The proliferation of the internet brought the world to the fingertips of users, and with it came a rush to register domains on the nascent network. Businesses like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) were born on the internet, while many others took their real-life business online by registering a website.
Domain names remain an integral part of the internet, acting as the flagpole of the biggest brands, companies, institutions and individuals. But, the advent of blockchain technology and Web3 has ushered in a new paradigm for domain name hosting.
The ETHereum Name Service (ENS) seems to be following in the footsteps of conventional domain names, surpassing 1.8 million registrations at the end of July 2022. In that month alone, 378,000 .eth domains were registered, generating a monthly record of 5,400 Ether (ETH) in revenue.
ENS describes itself as a “distributed, open, and extensible naming system”that runs on the ETHereum blockchain. Its purpose is to map human-readable names like “alice.eth”to machine-readable information like cryptocurrency addresses and URLs.
ENS is similar to the original Domain Name Service (DNS) in that it uses dot-separated hierarchical names, commonly known as domains, with the owner of a domain controlling both it and any subdomains. An ENS domain is effectively a nonfungible token (NFT) that serves as an ETH wallet address, a cryptographic hash or a website URL.
The ENS community has also played its part in the growth of registrations over the past six months.The platform was reaching a critical mass in awareness and adoption — driven by community groups like the 10kClub, which is made up of users that registered four-digit ENS domains from 0-9999.ETH. The group’s Discord channel has almost 7,000 members as of Aug. 5.
