and Future Goals
Summary:
Nick Johnson, the founder of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), elaborates on the development of the project which permits users to generate simple, human-readable Web3 addresses that serve as a domain for decentralized websites and a Web3 wallet for cryptocurrencies and NFTs. He underscores his objective of gauging how many users are using crypto addresses instead of DNS names. In the upcoming years, ENS plans to support Ethereum layer-2 infrastructure and ensure the service is more approachable for users.
Nick Johnson was uncertain about the investment required to establish Ethereum Name Service (ENS), but when he proposed estimates to the Ethereum Foundation for a grant, he was surprised to receive twice the amount from Vitalik Buterin. Johnson, the founder of ENS, recently participated in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph at ETHGlobal in London, discussing the evolution of the project that enables users to formulate understandable Web3 addresses functioning as a Web3 wallet for digital currencies and NFTs and also as a domain for decentralized websites.
Before joining Ethereum, the New-Zealand born software engineer spent his early career at Google, and then delved into Bitcoin and Ethereum. Drawn more towards Ethereum for its programmability, Johnson embarked on exploring Ethereum codes personally. His solid background in infrastructure, tools, and libraries aided him to script his unique Ethereum strings library.
According to Jeffrey Jenkinson, a front-end software engineer, manipulating string can be considered among the most intricate jobs in software. "Any human-readable element can be regarded as a string, and when developers draft codes that require translation into machine language, it initiates with string manipulation," explained Jenkinson.
Johnson was later recruitment by the Ethereum Foundation where he was given the responsibility to inaugurate the name service as one of his initial tasks. He recognized a gap in the infrastructure while serving for the EthSwarm team, focusing on their native decentralized storage and distribution technology. Recognizing that, just like their content, everything else like accounts required naming as well, he took up the responsibility as his project.
In order to work on this project on a full-time basis, he was encouraged by the Ethereum Foundation to form an independent organization, financed through their grant. Johnson drew up preliminary figures for a roadmap spanning two years with a small team of dedicated members. However, his plans changed when he encountered intervention by Ethereum's co-founder, Vitalik Buterin.
Since then, more than 2 million ENS addresses have been registered till date. While the number of registered names is an important statistic for Johnson, there are other harder-to-measure metrics he gives more importance to. Johnson would rather focus on how many users are entering crypto addresses in their wallets as opposed to DNS names.
ENS is targeting growth in networks with potential benefits from Web3 utility along with a gradual increase in the number of registered names. Johnson said, "If there's a new distributed content network that's gaining popularity among users, then ENS must cater to it. We must be there to aid people to achieve that rise in usability."
The future plans of ENS involve implementing Ethereum layer-2 infrastructure in the next couple of years while making the service more user-friendly to "plug-and-play". A point of discussion in this regard was whether the measurement of blockchain transactions per second (TPS) would seem insignificant in 2024.
Published At
3/19/2024 1:43:55 PM
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