Bankless - The ENS DAO and $ENS Airdrop | Brantly Millegan & Nick Johnson

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) announced its intentions to further decentralize with the $ENS token last week. Yesterday, they finally released it to the public. Anyone that held an ENS domain by November 1st is eligible for this airdrop. Congratulations to all those on the web3 frontier—you’ve been rewarded again! ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ 📣 DHARMA | From Dollars to DeFi! https://bankless.cc/dharma  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​  💧LIDO | DECENTRALIZED STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lido  👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Guests: Brantly Millegan – Director of Operations at ENS https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan?s=20  Nick Johnson – Founder, Lead Developer https://twitter.com/nicksdjohnson?s=20  ------ Resources: CLAIM: https://ens.mirror.xyz/5cGl-Y37aTxtokdWk21qlULmE1aSM_NuX9fstbOPoWU  DELEGATE: https://ens.mirror.xyz/cfvfKRpQSPtZJjPQOprWqEeqv2rytE7tQkxDg6ht7Oo  TOKEN ALLOCATION: https://ens.mirror.xyz/-eaqMv7XPikvXhvjbjzzPNLS4wzcQ8vdOgi9eNXeUuY  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation. Welcome to another edition of State of the Nation. David, I'm super excited. I'm full of energy. You know why? It's airdrop season, my friend. EnS just did a big air drop and we are talking to who, the people behind ENS and the air drop. David, who are we talking to and what's this episode all about? Yeah, we were talking to you at Brantley Milligan and Nick Johnson of the E&S team. They have been hard at work building out the ENS protocol for years now. And now the era of Dow's is upon us and is really, in my opinion, a very nice capstone to a lot of the work that Nick and Brantley has been doing over the years, tirelessly making Ethereum more and more usable for all of us. And now they are folding the ENS protocol into a Dow to be community owned, community governed. And so we are going to unpack what exactly that means. What does it mean to govern over ENS? Can I just say we're not just talking about ENS because they're doing an air drop. I mean, that's why specifically this week, okay, because they just sit in an air drop and you guys should know about it. We want to hear the details about this Dow and everything.

They're planning with it. But we've been talking about ENS for a long time now on the bankless program, both in our newsletter and through various interviews and conversations, because this is kind of like, we talked about a tweet last week, David, where somebody tweeted out, hey, the model for Ethereum as a wallet is right. But there's also the model for an eth address as a profile, as an identity. And so your ENS address can be part of that. It's like a dot-eath type address. You can also link this to a DNS, a domain name.

And it gives kind of a human-readable destination for your Ethereum wallet or your Ethereum profile in this way. And this unlocks so much, David, that we're going to unpack here today, unlocks the ability to do like, you know, kind of single sign on using Ethereum. it unlocks the ability to do very easy payments to and from the legacy Web2 world. So lots of things going on here.

We're big fan of the projects and have been big fans of the project. But this air drop is kind of fun too, right? Airdolls are always fun. This was a huge participation from a number of people in the community. So we're going to go over what's actually being governed over the next phases of ENS, how the Dow is going to be organized, how you can actually get the ENS. AirDrop, who's eligible and all of that in more. David, before we get into this conversation, we should talk about a few announcements, a few things going on in the bankless nation. The first is

Brian Armstrong, the CEO co-founder of Coinbase was on the podcast on Monday. That was just a great episode. Super exciting to talk to Brian. Also, you had DC Investor on Layer Zero. I just listened to that this morning. I love listening to DC Investor. Like, I totally vibe with that guy. Fantastic episode as well. Anything you want to say about those two episodes, David? Yeah, it's just really nice to see the clarity of thought that Brian Armstrong has for Coinbase and establish a vision for Coinbase that is fundamentally aligned with the world of crypto. So Brian's not a short-term or a medium-term thinker. He is a long-term thinker with long-term plans for Coinbase.

And having that podcast with him just like faith in the crypto world restored. I can't wait to see what Coinbase does in the next chapter of his life. And then also, yeah, DC Investor. Everyone loves DC Investor. really just connected the dots behind, like, you know, becoming a good investor before crypto is even a thing, also simultaneously watching the rise of the internet and then applying those skills to the world of crypto. So a great way to, like, speed run the last 30 years of investing in internet knowledge all at once. It's kind of what hopefully a lot of, like, layer zero stories are all about is speed running the parts of the history of the world that you haven't been a part of yourself. And so definitely tap into those two episodes. Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of speed running, I feel like we've been speed running user experience in UX and DFI here lately. Dharma wanted us to let you know.

They're sponsoring this message. They wanted us to let you know that they now have a version of their smart contract wallet, the Dharma wallet that works with Polygon. What's beautiful about this is fees are reduced. Fees are like nothing to onboard. So you can go from bank account to Defi in about under 10 minutes. This is like connecting your bank account. going through the entire process and purchasing a token in 10 minutes.

And if you do that now, there's $50 in free ETH waiting for you on the other side. They're actually giving away this money. You have to purchase above $500, but if you use the bankless magic link, then you get $50 in free ETH. Crypto is full of these incentives to, like, incent you into using crypto, not just like buying it and holding it. That's one way to use. but there are all of these other verbs, all of these other ways to use crypto, including opening a wallet, including creating an E&S address and registering that, right? And so like crypto is incenting people to do this.

Here's just another incentive. So make sure you tap into that. There's a link in the show notes directly where you get the magic link and you can get your $50 and free ETH by doing that. David, you and I are also doing this thing called office hours. Office hours. Yeah, this is going to be a new thing that we do for the bankless premium member. So if you are a bankless premium subscriber, that you, if you are not yet a bankless premium subscriber,

but you have some, maybe you're brand new into crypto, some 101 questions you've got, and you guys listen to bankless. So maybe you want to ask me and Ryan those questions. And so at the last Friday of every month, except not this month because it's Thanksgiving and also not next month because it's the holidays. But moving forward, the last Friday of every month, we will be doing office hours, where if you are not a premium subscriber, but then you sign up to be a premium subscriber, you'll be invited to office hours, we'll be in the Discord, and we will answer your questions

directly against only available for premium members. So sign up for bankless premium if you want to ask me and Ryan some questions. That's going to be fun. David, I got to start by asking the question I always ask, which is what is the state of the nation today, sir? The state of the nation, Ryan, is claiming. We are claiming. We're claiming the air drops. It's always a fun day when you claim an air drop. And I made a call to action for the broader crypto-twitwer world. Like, why haven't I seen the claimor meme? and apparently here it is. So we have the Claymore meme.

And so here we're delivering. You're getting a meme of the week a little bit early this week. The Claymore, I'm claiming. That's what we're doing. We're claiming the ENS AirDrop. That's what basically everyone in crypto is doing this week. We are claiming. And this is an economic incentive to help decentralize these networks,

decentralize these multisics. We're going to talk all about the ENS claiming process, why they are creating a doubt when we get back. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum,

which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap grant, program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswop Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury.

It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a Uni-Grant at Unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you Uniswap for sponsoring bankless. The AVE protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets.

AVE version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the AVE protocol even more powerful. With AVEA, you can leverage the full power of D. defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On AVE, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have supplied collateral. Here, you can see me borrowing 200 USDC against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens in ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to log.

lock in that interest rate in permanently. V2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets, trade them on un-swap, and then deposit them back into AVE. With AVE, users can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of AVE at AVE.com. That's AAVE.com. Hey guys. Hey, guys, we are back talking all about ENS, recent AirDrop.

ENS, of course, a domain name. We're here with Brantley Milligan, who's a director of operations at E&S. He's been on the bankless podcast before. Also, Nick Johnson, he is a founder, lead developer of ENS's first time on the podcast. Brantley, Nick, how are you guys doing? Good. Are you relaxed and doing okay? Or has this been like a totally frenetic wild time for you?

Like, what's the vibe like right now? I think for me, like, we had like a warm. room for the launch and my team was like, wow, Nick, you're so calm. And I'm like, yeah, just dealing with stuff. And then today, I'm like, there are 10,000 things I need to check and I haven't had any time to look at them. Oh, God. Yeah. Feels crazier than it than the actual launch did. Well, thank you for covering out some time for coming on the bank list. Everyone in the nation appreciates it. Yeah, we appreciate it. Brantley, how are you doing? You hanging in there too? Yeah. I mean, I would say a huge amount to do. And so I think the team has most,

been just focused on doing the work. We haven't really had time to really reflect that much because it's just been like so much to do. How big is the team right now? So when you talk about distribution work, like how many people are you? Eight full-time people and then a couple part-time and other people who do different things, but eight full-time. Okay. So it's like a relatively small team. Like this is like the bankless size team. I mean, we're a bit fewer, but we know very much what it's like to operate that. And like you guys are operating, I think, with a few more help desk probably request than we are. So like how does it feel coming on the other side of this? Are you guys feeling like rejuvenated?

Or is this, yeah, is there a feeling of excitement on the team? Are you just looking forward to getting this week over? I think everyone's really excited. Like we, you know, we were all sort of, we thought we'd nailed down everything we could, but there's always that like that jetter leading up to it of like, you know, is everything going to go as smoothly as we hope

well, and you know, we're like, we're going to get a lot of people on the claim site in the first hour, like, is our hosting robust enough? Is something to go down? Because so often it does, you know, and seeing it all come off smoothly was a blast. It's really great. I think everyone's excited. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm a little bit intimidated because this has been like far more popular than I thought it would be, you know, having been like quietly building ENS for

nearly five years now. And then suddenly having like the entire crypto Twitter. and crypto internet just talking about it seemingly exclusively, it's a little bit intimidating. Yeah, you know, and I've been super impressed at the percentage of claims you guys have had. I saw on a dashboard, it's already up to like 33%, something like this. It might be even higher. Yeah, I've been astonished by that as well. It's, yeah, it's doing really well.

Let me just check for you. We've got 15 million left, which means 10 million's already been claimed. Wow. That's incredible. Wow. That's the sign of a very surgical and precise air drop. That's exactly who you want, the people that are ready to claim their ENS because they are active users of the ENS system and of Ethereum at large. So nice job with it with a dispersion of ENS tokens. We're going to talk about the ENS allocation later on in the show. But just overall, like a really good sign of health on day one. Yeah, thank you. I've got to confess, I haven't claimed mine yet, but I do still have some time, right? guys. You have six months. I haven't either. I haven't claimed mine either. I haven't had time. Gas prices. Have you seen gas prices? Yeah, I know. I was just like, wait, wait for the, you know,

that hurt to claim theirs. You know, I'll get mine when the gas prices are cheap again. Yeah. Can I say something also just on the feeling here? Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with Nick. I mean, it's, it's, it's exhilarating. It's a relief. There's tension. It's intimidating because it's like, we've now decided to go down a path that we're committed to now that is going to require you know dealing you know with a lot more people and things like this I mean there's just there's a lot going on here and I really feel like this is almost like a second founding of ENS this feels like a founding moment I mean it really is I guess the founding of ENS Dow which is a decisive milestone in the history of this protocol and so I feel a lot of that

weight and excitement about that as well. I never thought about that. There's like no undo button for an airdrop is there. It's like once it's out, you can't go back on that. It's pretty immutable. Nick, you were talking about how like once upon a time you started ENS and it was very quiet. You just were building this thing that you had a vision for.

And as Brantley just said, it feels like a second founding of ENS. First, there was the inception of the protocol and there's the inception of the Dow. Can you guys take us a little bit through that history? when and who had the idea to do a Dow and when did it become obvious that the Dow is the right path and when were these decisions made take us a little bit through memory lane yeah so it's something that's come up repeatedly through ENS's like existence starting back you know when it first became a full-time project for me and then we started hiring you know other people um it you know it always kept coming up especially during like the sort of 2017 2018 like everybody

is launching a token nonsense, you know. And I'd always felt that like, first of all, Dow's weren't mature enough. And secondly, that, that E&S wasn't mature enough and that there were too many, like, risks from, like, particularly, you know, things like hostile takeover and so on. And so a number of things have changed. Like, first of all, E&S has removed human control over some important letters. So the key holder. today can't actually affect existing dot-eath registrations. And when that's handed over to the Dow, the dial won't be able to do that either.

And removing that from something that somebody could override and decide that they, you know, every ENS address is now going to point at their wallet or something was like a crucial step to being comfortable with, you know, with a less sort of tightly controlled, I guess, you know, system. So just to rehash that, what that meant is like, I own David Hoffman.

dot eth but previously there was a time where the keys that controlled the ens contracts could have revoked that from me but no longer this is now i own david hoffman dot eith until the end of ethereum as of now right so yes and no almost so first of all the the keys were a multi-sig of seven independent people and it wasn't like there was a like take a name away function it would have been like really a major like you know replacing a bunch of contracts and stuff but it wasn't impossible you know, it was the worry. Now, if you've renewed Davidhoffman.eath out 10 years, there is nothing anybody can do to that name for at least the next 10 years.

What they could do in principle would be to, like, put in like discriminatory renewal rules. You know, like it's 10 bucks for everyone, but for you it's 10,000 bucks or something, you know. But given that there's a time lock on this on any changes as well, if something like that would happen, which I view is extremely unlikely, you would just be able to go like, okay, fine,

I'll register it for 10,000 years before the new rules come into place. And then your name's safe. It can't be affected, you know. Would you go as far as to say, Nick, that this is like one of the most censorship resistant protocols on Ethereum? Like, I don't, you know, there's many. I don't want to either. But like, there are, there's degrees of decentralization here.

And what is ENS? Yeah. Like, I guess I would probably put things like uniswap, for instance, where, like, like the deployed contract is entirely, you know, pretty much entirely permissionless and requires upgrades to new versions at one extreme where there's like the governance is entirely social through like, here's a new version, we think you should use it, and people like, yeah, that looks great. And then at the other extreme, you have a lot of new platforms where everything is under

admin key control, including things that I think really shouldn't be. And I won't name names because I don't want to make enemies. And I would say E&S is much closer to the uniswapping. things particularly today. There are a few things like we don't really feel it's safe to like, because unlike say Uniswap, a complete migration to like a new platform to introduce a new feature isn't very practical because there's a big risk in something like that where some apps are using the old version and some are using the new version. And that's a really, that's a wide open window for someone to, you know, to use the chaos to, to fool people

into sending things to the wrong place and stuff like that. So we think like a single unified name space is important, and that means that a few of these things do have to kind of be under somebody's control, and that will be the Dow going forward. So you mentioned, like, that you were kind of waiting, I think, till some of this infrastructure was built out to do the Dow. But, like, I was wondering, you almost made it sound like a Dow design was always the intent from the beginning. Is that the case, or has that been an emergent idea within the NS?

Yeah, so some form of decentralization to the community was always the idea. And, you know, at the time, the DAOs are the obvious choice because of, well, capital letters the DAO, and then all the things that followed it. But we've sort of just been keeping an eye on, like, the decentralized governance, you know, ecosystem in general for whatever seems the most viable option. And the emergence of like the compound Dow, which has a very straightforward and very, like, well-structured on-chain strategy, and the emergence of tools like Tallian Snapshot to make it easier to work with. and more importantly, just the various projects proving out that model and demonstrating that it can actually function were I think really important factors. It's so funny because so much of this is just emerged in the last year or so, which is said, it's relatively recent.

It is. So guys, so many DAOs have been spun up, and each DAO has their own sort of flavor, their own architecture, their own components. What components from other DAWs did you guys really like that you decided to borrow from when constructing the E&S Dow? So I really like the compound style contracts for on-chain governance with the delegation set-up and so on-on, because although it requires on-chain voting, the delegate set-up reduces the number of people that have to vote, and it gives you the highest level of security,

you know, technical security against, you know, manipulation that's available. We based our stuff was heavily inspired off get coins set up because we feel like they're, you know, similar to us. We're well aligned with them, and so we look closely at what they were doing. What we ended up doing was using Open Zeppelin's new governance contracts, which are based on the compound contracts, but Open Zeppelin's engineering is amazing. They're really good at building modular, secure, like, you know, well-architected contracts that permit customization without, like, you know, while minimizing the risk of unexpected consequences. So we ended up basing it on that. And then, so it's going to the side.

the delegation side of things, because that's a big component that's running around with Dow's. I know, Gitcoin Dow did it. Talk about the role of delegation with ENS Dow. And when somebody claims their ENS tokens, illustrate what they are prompted with and why delegation as a concept is important. So as part of the claim flow, you asked to approve a constitution, which is a separate thing. And then you're provided with a list of delegates. And every delegate is someone who's put themselves forward and said, I want to be part of the voting on decentralized governance for the ENS. They've set a profile picture that's said an ENS name, and they've written short or in some some cases quite long description of their position on both the Constitution and like ongoing

governance and what their expertise is and so forth. And you can flick through those and pick a delegate who you prefer. And what you're doing by doing that is you are giving that person control over your voting power. So you keep the tokens, but when they vote, they vote with the sum of all the tokens that have been delegated to them. And this is kind of important because it's simply not reasonable to ask someone who has 100 ENS tokens to keep abreast of like all the details of every development in the ENS Dow and the ecosystem and so on and vote intelligently on everything. You know, most people aren't going to want to do that. And if you rely on that, your participation is very, very low.

But it's much more reasonable to ask someone to pick a delegate who has similar views to them and the delegate to be the one who keeps themselves up to date on everything. Is there a real quick? I'm sorry, real quick on that. Nick, I just passed you again on the delegate. Can I see this, guys? It's been neck and neck. Can we see this?

Is this happening in real time because people are watching bankless? And they're like, you know, we're really liking what Brantley's saying. How should I share it with you? If you screen share, that'll work just fine. Yeah, I can do that. let me say. It's been me, Nick, and Coinbase have been all, have been neck and neck. Yeah, who, which delegates have shown up that you guys were surprised would show up?

Coinbase was a little bit of a surprise to me. Why do you think people are delegating to Coinbase? That's good question. I mean, I guess they are popular and largely trusted name, but, and, you know, we've worked well with them, but it does seem a little counterintuitive to me to delegate to a large company in this. I still trust that they're going to act with their users' best interest in mind, but personally, I would pick one of the many excellent people who have put themselves forward.

Personally, Nick.eath would pick nick.eath, I think. Well, no, so here's the funny thing. If you go to my delegate profile, which you can see by clicking on the speech bubble link next to my thing, the first thing I do is I list seven other people you should vote for ahead of me and ask you, like, tell you what's excellent about each of them and tell you why you should pick them because, you know, I, I'm happy to, to accept people's delegations, but I think there are, there are many other excellent people, and they don't all have the same opinions as me. And if you agree with them better, you should vote for them. Can I ask a question,

what is the incentive of being a delegate, right? So, you know, is it sort of like operating on a board of some type without financial compensation, without financial payment? you're sort of doing it because you believe in the cause, you believe in the missions, you're dedicating some of your time to it. Is that the principle? To a degree, yeah. I mean, it's, I guess it's, in some ways it's like being on a board. In other ways, it's being like, you know, leading a department or something like that. And it's sort of, it is the business of running the company. So a board is a reasonable parallel. The compensation question is an interesting one. Do you want me to keep sharing this, or should

I, yeah, we can, yeah, we can stop. Thanks for that. Appreciate it. The compensation question is an interesting one, because on the one hand, like, you don't want people, like, seeing this as a sinecure that pays the money and having, you know, lots of delegates just show up for that. On the other hand, like, I think this is going to be a good conversation for the doubt to have, because we also don't want to have a situation where the only people who can afford to be delegates and spend the time to be properly informed on things are those who are like independently wealthy or those that are compensated externally by which I mean basically lobbyists.

So I think there's a pretty good argument for saying like if you're a delegate and you have like more than whatever proportion, then there is some sort of compensation available to compensate you for your time spent on this because we believe running this is as much a job or a profession as anything else. And I think, you know, we haven't tried to like nail that down as a precondition of the Dowell,

but I think that's going to be an interesting discussion to have with everybody about what's reasonable because you also don't want a situation where people are seen to be like exploiting their position for profit either. I'd love to unpack what it actually, what a day in the life of a delegate might actually look like. And I know Enosal just started yesterday, so it's very, very fresh. But in your guys' imaginations, give us a reminder of what are we actually governing over? And what do you think are going to be the most common activities that all of the ENS delegates are going to, to do on behalf of the ENS holders that have delegated to them? Yep.

So there's going to be sort of three main things. One is ENS has a treasury that's accumulated from registration fees. And I think it would be very good for people to propose ways that that could be put to good use to improve our ENS, to improve other public goods in the Ethereum and ENS in crypto spaces. And, you know, perhaps even more widely than that, if we satisfy ourselves that it will be impactful. So there's going to be a lot of work around like identifying, you know, what things can can be effectively funded and improved with some of the ENS Treasury. And then just, I guess,

the wider financials about, like, you know, keeping track of ENS's income and all that sort of stuff. The second is like upgrades and changes to ENS itself. And so, for instance, we the, the true names team, you know, the development team have been working on a number of improvements to some of the core smart contracts. And so once those are ready to go, we'll deploy them and then we'll ask the Dow like, hey, here's the new code. We propose to enable these as the new contracts for, you know, for these components. And if the delegates approved, then they sign a transaction that puts that into effect.

And the third thing that I, that will probably happen a lot more in early days than later is we have this constitution, which spells out sort of the bounds of what the Dow can, you know, legitimately do. It's sort of a social contract rather than a code contract. And I think people are going to be proposing amendments to that. And that's going to be a big job. The delegates is sort of the meta-governance of how do we change how we govern. I want to go into the details of the Treasury because the Treasury is an interesting part of

the story of ENS. But before I do that, I want to zoom all the way back out and really just have a very broad conversation about, again, why Dow's and maybe why a Dow works. Why not just you guys? Why not you two? Why can't you guys govern the ENS system? What's wrong with that? Well, so I think the obvious question is like centralization,

which people are like, ooh, boogieman centralization, but it's useful to sort of back up and say like, why is that bad? I mean, apart from like the bus factor, there is just the fact that if we're building a system that should be useful to avoid variety of people, we shouldn't be relying on one single person's judgment on exactly how that should operate and what changes they should make.

And wherever possible, I prefer to just remove power over things, which is what we did with the .Eath names. But where that's not possible, we need a reasonably decentralized system with a variety of viewpoints to decide, like, what's best for the users. And I think the best way to do that is to actually have the users involved. Yeah, you know, I trust myself, but I don't trust myself with all of the UNES.

And in fact, right from day one, we've had the route controlled by a multi-sig, seven people, only one of whom myself is actually on the ENS team. The rest are all drawn from the community. Fantastic. Okay, so going into the details of the Treasury, Brantley, you and I talked about this, I think, like three years ago or something, on POV Cryptopod before I even started bankless with Ryan. Back in the day.

Back in the day, yeah, back in the day before Ethereum was cool, right? And we were talking about the concept of ENS and all of the things, the great things that ENS does. And we talked about the whole, why you have to actually sell ENS addresses. And the answer you gave me, well, we would love to hand out all these ENS addresses to whoever wants them, but you have to actually put a monetary price on these things as the anti-cibil mechanism because you've just given them out for free, then one person's going to claim all of them and the whole thing kind of breaks.

So you have to sell ENS addresses. And so you guys use the selling mechanism as just a way to make the actual system actually work, not as a way to actually make money. And so from what I, from what I remember in that conversation, the ENS system was just collecting a large amount of ETH. And like, that was large back then. I can't imagine how big it is now over and over time, really just as like a byproduct of what you guys wanted to get done, which is get ENS into the hands of people that want it. And the right ENS addresses into the right people's hands. And so now there's this treasury of ETH. Can you guys take us through that history. Has that treasury been used for anything at all before now? And also,

where is that treasury going now? Is it all going to the Dow? How big is it? And also how big is it? Yeah, good question. So I just looked it up. And it's about $46 million right now. Okay. And you can see this on EtherScan. If you go to multisig.org.enS. that wallet that it points to is one of the places where it's held there's a second place that's controller. ns.eath. And right now that's still held

by the multisage, one of the first things that the Dow is going to do once kind of the dust settles is to formally request, we're going to have a proposal that people vote on to formally request these things and all things that Nick talked about. And then the multi-sig will send all of the current money

and also set so that all future money also goes to the Dow. So the multi-sigle will be completely done with the money. In terms of what money has been spent already, not very much. So there was a $700,000, they did a $700,000 donation to get coin grants earlier this year. And that was just because with the run-up in price, the treasure was worth more. And we felt like we want to give back to the community. We'd received a lot of grants and things like that.

So they did that. And there was also some money that they set aside just recently to pay taxes. taxes on money from protocols and Dow's is like a whole topic that we have developed opinions on. But basically, you do? You have opinions on this? You have opinions about it. Different show, but we want your opinions on that. Not for today.

Although we are not tax lawyers. So maybe people shouldn't listen to our opinions, but at least we'll be recorded. We have lawyers who have opinions on it. And they have told us what to do. And so we did set aside, it was like $2.5 million actually. to pay taxes on this. Anyway, that's before it gets passed over. I think the main reason the money had not been spent, though,

was that although the multi-sig had the technical power to spend the money, they didn't have the political mandate. This is so critical for people to understand about ENS. I say this all the time, if you heard me speaking in spaces. ENS is an open public protocol of the Internet. We have no investors. Like literally, no investors. We've never accepted investments.

from anybody. There are no VCs, even with this token thing, no, all tokens went to users or contributors. There was no investors. And why is that? And it's not because investors are bad. I'm super capitalistic, okay, like raw, raw America, capitalism, okay? But for this, it's supposed to be a neutral protocol of the Internet. And so that the credible neutrality is critical to E&S.

And so, yes, money's coming in, but we think that money doesn't belong to us. It doesn't belong to the multi-sig. It belongs to the community. And so we were just sort of waiting until we had a mechanism for the community to be able to govern this. And now we do. And so I'm actually really looking forward to seeing how the Dow can finally put this money to use that's just been sitting there. By the way, the Treasury will not only be the ether from dot-eith names I mentioned. Dow is also getting half of the Dow tokens, which I would say it appears as though that will actually be the vast majority of the Treasury that the Dow has.

Well, this really just lends itself to the vision that you guys have established for ENS from the get-go. If you guys were selling ENS domains and then going out on like yachts with champagne, it would just ruin the whole point of having decentralized open source protocols, right? And this is really what DOWs allow us to do. So thank you for having that vision so early and sticking through it, sticking with it all the way through and through and through. And so just to be clear, uniswap, it provides liquidity, collects transaction fees. Ethereum, it sells block space. ENS Dow sells ENS names. Like, that's just, is that, that's the product?

Is there any, is it really that simple? Yeah. I mean, I say it's fundamental job is running the ENS system, like making it as useful to as many people as possible. And so, like, you know, we've got this DNS integration, for instance, where you can use like a dot-com name or a dot-anything name in ENS. And, you know, EnS Dow's job is to keep that useful and valuable and functional for everybody as well, as much as it is to like, you know, sell names.

Because selling names kind of implies that the goal is to make money, whereas the goal here is to make useful infrastructure. Yeah, managed. I wouldn't say sell names. I'd say it's in the business of managing the namespace. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I wanted to ask a question. So I haven't, because I haven't gone through the process,

understanding is I actually have to like if I'm going to claim my E&S tokens I actually have to like sign the constitution so I haven't read the constitution right but going back to something you said there Brantley which is like we have no VCs we have no outside investors this is a public good I'm kind of back to my question like I guess the one question in my mind is yes that's awesome but have these tokens basically become almost proxy shares for a product right so like Like, here's what I mean. Yes, there's no original investors. There's no original VCs. But what happens if the Dow token holders vote to start distributing that treasury back to token holders? Or they say, you know what, we want a dividend of all new.eath sales every year or something. Is this

in the constitution that this is not supposed to be that type of commercial enterprise? Or how do you like handle situations like that or maybe that is the vision the vision is ultimately it's basically a decentralized autonomous almost like a you know corporation type set up any thoughts on this yeah this this is this is one of some of the things we thought it was most valuable to spell out one is like why are we collecting fees and so that conversation you heard with bruntly that sort of encoded in the article one of the constitution is like we collect fees because we need to regulate system. And then secondarily, like, well, you know,

if we're going to go bankrupt without fees, then we should probably, you know, fees are better than bankruptcy. But the, you know, the primary goal here is sorry, Article 2, I should know my own constitution better. Nick, you wrote this thing.

Yeah, I wrote it. And then Article 3 is like, okay, so once we've got fees, what do we do with them? And the point here is fees are used to ensure ENS functions first and to develop and improve it second and to help public goods and in Web 3 and ENS and sort of the wider ecosystem third.

So there's a real intention here that this is effectively a non-for-profit organisation. And so we've encoded that into the Constitution with the goal that this is more important and harder to change than just a simple like, you know, let's vote on sending out some dividends or something. Yeah, a couple of thoughts in this. Uniswap has not turned on the fee sharing.

Is this correct? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, Uniswap, which actually had that built in and said this from the beginning, I just noteworthy, that the Dow has actually chosen not to turn that on this far. So I think that's actually an interesting example. With ENS, we actually don't have a mechanism like built in to make this easy to do.

And we're actually trying to put in this kind of the, kind of the founding social contract that this isn't the thing. So I say this is not the vision. And I'm not really concerned about this given the example. And if there ever was a time where some evil outside corporation decided to buy up a whole bunch of ENS tokens in order to change the constitution, make it a for-profit company and start to extract rent, I suppose then there's always the option to fork. Yeah, there's the possible. of a social fork, which I think would be an absolute last resort because of the issues I talked about before with the risk of forks and like the same name resolving to different

things on different systems. But faced with like an existential crisis, it might well be the lesser of the evils, you know. I also think that it would be ineffective to do this. Like I don't think you could acquire enough ENS tokens and then take over the Dow and make it, you know, send profit to its, it's now relatively few token holders in a way that actually made financial sense. But I would just, I would like to just start by setting with social norm that like this is not the expectation, you know, that we're going to run it as a public good. Guys, we want to dive into the topic of the token itself. Everyone's favorite subject. There's a certain amount of distribution that the token has gone through. So we want to unpack some of those

numbers, what the criteria is, why those decisions were made. Everyone loves the token conversation, which is why we've saved it for the second half of the show. So we'll get into that conversation just a moment, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. The era of proof of stake is upon us. Proof of stake systems like Ethereum, Terra, and Solana allow the industry to move away from the hot, loud, and wasteful proof of work systems and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators. And that, That is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized. Individuals must play their part in crypto network validation.

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And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at Gemini.com slash go bankless. Hey guys, we are back with the team over at ENS, and we are about to dive into the token, how it got distributed, who it got distributed to. And Ryan is about to pull up a graphic here in a second so we can walk through some of the token allocation balances.

And boom, here they are. see the largest supply on the left, clocking in at 50% of total issued tokens, goes to a community treasury. And I'd like to throw in a little take here. Is that that 50% to the community treasury, that is a very neutral allocation, right? It's owned by the community. And who is the community? The community is the right side of the pie that we are seeing, right? And so, it's actually not actually going to anyone. It's going to everyone equally. And Hazu recently had an article that he put out where he's basically saying that, you know, these are, these are neutral tokens. They are minted, but they are not issued, right? And so I believe, correct me if I'm wrong,

guys, that the ENS, Dow will have the ability to mint tokens. And so, again, is that correct? Yes? It will have a limited ability to mint. Limited. Limited. Okay. Okay. Very limited. Okay. So then, really normal. Right. That is, yeah, that is pretty normal. So this is a, this is a supply of tokens that are already minted that are owned by the community. You guys want to comment on the allocation of the community treasury, 50% to the treasury. Any comments there? Yeah, I just thought it was reasonable that the community should own the largest part of itself effectively and that it gives it a lot of future runway to do things with,

you know, with those tokens. And those are 10% of that is available immediately to the Dow and the other 50% vests over the next four years. Fantastic. Okay, so a lot of that supply is locked for, you know, long-term thinking, long-term, you know, good, just good treasury balance. And then clocking in at the second largest distribution of the ENS token is theirdrop. And I really like this graphic because you guys actually have numbers, what I believe are numbers of addresses that these tokens are going towards. So 25% of the total outstanding supply of ENS tokens, which is, by the way, 100 million tokens. 25% of supply is going to over 130. 7,000 addresses. Can you guys talk about why 25%? I mean, I guess I'm a software engineer and I like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, it was, it's, it's, it's, a way to do it. Yeah, so like we had teased at the beginning, and then like I just said, 137, 689,000 eligible

addresses. 48.5,000 has already claimed. Ryan showed this, this Dune and Alyxsport to me a couple hours ago, and we were at 33%. We are currently at 35%. So up 2% in the last few hours. So there's a lot of active participation of people that are actually claiming their airdrops. Are these numbers surprising to you, guys, would you guys expect already?

over 35% of total eligible claimants actually claim their tokens? I'm delighted. I didn't expect it would be quite this big, quite this fast. What about you, Brantley? Yeah, I mean, we've been actively discouraging people to do it right away. So we've emphasized that you have six months. You have until May the 4th, 2022 to claim. After that, the Dow will have access to it could sweep it back into the Dow.

But like, there's no rush just for the claiming parts. You don't have to pay super high gas if you don't want. want to, you can go to sleep, you can relax, take your time with it. But yeah, I mean, the fact that people are so excited about despite the high gas prices, I think that says something about the energy around ENS, which is very encouraging to us. Is this one of the largest drops that we've seen in terms of total amount of eligible addresses? I mean, obviously, if you just air dropped everyone with ETH, right, like, you know, every ETH address, that would be different. But like talking about maybe Uniswap is sort of similar in scale. Like, it's like an active user.

type of airdrop. How large is this compared to others that we've seen? I mean, I know uniswap was larger. I think it was around the 380K size. But I think this is definitely one of the, I'm not aware of any others other than uniswap that are larger offhand. The initial air drop, yeah. And then when it, when it comes to theirdrop itself, what were kind of the criteria for how many E&S tokens, one individual address received versus another. So we spend a lot of time on this because it's going to be crucial to what the community looks like, you know, what the Dow community and the people who have a voice look like. I'm sorry, Nick, can I emphasize something on that point?

Yeah, please do. This is so important, okay? I've heard a lot of people talk about this. We are not rewarding people. We are not trying to pay people back. This is, these, these are not entering into our thinking at all. What we are doing here is we are setting up a governance system for ENS, and we're trying to think, what is a good initial distribution of voting power for this governance system, right?

So some people who are like, oh, I paid so much money on gas, or blah, I was like, okay, that's interesting. Thank you. You got your ENS names. You got everything you were promised. That is not what we're trying to do in this distribution. I'm sorry, Nick, you can continue. That's a great color.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, we've been quite, the other thing we've been quite vocal about right from the early days of E&S is that ENS is a system that is built to be a functional infrastructure first and not a speculative vehicle. You know, our goal is not to like enable people to to buy names and flip them at a profit because we've seen other systems, you know, attempts at decentralized naming that have done nothing to try and like, you know, minimize that. And they've sort of been strangled in their crib. because every good name gets snapped up and then it becomes extremely illiquid. Nobody can find a name that works for them without paying some exorbitant markup to someone who just happened to get there first. But at the same time, we want to build a neutral system. We're not going to try and go, oh, your account has too many names deleted or anything, and we literally can't.

But we want to build a system that has incentives and structures set up so that it rewards the people who use the system, or sorry, rather it's built to facilitate use over speculation. So that comes into like how the name pricing is set up and so on. And it also comes into like how we distributed the ad drop. And so we wanted the end users to be the ones that had the voice. And we don't think how large your voice is should relate to how many names you've registered. So what we did is we divided the adrop up into halves.

Half the airdrop was allocated to people based on how long they've owned it, least one name in an account. So every day you've owned at least one name, you get, I think it's 0.22 tokens. And then the other half was allocated according to like how far into the future you've renewed your longest living EMS name. Yeah, extended. And so, you know, if you've renewed it out to, extended it out to eight years, then you get the maximum number of tokens for that. We had to cap it because there's one guy who registered his name until the year like 4,400 and he would have just been able to like run the down on his own otherwise that is a 4,171 something like that 3,250 years in the future yeah his great great great great great great great great great

and grandkids are going to have that that ENS address yeah exactly how just out of curiosity don't you have to pay for time didn't he that whoever renewed that paid an insane amount of Eath to renew it for that long five bucks a year yeah yeah it's like it's not it's not up front though right yes it is yeah you pay that up front you paid 11,000 dollars to renew it for like 2,000 years yeah and now we're talking about them okay well yeah there's that's a good point individual yeah this is someone who's I hope is working in parallel on some life extension researchers of thing well I hate to say it but it was some account related to the sheep token

it was something related to that yeah so well this is some great trivia right here yeah yeah some lore okay so just to recap that. You got the ENS AirDrop for two reasons. You bought an ENS name and then you for the number of days that you've owned that thing, you got point, what do you say, point two to tokens per day that you've owned the ENS name. And then also when you purchase an ENS name, you also have to renew it, right? Because, you know, this is public good. These things... You can extend it into the future. You can do as many years into the future at one time as you want. So you don't have to actually be renewing on an annual basis.

Right. Correct. Yeah. But you pay for the that up front, right? And that, again, that actual, that money goes to management by the Dow. And then so it was 0.22 tokens per day for how long you've owned it, and then 0.06 for the number of days that you've renewed it into the future. And then if you actually register this NS name, because there's a difference between purchasing an NS name, because you actually have to register it to an address. If you do register it to an address, as in like the, it actually points somewhere, these numbers double. This is all. all correct?

Not quite. So instead, if you have set a primary name, so you could own a dozen names, but your account has a primary name, which is the one that shows up in ether scan and so on, if you set that, then it's doubled. Okay. It's what makes it your portable web through user name and profile. That's the key thing. Right.

So if one address bought an ENS name a hundred days ago, and then they renewed it for a thousand days and then they set that address as the where they point it right uh primary ens name primary ns name and then that same address buys a hundred more ens names after they bought that and they don't renew uh or or uh you know pay for pay for the future that then that person just got the allocation of that first address correct yep that's right well fantastic and the purpose here is so that you're not rewarding just like squatters right yeah So that we don't give an outsized voice to people who have registered a lot of names. You know, we don't think that they should have a thousand times more voting power on the future

of E&S than somebody who registered two or three names and uses them actively. Yeah. Yeah, I think this formula makes it just more egalitarian. And we think that's we're going to, that's a principle that we think makes the Dow better. Makes a ton of sense to me. All right. So I feel like that's actually been, that, that's. That's the community airdrop.

That's what everyone's getting excited about. But there's a few more other people that got the ENSirdrop. So I do want to run through those pretty quick. 25% went to the community. 25% also went to contributors. Who are the contributors? Yeah, so there's a couple of different categories here. The biggest category is, of course, core contributors.

So those are people who are currently working on the core team. associated with True Names Limited, which is the nonprofit that does most of the development work, although there are people who do development work outside of it. And for that, that is actually split up into two different parts as well. So there's tokens that are set aside for each person based on their previous work. And those tokens are locked for four years, on a four-year schedule. I can talk more about that in a second. But then each person also has a certain amount of tokens set up that they could earn if they continue to work. That's vesting. So those are also locked, but you can earn them if you continue to work. There's also a six-month cliff. So for the

first six months, if you're a core contributor, you don't get any of your contributors allocation. And then at that point, you get six months worth, like proportionate to the amount. And then over the next three and a half years, it just linearly released you. So again, the locked stuff from your past work you are going to get no matter what, but it's released you over four years. The vested stuff, if you continue to work full time on the project, you earn even more tokens that's the vesting there. And that's the core contributors. Nick, do you have any comments on that before we move on to another?

Is that the category that you guys are in? I see there's 11 people there. So there's 11 individuals and you are two of these guys and then nine of them. Any other like big names that we might know who are a part of this 11 group of people? Yeah, I mean, most of them are lists on our website. Okay. Perfect. And I've been associated with EnS.

Fantastic. Then we have a launch. I'm just going to go down in the order here. He's not an order of size. I was about to prompt you to do that anyways. Yeah. So there's launch advisors. So it says to all this is slightly misleading.

So one of them is the organization, Fire Eyes, which is a couple of different people who are amazing. And then the second person is Scott from Gitcoin, who just was by himself. These were advisors. spectacular. Cannot recommend them more highly. We would not be here without them. They saw us through the whole process.

We had never done this before, obviously, but they had. And they also, all of their tokens are locked on a four-year release schedule with a six-month clip as well. So that's also locked up. Then we have future contributors. And this is not designated for anybody yet. This is just set aside held by True Names Limited. and the idea is that if we hire more people, core contributors,

we have something that we could offer them as incentive. It would be likely a similar thing where it's like locked, invested, or something like that. Then we have translators. So this was a cool group of people who, about like a year, year and a half ago, we opened up the website and manager for people to translate in other languages, and tons of people just did it for free.

And it was like, that was so cool. There was a lot of work. I mean, it's like technical stuff. We want to reward those people. Then we've got select integrations. So ENS actually has like over 310 integrations right now. We decided not to give a contributors to all case you every single one. We thought it wasn't practical.

And there's kind of a, anyway, we decided to focus on integrations that we thought, you know, like we're early or have really deep, full integration of VNS that have been particularly impactful to the history of VNS at this point. So that's 54, and that's 2.5% there. Then keyholders, these are people who have served in that 4-7 multi-sig governing ENS thus far. There's more than seven because some of them have rotated out to new people. And then this last section here, active Discord users, again, this is over 400 people. I think it's actually over 450 people who have been particularly active in our, we have thousands of people in Discord. These were people who are particularly active.

we wanted to give extra reward to them as well. I think you skipped over external contributors. Oh, I did. I'm sorry. Thank you, Nick. So these are people who are not working for True Names Limited, but who have had significant contributions just in other ways that didn't fit into another category.

So we wanted to reward those people as well. Well, that sounds like, yeah, go ahead, Ron. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, it sounds like you've given a lot of thought to all of this, right? And of course, for any token distribution plan, there's going to be people who don't like it, of course. And there's always those that exist out there. For what is worth, the YouTube comments are very positive, saying it's a very fair air drop. And the YouTube comments are hard to appease.

So there is that. Yeah, they're not generally very positive. So let me ask you guys a question about this. I know the purpose of, like, I think you tweeted something out earlier, Brantley, hey, what you've just been awarded is actually responsibility, right? It's not like a free money, okay? Which is really what an ESNS token is. It's, you know, governance rights.

It's a responsibility right to the ENS system, as you guys have been saying. That said, like price on this thing has been absolutely bonkers, right? And like, I don't know that obviously you guys have no control over that. That's just the market doing what the crypto market does. and it likes to try to price things. But I'm wondering if you have any thoughts here or comments here. Is this like the market trying to figure out what a public utility is kind of worth? Because it like strikes me that we haven't had very many of these in the past.

Like, I mean, besides blockchain, do we have, we don't have a tokenized version of TCPIP or some other sort of internet protocol. So are any thoughts on this? and for the listeners who can't, you know, kind of see the Charzer, I haven't looked at this, like ENS, at least the fully diluted valuation, like $4.6 billion at this point in time, which is like absolutely insane even by crypto standards. It's, you know, quite a market cap. So any comments on this? What is this telling us, do you receive any signal from this? Or is this all just noise from your perspective? Mostly noise, I think. Like, you know, obviously it has.

impact on things in terms of like it's going to happen that people will buy and sell tokens and that affects voting power and so forth and so that affects the ongoing running of the Dow so it has some impact like you know if the tokens in total with 10 bucks somebody could just acquire the whole thing and like take the whole treasury and we don't they don't want that to happen but we really structured things with like the governance system in mind rather than any sort of you financial goal here. It's certainly been

dramatic to see, but I don't have a thesis on what it means. I guess, you know, Gitcoin is another example of an organization that's done this. The graph, although it's not like not for profit, is public infrastructure and it's interesting to watch them as well.

I think like, just as a more general, like, meta point, like it's a shame that there isn't more potential for community involvement and things like I can and stuff, you know, that they are effectively, you know, run by their board and so on. And so at the very least, we're experimenting with new ways to run this infrastructure that are, you know, is open and welcoming. That is a really important conversation and really lends itself to what Ethereum is trying to do. And one of the failures of humanity is that we can't really price in the value of our public goods.

And this is the power of protocols is, and especially the, power of the Ethereum, which is itself an open decentralized protocol, it allows more surface area to price in more public goods. And so we can actually price in things in the market that previously were inaccessible. And so Brantley, Nick, I know you guys have been in Ethereum for a very long time and kind of understand this problem of free rider problems, public good problems. Do you have any comments on that at large? Like Ethereum being able to price in public goods and how ENS is an example of that? Yeah, we've, we've never priced things like this before. We've never, this is an experiment in history. And I don't know, what do you think of,

I just thought of this now, maybe that in some sense, the price of the token is like the security of the Dow. Yeah, I mean, that is, that is true to a degree, you know, much the same as you look at, like, the price of ether or Bitcoin and you use that to calculate the cost of a $1,000. 1% attack. This is kind of economically very similar. Yeah. We talk about some future stuff too guys, right? So you guys have already had a big year.

The integration with DNS. Oh, there's much bigger things coming, man. Okay. Well, so give us a quick recap of like the integration with DNS because that was big. That got me excited. And I think the TLDR is basically you could take your dot com and now route it into your ENS name, right? So like somebody could, if I owned Ryanshonadams.com, which I wish I had, somebody, I could route that to my, my eth address through ENS and basically receive either that way.

So tell us about that integration and then talk about some of those big plans that you have in store, Brantley. What's next? Yeah, so the DNS stuff, just to say a little bit more on that. Yeah, basically any DNS domain name you can import into ENS with the same ending from DNS. This confuses a lot of people. So like BCMilligan.com on DNS becomes BCMilligan.com on ENS and the dot ease is separate. And you can do most of the same things. So not only it can be your Web3 username. So like I can set BcMilligan.com as my primary ENS name. And that would show up like on Uniswap and sushi and blah, all these places. That's kind of wild when you see that.

Like, whoa, that's not where I normally see these things. You can also use it to simplify crypto payments for any cryptocurrency. This is true for all ENS names. You can not only receive ether and Ethereum-based things, but Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Solana, near any arbitrary one. And then, of course, profile data as well. It's like an avatar image, Twitter, all these things. So DNS names can do all that.

That was huge. Nick, do you have any comments, additional comments on that? Because I know that's something you've been working on for many years. Yeah, it's like it probably took longer than it should have, but surprising nobody like internet protocols are complicated. and this one wasn't written with Ethereum in mind. But don't worry, when ENS says we're going to do something, we do it eventually. True to all the promises of the Ethereum Protocol, EnS is no different.

Yeah, exactly. We get there eventually. Very much the Ethereum spirit, yeah. It's like it kind of speaks to like ENS's overriding principle that the goal is to have like a usable name space, not to like bring an income. you know, because when we first announced it, and then again, when we released it for like all TLDs, everyone's like, what are you doing? My F name is worth less now.

And I'm like, but that's not what they're for, you know. Okay, yeah. Yeah, that's okay. You know, if you, they're like, well, then why would I want a dot-eath name? And I'm like, well, if you don't want one, then get a dot-com name. That's fine. You know, there are unique tradeoffs. You know, the dot-eth name we can actually lock down in a way that ensures no outside

interference that you can't do with DNS. but if your use cases served well by, you know, using your same name for your website and for your, you know, your traditional website and your ENS, then that's exactly what it was designed for. But by the way, I don't like not financial advice, but personally, I don't think that makes dot-eaths worth any less at all. I think just building the network makes all of the dot-eats increase in value. That's my own personal take. But, but yeah, I guess people had that take for the short run. But it's like, tell us about the future than, You're dropping some hints, man.

We got, we got to ask. I don't think you guys are ready for this. Oh, we're ready. Oh, we're ready. Yeah, I think we're ready. Okay. I mean, nothing secret. We're open book.

We talk about these things all the time. So anybody who's been following E&S and in our Twitter spaces on Twitter and is going to know about these things. But I'd say here the big thing is coming up. So like, layer two. That's the first thing. Number one is layer two. Gas fees suck.

We're aware of this. We also are aware of people like, Gatsby is really high. It's like, yes, we know. It's bad for us, too. So we're working on that. Scaling is a hard problem. You guys know this. And ENS is unique among many other protocols. A lot of people say, like, well, why don't you just put it on Arbitram? Or something, you know, like Uniswap just, like, put itself on Arbitram. Okay, EnS is a naming system. And by the very nature, you need a single source of truth. Like, there's the whole point of a naming system. So we can't just, like, create copies everywhere. This wouldn't work. So we have to do this

very carefully. The first step is we're using a system that we developed that was, now called CCIPV that we're doing in conjunction with chain link. That will allow you to put records and subdomains on the external location of your choice. So right now everything's on a 3M layer one, but you'll be able to use this to put it on an L2 like optimism or Arbitrum or something, on another layer one, like Solana or whatever you want, or even a non-block chain place, like a server. I mean, this could make setting records and the creation of subdomains,

either very cheap or even zero cost. And comment on this real quick. It's been our vision since the beginning, actually, that most ENS names long term will be sub domains, right? So when I say like there's going to be a trillion ENS names in a few decades because we're going to be naming like every contract, every organization, every person, all these things. I'm not saying dot-eaf names on layer one paying gas to be.

This is ridiculous, obviously. I'm saying like subdomains that are mostly off-chain that are zero costs that are going to be like naming everything. So that's going to like explode that. Just to just to illustrate, take our, what's a subdomain for the listeners that need that to find? Yeah. token.

Dotten.e. Which is the address of the ENS token. So Brantley, another metaphor. And again, it's really nice to have these metaphors work out. It's like you said that more people will be using subdomains than just plain old. Dot Eith. And like the metaphor that I'm going with there is like, Ryan and I tell everyone that listens,

like it's weird that you're on the L1. Eventually you're going to the layer twos. And what you're saying is like it's weird that you're using dot-eaths. Eventually you'll use a sub-domain instead. Yeah. So like hardcore people, you know, we'll see how it plays out. But hardcore people are going to have their own dot-eath. It's like email.

You can have, you know, me at brantley.com if you want. And that's open for people. But most people sound like have a Gmail because it's easier. So I would say that's our expectation. We'll see how it plays out. But that's coming for, Yeah, so subdomains and records for like dot-eath registrations themselves and also for the DNS names being import to ENS. Both of those things are very expensive.

We have ideas about how to do that. But just warning to people that's like either months or even longer into the future. Those are trickier problems to solve, particularly when it comes to registering dot-eaf names for various technical reasons. Nick, anything else you want to say on that before I go on to another thing? Go ahead. Okay. The other big thing that I am super excited about is our manager redesign. Okay, again, if you've been following ENS, you've heard this.

We've been working on a complete ground-up redesign of our manager app for months now. We got a little distracted with the whole token Dow launch thing. This is becoming a top priority again. And the basic idea here is this. The current manager was designed a couple years ago when ENS was much simpler. You know, it was just like mostly .eath names and for Ethereum addresses and maybe and IPFS hash, his vision was much smaller. Since then, ENS has become like the identity protocol of Web3.

And we are now redesigned the manager around that concept, basically. And it's going to be much, much easier, much more user-friendly. Things will be set automatically. It'll be easier to do things. It's going to be a much better experience. And we've shared a shared some previews of that on Twitter. And then the third big thing that I'm really excited about, which is actually very close, is the whole sign with Ethereum project.

And basically what that is is taking, you know, sign in with Metamask and with Ethereum stuff that's already prevalent Web3, standardizing it and trying to make it available to Web 2 services. This is a standardization effort that we actually are working with the Ethereum Foundation on. We co-sponsored a grant. We've picked this company, Scruce ID. It's been an open public standard.

The EIP draft is pretty much set. We're just kind of doing the final last details, but that is also very exciting. Can I ask about that? That's super interesting, right? So, like, the idea of being able to sign in with your eth address is basically obviates the need for, like, a Facebook user name and password and a Twitter, username and password, and all of the web to you. What's the username and password?

What is that? Exactly. Right? Some old thing that people used to do? Exactly. I hope so. But it hasn't come about, yeah. So the ability to sign in with Ethereum is basically giving individuals back their self-sovereign identity.

But like, what is the EIP that you're talking about, right? I thought this was just a matter of kind of adoption, right? So, like, basically, we have to convince the entire world that this is the best sign-in experience possible. And that's just going to take time. That's going to take adoption. It's going to take the success of our onboarding mechanisms. and basically some killer apps to do this. But you're talking about an EIP specifically, Brantley.

What is that? Yeah. So sign with Ethereum already exists as used throughout Web3. Right. And to be clear, what I mean by this is not just connecting your wallet. It's you connect your wallet. And then for some services, you also sign a message to authenticate yourself to their servers. So for example, like OpenC does this.

And then once you do that, they can use your ENS name as the default username for yourself, they can bring in your avatar, they can bring in all these things, right, profile data. So that already exists. Here's the thing though. Up until now, people have just been like creating their own versions of this, like each time, an own bespoke versions, which is fine, but some people don't do good practices, people don't know what to do. How do I implement sign it with Ethereum? You know, it's just like it's not, it's just been organic completely, which is one of the reasons I am so bullish on it that we've already gotten so much adoption of this, even though it's entirely organic. There's no,

guide on how to do this. So basically what the current effort is, is okay, let's interview everybody, let's gather information, let's get best practices and create an open public standard of here's the best way to do it. Here's exactly how to implement it. Here's a JavaScript, script library. Here's an OAuth implementation, if that's helpful. And that's what the current one is. And the EIP, which I think is still a draft, is EIP 4361. And I guess I would also add that like with the standard wallets can show more user-friendly interfaces for this too. So instead of saying, do you want to sign this message, which is this machine readable blob, it'll say, do you want to sign into the site with these credentials and immediately improve

the usability and security there? That's fantastic. I'm just curious, like pie in the sky, how long do you think this will take to catch on and actually get adopted, right? It's like, am I going to be signing in using Facebook and Google accounts for like the next 10 years until this is ready? Or do you think this could happen faster? Well, I'll say that there are a couple Web 2 services that have already reached out to us who are interested in implementing it. I mean, we'll see.

Nothing's like announced or something like this, but there is interest. It's one of them, Discord. The recent screenshot going around. I see that screenshot. I'm going to look that out. I have not talked to this book. Put it on the background. But who knows what they're thinking.

I mean, people don't tell us. I hope if they're doing, I hope if they're intending to do some sort of sign and that they join with us on the standard instead of inventing their own, because of course that's the whole goal. But I would say my personal expectation is that it might be a slowly

than suddenly type thing, but we can't predict the future. A big chunk of this work is building a service that is compatible with Oath, so that existing Web2, sites can just basically plug it in without having to do a whole of new engineering. So that will make a lot easier for these sites to add sign in with Ethereum. Yeah, our goal is that the average Web2 service can like literally in half an hour, just drop this into their existing off, you know, off system, just as one of the options.

That's the goal. Look at that. Cool, guys. This is it. Got to get Discord on board. We'll see. David, anything else, man, from you? Nothing from me.

This has been great, guys. Congratulations for taking, just putting the team on your back for such a long amount of time. And I hope the community can now share the load. As Kevin O'Waki said, when we had him on to talk about the genesis of Gikkoin Dow, he said he's a really a big fan of decentralizing stress. So I hope the community can help decentralize some stress away from you guys. That sounds good. I bet it does.

The relief in Nick's voice just there. Hey, it's not our problem. Except Nick, now we're both delegates. Yeah, kind of screwed up on that side of things. Bentley, Nick, it's been a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for this project. For bankless listeners, if you're looking for some resources on how to claim your ENS tokens for anirdrop, just keep in mind. There's no rush on this.

You have six months. You have until May. If you want to do that, there's some links in the show notes. You can take a look at that. Also, links to the distribution we were talking about the delegate page. I'm going to be really excited to review this at week end and see if Brantley is ahead of Nick or Knicks ahead of Brantley or Coinbase ahead of both you guys, we'll have to see. But it is neck and neck.

So we'll be monitoring that. All the resources are available to you in the show notes as well. Once again, none of this has been financial advice. Of course, it never is. ETH is risky. E&S domains, I guess they're kind of risky too. All of DFI really is risky. You could lose what you put in.

But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Cheers, guys. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills

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