# State of the ENS by Jeff Lau | Devcon SEA

- Speakers: [Jeff Lau](https://streameth.org/speakers/jeff-lau)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 26:14
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Lycp5FW-4x4
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lycp5FW-4x4

## Description

Jeff Lau, co-founder of ENS, gives an update on the state of ENS, and our progress with migrating over to layer 2. ENS's approach to layer 2 aims to preserve users' ability to choose where their names are stored and administered, while massively reducing transaction costs and increasing scalability for the vast majority of users. Embracing its status as a public good, we want to make ENS the most useful to the largest number of people possible.

Speaker(s): Jeff Lau
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Protocol Design, Identity, Public good, usability

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] [Applause] good morning everyone how's everyone today good my name is Jeff LA and I'm a co-founder of En traditionally this talk is done by Nick Johnson but sadly he had not make it here today out to Thailand so instead I'll be talking to you instead the last time I did an ens state of ens talk was in 2018 at Prague who here hands up who here was at Devcon 4 Prague wow wow that's actually more than I thought at that time 5 years ago we were exploring the permanent registar and migrating from the vicory auction to the commit reveal registration of today since last time so much has changed and I'll be talking about some of those things today so who here has heard of ens right that's pretty much everyone that's good that's good um vitalic said this in 2024 en is our most successful non-financial application on ethereum and and I'll go into a little bit of what ens is for the very few people out there who don't know what it is so ens is a user experience protocol and that means we put users first and that has multiple meanings we Endeavor to create the best user experience to make the blockchain easier to navigate we want our users to be a control of their identity creating true trustless ownership and the protocol is built to be credibly neutral and permissionless so anyone anywhere can use ens 's humble beginning started with trying to solve one of the innate weaknesses of blockchain everything is a long number in hexadecimal and it's completely unreadable so really how are we supposed to scale to billions of users if the first thing they do they see when they create a wallet is see this ens helps you turn that into something humans understand a name the Simplicity of a name is familiar to all of us as soon as we are born we are given a name and it forms part of our identity whether that large number sometimes called a hash represents your identity on ethereum a decentralized website or something else a name is an order of magnitude more meaningful to people and ens serves humans not machines ens has several core principles that make our protocol user Centric it's decentralized meaning no single person or entity controls the levers and buttons that govern the protocol it's permissionless so anyone can register a name name and create an identity without having to State who you are or where you're from and lastly the protocol itself is built to be credibly neutral this means we're doing our best to not have codified privilege actors in the system okay definitions out the way let's talk about the year so far and we've had a really great one if you put all of the ens registration durations end to end you'd have to start 9 million years ago in the late Meine Epoch Earth was a wild range real realm of change saber-tooth tigers stalk sprawling grasslands while Earth early elephants thundercross open savanas and despite an abundance of large sharp teeth nobody was trying to sell D Coin to anyone so more seriously though it illustrates we're Brewing pretty damn well here's the basic stats nearly 2 million e names 900,000 users of which nearly 200,000 have set up decentralized profiles for themselves which you can view in ethereum F protool but ens was not only about eth a trer picture of 's popularity has to take into account the enormous number of names using one of our many many partner Integrations and many of these are completely trustless and cost free linear Bas and uni all have released subdomain registrars this year linear has completely trustless on linear L2 using State proof on L1 for ccip CCI read verification Bas has them also stored in L2 but uses signature verification and uni. E has them completely offchain and verified using a signature this really shows the progressive decentralization of subdomains that can start simple and gradually be made trustless using l2s and a state state proof with ccip read and lastly the, Guerilla coinbase as of today coinbase reports they've issued over 12 million cb. ID names their users this marks the largest deployment of es names to end users since we launched and really demonstrating the value of rolling out ens infrastructure to absolutely everyone and that has really been the theme of the past year or more bringing ens to more people more affordably and with less knowhow required ccip read and offchain names have been the foundation of that and have to have led to a number of hugely successful Integrations almost 16 million active names more than 14 million more than do e names that exist around 10 million users and over 400,000 decentralized profiles do eth only paints a small picture of the success of ens but if you include all of our many partner Integrations you'll really see how wide ranging ens truly is but ens is not only about subdomains our success is widely how widely integrated we are allowing names to be used out in the wild Integrations are one of the most important success metrics for ens imagine owning a Visa credit card but no one accepts Visa this is the problem we need to tackle by bringing large Integrations that all allow the use of ens with the within their existing users allowing ens name resolution to exist outside of our Echo chamber and this year has been a fantastic year for Integrations and I'd like to tell you about a few of them today but first while not an integration specifically I'd like to quickly highlight gasless DNS SEC one of our biggest technological advances in ens to date we've supported DNS top level domains inside ens almost since day one but importing one came with a substantial fee gasless DNS set combines our trustless DNS import functionality with the Gateway architecture of ccip read and makes it possible to make nearly any DNS name function inside ens without transactions or gas fees whatsoever and one of the first to use the the power of gases DNS SEC was GoDaddy GoDaddy added built-in support for every name registered through them removing the usability barrier of understanding how to set up DNS SEC and you can set up your DNS name to work in ens using GoDaddy in just a few clicks GoDaddy has over 80 million user names registered with them 20 million customers and just as one integration on it own vastly improves the network effect of ens in collaboration with 3dn dobox is the first truly blockchain native fully ens enabled dnst TLD dotbox registrations are all recorded on ethereum and do every dotbox name is automatically ens enabled it's not just the main related nanies that are integrating us though bitwise a traditional Finance Company who released their ethereum ETF product this year has created ens subnames for each of the addresses that hold the eth back in the ETF this is a great use case and that hopefully makes tracking custody of Unchained assets more transparent and auditable payment providers have started to adopt ens2 most notably PayPal and [Applause] VMO they rolled out their en support for their crypto wallets to all us users users earlier this year VMO has 90 million us users and PayPal has over 400 million accounts globally and this really shows how ens is really super wide ranging and going to millions and millions of users and lastly can you really say your successful protocol until Google integrates you today you can search your e name on Google and it will automatically show you your balance and your resoled address Google is the gateway to the internet and Ian has become important enough to be integrated into the most used search [Applause] engine so what do these large Integrations bring to ens well subdomains means more users more people using ens for the first time and broadening The Social Network ens creates large Integrations like PayPal VMO and Google means there are more places for ens to be used making ens fundamentally more useful in the same thing we've also been pushing forward L2 ux with some eips in the pipelines the first of which is ERC 7785 that will enshrine ens to be the name Nam space to allow discovery of new l2s in the future we hope to push further eips that help the fractionalization of L2 addresses and address this problem headon ens works on these problems because of course self selfishly it helps ens proliferate but selfishly it also helps the entire ethereum ecosystem as well born out of ethereum we as en have never forgotten Our Roots all the values that have come out of them ethereum is not just in our name but in the DNA of En itself for seven years primary names have only existed on L1 which limits their use to people who are willing to pay ethereum gas fees being able to set a primary name on any chain effectively for free will be a huge unlock for the web through ux and this is the first example of a more flexible contract that will be seen to me broadly in ensv 2 which was announced in May and marks the first time that any enss contract will it be officially deployed to L2 and I'm proud to announce that primary names are coming to L2 and are available on test Nets today reverse registrars are smart contracts that power L2 primary names are live today on a handful of test Nets and should be com to main net by the end of this year and to be clear there's nothing for developers non-developers to do this time but if you're a developer you can go to test Nets today and play around now things have really changed in the last seven years I mean look at our old 2017 logo l2s are the norm now and smart contract accounts are common place gas prices are fluctua fluctuating and it's not sustainable to stay on L1 anymore more in may we talked about moving to L2 driven by several key reasons the first is reducing the overall cost of interacting with ens the second is reducing the number of transaction in all possible situations and the last is we want to let all users transact from the chain of their choice without the need for on and off Rams that can make L2 so painful with these ux goals in mind we are aiming to make a true Improvement to ens ux without the usual trade-offs and with that on Monday at frns day we announced our plans to build our own chain which we're calling name chain name chain is built on a few core things that are really important to us ANS today zi EVMS are the only way to get transaction finality in a reasonable amount of time and because ens is one of the only application that requires reading state from L1 we need the fastest finality we can to ensure that everything can be contrust thisly read from other l2s ZK EVMS use ZK proofs to prove the correctness of a state transition on an L2 and Commit This to L1 the ens resolution process can then use ccip read to verif verify the data from name chain contrasting this to an optimistic rollup the industry standard would require us to wait 7 days before our name can be in use the second is of course the stack must be complete open source all allowing to be easily audited edited and fought if required and lastly we care about the credible neutrality and decentralization of ens and maintaining that is a priority we're exploring whether shared sequencing or base sequencing makes sense for us at name chain as for decentralization is non-negotiable for us we're going to be building L2 to L2 bridging right into the protocol so you can do things like commit whilst you bridge and pay from your preferred L2 this will allow you to start your ens Journey from any L2 lowering the Barrow to entry when you buy your first name and this is one of the primary reasons we wanted to launch our own Chain versus deploying to another public chain being able to control the entire stack from protal to governance means that this rollup is here to serve ens and naming this is super important to us as we are ens are committed to being L2 agnostic name is the L2 we're building but we're not just building an L2 ens V2 is a complete ground up redesign of ens and only one component of that is having a dedicated L2 it's designed to be more flexible more accessible and more affordable so we continue the momentum started with ccpi ccpi read and offchain names and expand its utility to every user and application that needs it so how are we going to do that well first we've redefined how names are registered and recorded with a completely redesigned registry second do e names will be recorded and by default hosted on our dedicated L2 name chain and finally a user-driven migration with backwards compatibility and let's explore these in a bit more detail e on name chain means that all registration renewals will no longer live on ethereum L1 but instead on name chain storing it on name chain means that registration renewal gas will be significantly lower although ethereum has its conveniences it's not a long-term solution for gas prices on L1 having registration name chain means we can ensure registration gas costs as close to zero as possible however even though e names will move to name chain name resolution largely remains untouched and begins from ethereum itself let me reiterate that ens resolution reading from ens names remains anchored on L1 and that is a fundamental difference between ens and other protocols moving to L2 we do not fractionalize our protocol we connect it together and remain as one and this is how we remain L2 agnostic L2 was a L2 support was a consideration for the beginning of the design process of V2 and that means we can also deploy the V2 contracts to L2 networks combined with ccip read this makes it possible to seamlessly stitch together a coherent name space from m multiple distinct networks and l2s this architecture reinforces how we are staying L2 agnostic beginning everything from L1 but only moving eth to name chain while supporting ens on other l2s okay let's talk about the complete technical rewrite of the ens registry Registries are contracts that store data about that name the current registry stores the owner and resolver records and currently all names are stored in a single flat registry this design is straightforward but also has a couple of significant drawbacks one of which that is difficult to find custom rules for name issuance and ownership another is that because each name exists independently in the registry when a name is transferred or deleted all subnames remain unchanged we're solving both both of these problems while adding more flexibility to the system as a whole by introducing a new registry design in EN V2 in V2 each name optionally has its own registry which deals exclusively with its subdomains there's a root registry which contains all the top level names each top level name has a registry containing all the second level names such as nick. eth and so forth using a hierarchy of Registries has a number of advantages anyone who owns a name can now Supply the registry implementation of their choice giving full control on how subnames are issued and controlled this allows all the functionality of the name name rapper and more whilst preserving the flexibility for name owners to set their own rules ownership and even resolution when a name changes hands or if an owner wants to start from scratch they can easily replace the registry from a name entirely erasing all existing subnames allowing a very easy fuss-free way of clearing up the hierarchy of your name likewise because each registry exists independently we can even insert Registries at multiple places in the ens hierarchy when you're ready to move from a subname to an eth name of your own you can bring everything with you while still ensuring your old name functions as it did before in line with 's core principles moving to V2 is an entirely user-driven and optim process all registrations will be transferred to the new L2 chain because by its nature a registry has to be stored all in one location but the names themselves their records and subnames however can continue to exist on ethereum or any other L2 or offchain storage solution after launch users can migrate their names to V2 with a single transaction this will move the name from The Legacy flat ens registry to new hierarchical one at the same time they can choose to either leave the name on L1 or migrate it to name chain and names that aren't migrated will continue to function indefinitely the new ens contracts are programed to automatically fall back to looking up names in the version one registry this means that for names that owned by immutable contracts or for users that can't or won't upgrade functionality of their name is safeguarded forever it's been 7 years since the Inception of ens Google VMO PayPal GoDaddy wow we couldn't have imagined seven years ago that we would get so far and ens is ethereum aligned and always will be that's why we always enjoy coming and giving the state of ens to Devcon every single year since Devcon one or two and L2 reverse registrars on testnet today it's something we've been working on for a little little while now and we're really trying to bring the interop into ethereum and that's really been the the um the theme for this Devcon and ens is expanding to name chain but remaining on L1 whilst remaining L2 agnostic and and ens V2 will improve the ux of ens across the board for years to come and lastly this talk was too long to mention some of the amazing ens Dow service providers this year we're not the only ones building ens and it would be impossible to expand to a billion users without help to name a few first the ethereum fell protocol is bringing the social profiles of ens to the masses Nam stone is pairing many of the subdomain Integrations and unrug for building the generalized gateways that are powering ccip read and of course my ens Labs team for building everything that we've seen today and supporting us today and for years to come and finally the adventure is not over if you're looking for a position at ens we're always looking for good people so if you'd like to work for ens Labs please check ens labs. org for job postings thank you and enjoy your last day at Devcon [Applause] all right thank you so much Jeff for that I think that was fantastic so as you can see here if you've already asked your questions that is great uh what you can do is you can also upvote a question so if you really really want to have it answered it can move up to the top of the question so we're going to start off with the first one what about privacy using ens as a major privacy leag and conducts a user sure I mean this is a question we get a lot for us at en and for us ens is a usability protocol on top of ethereum and l2s and ethereum and l2s have this issue regardless of ens so obviously you need to practice good obsc and make sure your address is not linked and do the things that you do to protect yourself for the addresses having a name on it doesn't additionally create less privacy so you obviously need to create that good OBC no matter whether you're using ens or not all right and then we've got Google integration ports. e domains but not the corresponding subdomains why is that I mean if anyone's from Google here can do this we'd be it'd be fantastic if they could um obviously eth is our Flagship product Google really respects that and wants to to do some Integrations and starting with. e um but hopefully in the future we can really push them to do self-domains as well and if anyone has connections at Google please talk to us and we'll we'll try and get that in okay remember you can still add some more questions if you feel like none of the ones that you have are on here we've got can builders use name chain for other stuff yes so as I said name chain will be on a ZK evm most likely and that means it's evm compatible so it's going to be it's going to be a public chain that anyone can use we're not going to be you know permissioning the chain so you can deploy your own resolvers all right then at the top here we've got what are some of the problems that stand in our way to increase mainstream adoption of iness I mean I think this applies to all of ethereum and all all of blockchain itself it's really about um getting improving our wallet user experience having names and all of these things to replace addresses and once you do that you can get more blockchain and ethereum support across the board you know in your cafes um in your you know paying for things dayto day and then it'll be very easy to kind of improve the mainstream ad doct of ens I believe already ens is quite widely supported across blockchain so it's really about expanding the entire ecosystem itself so ens can serve a larger ecosystem all right can name chain be key store rollup as well it is something we talked about and I I don't think it's something we have we can Ru out I think a key store rollup would be absolutely great um but obviously there are technical difficulties to the keystore rollup as well so if we can solve them for other chains I'm sure we can do it for name chain as well all right we got one that just got upvoted quite hard how will the ens token be integrated with name chain um that is something for Up For Debate right now I believe the token is currently on L1 and for now it will stay on L1 um obviously this is discussions about where we would put our Dow and governance contracts but um yeah that's still off of discussion and then a few more questions here how does ens compare with unstoppable domains what do you guys think how does ens compare with unstoppable domains I think we're doing pretty well I feel like that one was definitely a trap uh the next question when will the ens manager app support efp oh we'll have to talk about that [Laughter] bronley all right uh what has been the greatest challenge for en um the greatest challenge for en oh there are many I think it probably starts many many years ago and when people didn't really believe that we were a project worth supporting but I think we've overcome that now and it's really like a non-starter if your app application doesn't support ens name so I think just overcoming that just shows we're here to stay and we're here to help all of you Builders out here