Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Alex Van de Sande & Nick Johnson: ENS – A Global Naming System for Ethereum

Episode Date: May 16, 2017

Naming systems are an important component of any networked information system. It’s difficult to imagine how the Internet could have been adopted by the masses had it not been for the Domain Name System, which translates machine-readable IP addresses into human-readable domain names. Blockchains, with their long and complex address formats, suffer from a similar problem. One might think a solution would be to apply the same naming system architecture we have for the public Internet to public blockchains. But DNS, in the eyes of many, is a largely flawed system. Centrally controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet domain names are vulnerable to censorship and barriers to entry are kept artificially high – registering a new Top Level Domain (ex: .epicenter) costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. We’re joined by Alex Van de Sande and Nick Johnson to discuss their approach to creating an open, secure and decentralized naming system for the Ethereum Network. The Ethereum Naming System (ENS) allows users to register .eth domain names, which can be used in supporting Ethereum wallets and clients. Names are reserved by placing a deposit in a smart contract and can be mapped to any Ethereum addresses. So rather than sending funds to 0x8cd…0935, one would simply need to type a memorable name like epicenter.eth into their wallet. Backed by the Ethereum Foundation, ENS will likely become the defacto standard for name registration in Ethereum. Topics covered in this episode: Alex and Nick’s respective backgrounds and roles in the Ethereum Foundation How the Internet’s Domain Name System works The problems and pain points with DNS and how it is governed today What is ENS and what problems it is addressing The ENS auction system and how names are registered The different parties involved in ENS ENS’s technical architecture and governing smart contract The current governance model of ENS and future plans for increased decentralization of governance ENS’s economic model and technical roadmap Episode links: Ethereum Name Service ENS Registrar ENS Github Project ENS Gitter Channel ENS Twitter Bot This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/183

This is Epicenter with guests Nick Johnson and Alex van de Sunday. This episode of Epicenter is brought you by the Ledger NanoS, the hardware wallet which sets the new standard in security and usability. Get it today at ledger wallet.com and use the offer code Epicenter to get 10% off your order. And by Jax. Jacks is the user-friendly wallet that works across all your devices and handles both Bitcoin and Ether. Go to J-A-A-DoubleX.io and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets. Hi, welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Sebastian Kujo.

And I'm Mahiroi. Today we shall explore the future of naming on the Ethereum blockchain. Specifically, we are talking to Nick Johnson and Alex Wanderthang. We're developing the ENS or the Ethereum Name System project. The ENS system went live today, so we think it's a great time to catch up with them. Before we start, let's have a short. introduction, starting with Nick. Nick, tell us a bit about your background and how you came to be in the blockchain space. Sure. So I've been a software engineer for sort of going on 15

years now. I've always been interested in infrastructure type projects, the sort of stuff that behind the scenes make stuff work. I hadn't really had much involvement in blockchains until very recently. When I sort of had chance to cross Ethereum from a pure coincidence and and had a look at it. I'm pretty sure I saw it during the crowd sale, but like many, sort of didn't do anything about it. And when I took another look, I was sort of really impressed with what was being built up and how rapidly. And since I love infrastructure in general, and Ethereum is basically the biggest and most interesting bit of new infrastructure on the internet in a long time. I was really intrigued. And next thing I know, I'm being offered

a position by the foundation to start working on Goetheum and so forth. And from there, it sort of, you know, spiraled from there. Cool. And now, now on to Alex. Now, many of you would know Alex as a UX designer and creator of MIST. But Alex, we'd love to hear from you how you got to be involved with blockchain technology in the first place. Well, I'm a designer by formation and by trade. And I was working just with developing apps and, like, so I'm just.

trying to be an entrepreneurship for a while, but then I started getting interested in Bitcoin, and then I started getting really interested in all the so-called back then Bitcoin.2.0 projects, right? And then that's how I got into Ethereum. It was one of the most active communities, and I just started helping people around. So back then it was before the proud sale, and a lot of people needed help with presentations and designs and screenshots and I started helping them on that. Then when the wholesale ended

and they had some money to hire people and to ask for help, they offered me a job. And I think I was among one of the first employees, one of the people who worked with a salary to the foundation, one of the first, a few of the first, one of the first buyers, I believe.

So that's how I very well, and I've been working with them since 2014. Cool. Well, I've always wondered what it's like for you to be one of these, let's say, sole well-known people in this space out of Brazil. Like, for example, I'm originally from India, and there are so few people from India in this space that for my friends and all, what I'm doing is might as well be, you know, completely bonkers. What is it like in Brazil? Do you think there's a huge community, like people understand what you're doing, your friends, understand what you do? Well, when I started,

the only places that I could, I wanted to hear anything about Ethereum were in probably in Bitcoin communities and they were both talking about Bitcoin price and mining. And then sometimes, oh, let's give the outcoin space now. And then I think one of the first thoughts I gave in Brazil was for a conference. So my time slot was just after some guy who was talking about crazy conspiracies on how everything on the word is going to end and how. And then after that there's Bitcoin mining. After that, there was a short space for all coins.

And then that goes me. So in the beginning The Brazilian Bitcoin community was really just about minor and trading, etc. And unfortunately, I think for a long time they are still like that. But I'm starting to see more interest in the entrepreneurship

and especially the social side. It seems that I've been talking more and more to people involved with NGOs and who want to give more looking on how much you can help governance and fight corruption, which is a big topic on the budget of Brazil right now. Cool. So let's get right into it. As Mayor mentioned, the ENS or Ethereum Yaming system went live the day that this is being recorded, so it's going to come in a few weeks. By then, there will be, I'm sure, lots of domain names that will have been registered.

registered. But as of now, there's a Twitter bot, I believe, that's tweeting out the names that are being bid on. And we were just looking at it. It seems to be, you know, the live release, it seems to be going smoothly, I take it. The frugal housewife, if it just went for action, so don't live it. So, yeah, so before we get into ENS and, you know, what? the technical architecture, what use people will be able to make out of this new system. First, I think it would be interesting to spend a little bit of time on DNS, so not the Dochecoin naming system, but the domain name system.

So I'd like to ask you guys first as an introduction, can you describe what the domain name system is and what role it plays in the functioning of the internet? Sure. So I think it probably helps to go back to how it originated. And back in the very early days of the internet, when it was still called the ARPANET, early 80s, there was no real domain name service. And the way you assigned a name to a computer was you literally called them up on the phone during business hours and you said, I would like this name to be associated with this IP address. And they edited a great big text file called host. dot TXT, the remnants of which you can still see on your computer today, and added the name in there. And then they sent that via FTP to every single person on the internet, basically. And if you wanted to visit a new site, you had to wait until the newest version of the host's file was distributed and make sure you got a copy before you could actually do it. A visitor site is a terrible term, of course, since this is pre-web, but at any rate. And this became sort of rapidly unwielding

as the number of hosts and the number of names ballooned. So some of the early sort of pioneers came together and Paul Mockeratris, who's one of the founders of the domain name system, in fact, wrote the effect of first version of it, set out to build a distributed system. And what he built is what eventually has become DNS today. And the way it works is it's actually one of the Internet's first distributed systems. We think about blockchains and so as being this, you know, revolution and distributed

systems, but to some degree, the DNS was kind of first. And the way it works is, is you have these root servers and they're responsible for answering queries about the first part of the name, or actually the last part, the way it's normally written. So dot com and dot net and dot org. And they, when asked, how do I resolve dot com, get sent to the servers responsible for dot com. And those then get asked about an expert example, for example, and then they send it to the expert and so on. And so the idea is that anyone wanting to register a new name can add it to the domain name system at the relevant part by asking the people who maintain that section of it to add them and then point to their own domain name server, which does the next bit and so forth.

I had no idea that host.t.txte was the originals of domain name system. I had no idea. That's That's really cool. It used to be literally all the wars. Wow. So you would just populate that with all the domain names, and then you had this company that would issue or iterative versions of this host.t, txd file, until it just got unmanageable.

Yep, exactly. Okay. So essentially there are these servers, and these servers are sort of the top-level domain name server. So you've got like dot com, dot org, like, dot Paris, you know, all these new domain names that have come out. And when you query, when you make a request, your ISP through its DNS servers will query the correct, I guess, root server for that top level domain or TLD. And then that TLD server will come back with response saying this domain name points to this IP address, and then you can then make that request.

So before you make any, you know, when you type Facebook.com or whatever, before you go to Facebook or get anything for Facebook, you're first contacting a DNS server, a directory essentially to get the IP address for Facebook servers. Yes. So there's actually one level above even the dotcom and dot netted.org ones, called the GTLD servers. And they just maintain a list of addresses. So you only need the one GTLD server. and that tells you where to find the dot-com server and the dot-neet server and the dot-neet server and the dot-org server and so forth.

Okay, so as new domain, as new top-level domain names start appearing, such as the case these last few years with, I think there's like a thousand now, your ISP or DNS provider, typically it's your ISP, will give you access to this list, of top level domain servers.

So the GTLD. No, so the GTLD is actually maintained by ICAN so that your ISP doesn't need to update with each in top of domain. I see what you're saying. Okay. Okay, so that's quite clear. So talk about how the, how to DNS system

and with regards to ICANN and how that works. What, you know, what is the governance model there? Like if me or some company, or anyone wants to register a new top-level domain, let's say I want to register, like, you know, dot epicenter, top-level domain. How does that work? What's the governance mechanism in order for that to happen, et cetera? So like you pointed out, it used to be that the answer was you don't.

You either put upwith.com. Dottingdog to org or you form a new country. And if you're lucky and you form a new country, then you'll get, you know, dot epicenter. so if you can form the epicenter country, then you're sorted. That changed a few years back when ICan decided to open up registrations for new TLDs, and of course now we have an incredible profusion of them. And the way that works is they opened up a limited period during which people could submit proposals for new TLDs. And if you were interested, then you wrote up a many, many page document describing what the TLD was

and what you intended to do with it and how you'd sell names to people and so forth and a whole lot of other details like security aspects and so on. And then you submitted that along with $100,000 application fee, which is void of rejected to ICAM. And then they went through all of the lists and assessed all of them and determined who got names

and who didn't according to the applications. And if you were lucky enough to get it, then you now owned exclusively the the registry for that top level domain and you could decide according to whatever rules you'd set who gets subdomains and how much they pay for them. So that that opportunity window to register new top level domains has now expired. That's no longer possible. Yes. So they're talking about opening it up again for a second batch of new domains. They might revise the rules from what we've learned the first time around. They might and in fact almost certainly will increase

the application fee. And then, yeah, they go through another period of accepting applications and then close it down and then review them all and so on and so forth. Why is it so expensive to register a new top-level domain? That's a very good question. My guess is a combination of the amount of due diligence they have to do and not wanting to be out of pocket for that and a deliberate tactic to erect a barrier of entry so that, you know, Joe Bloggs doesn't say I want dot Joe Bloggs unless he's really serious about it.

Right. Well, I mean, there could be some sort of an auction system, you know, that discouraged people. It seems like to look pretty well. I can have an effective monopody on the main system. So they sort of charge whatever they want. And are there any ways that, in your opinion, this system is vulnerable or have there been any? I mean, I know I'm asking this question, but I know that there have been attacks on DNS in the past. what are some of the ways in which the system is made vulnerable, either security vulnerabilities or any type of vulnerability? So I guess you can roughly divide it up into security and social issues

or technical and social issues. From a technical point of view, DNS was designed back before things like SSL even existed. Everything was in the clear on the internet, and the general threat model in the very early internet was only people we trust even have internet connections. And obviously that's changed, but the internet infrastructure has been slow to catch up. So DNS continues to be resolved entirely in the clear, and yet it's surprisingly easy in some situations for people to mess with your DNS replies.

If you're surfing the net at Starbucks on an open access point, then chances are that anyone who's in the same cafe as you can screw with your replies and send you to different sites. So DNS requests are not secure through HTTPS or some sort of a secured like... Exactly. And they're also, so they don't have the transport layer security like that. They don't even have, they also don't have any sort of security to attest to the origin of the report. So even if you knew your connection was right, you wouldn't know if the DNS server was lying to you or not.

And there are solutions to this, the accepted solution is DNSSEC, which is a sort of a stificate hierarchy. similar to how SSL works for websites and for other resources. So it relies on, you know, the root certificates being inviolate and they issue signing authority to dot com and dot net and dot org and dot babies and so forth. And they sign certificates for all the individual domains. But it's been, it's slow to be rolled out and has a lot of technical issues, both in terms of implementation and sort of legacy software. and there are political issues too, believe it or not,

because there's a whole bunch of attacks that are possible, for instance, if you can just lie about whether a name even exists, but proving that a name doesn't exist exposes some information about what names do exist and some people don't want other people knowing what names exist and so on and so forth. Also, there are some other issues which I can have effective control over the night. So if you are doing something that is,

illegal under the jurisdiction that I can is, your domain might be taken away from you, even if what you're doing is perfectly legal in your own country. And also that I would say this opens up the possibility of government firewall blocking a specific whole domains from existing or just switching them out. So I think I think that's a big. political vulnerability. It almost

seems like the DNS can be like a potential choke point in what is otherwise

a otherwise spread out and decentralised information very much so

unfortunately a number of countries sort of censorship systems ranging

from the fairly liberal you know that some some countries have

unfortunately adopted all the way down to very restrictive ones like Turkey

and so forth have relied at least historically and sometimes still on on being able to redirect DNS queries and sense the results. Let's take a break to talk about the Ledger NanoS, the new flagship hardware wallet by Ledger. I'll pass it over to the Ledger's CTO, Nicola Baca,

who can tell you all about Ledger's security features and SDK. So Ledger NanoS is a personal security device based on a secure element, a screen and button so that you can verify everything that is done on device and make sure that you are really doing what you want it to do. Compared to our previous solution, this device is based on the latest generation secure element, the ST-31 from ST-Micero. The SC-31 is using a secure armcore, which means that you can have the same ease of development that you would have on a generic microcontroller, but benefit from the security features of a secure element. Security features include an application firewall at the lowest level that let you protect applications from each other, which means that you can load multiple applications on the hardware wallet, even post-issurance,

and you as a developer will be able to leverage these features to load your own application without our authorization and without any kind of authorization from the vendor. We will be providing this device with an open SDK that let you do anything you want with this device. We provide sample applications for cryptocurrencies, different cryptocurrencies, so Bitcoin, Ethereum. We will also provide a Fido Authenticator, and you will be free to add everything you like. For example, you could have some secure messaging, some encrypted chat, and you'll see that the solution is quite powerful and very easy to develop with. The NanoS sets the new standard in hardware wallet security and usability. You can get yours today at ledgerwallat.com.

and when you do, be sure to use the offer code Epicenter to get 10% off your first order. We'd like to thank Ledger for their support of Epicenter. Let's segue into ENS, the Ethereum name system, starting with like, what is ENS and what is it trying to do? In short, ENS is our attempt to bring naming to Ethereum and blockchains in general, I guess, but for now let's, you know, stick with Ethereum, solve one enormous problem at a time. the idea is that you know blockchains first in the form of bitcoin and then in the form of other blockchains have been around for a while but people still communicate addresses to each other as if it was 1984 and host stock txt was all the rage or in fact even before that so if you want to

send some funds to somebody you have to get their you know their Ethereum address off them or their Bitcoin address or whatever and it's a big long you know string that's completely unhuman readable and very easy to typo with terrible consequences if you do. And while it's difficult to build a distributed naming system on top of a first-generation chain like Bitcoin, Ethereum actually makes this really easy. It's really straightforward to build a naming system in terms of technical implementation. And there have been attempts in the past, but they haven't really attempted to address

the full set of use cases that a naming system can engage in. So the goal of Egines is effectively just to go from human readable names like Ethereum.D.Eath or Wallets.Eth or whatever to various different types of resources. The most common ones being somebody's wallet address or a contract that you want to interact with or a site hosted on Swarm and IPFS, things such as that. interesting enough, I think it's interesting to know that this whole issue sort of predated you for a bit, right? So one of the first use cases of blockchain other than the coins was probably name coin as far as I remember, which was clearly an attempt of on building a

decentralized naming system. And sort of name coin didn't really, wasn't really, was really successful with that. And then when other blockchain, when other people try to make other uses of blockchain, that's when sort of color coin and master coin sort of spouting up, I think, I would say that was sort of the beginning of June because then a lot of users sort of realize, look, why do we have a separate blockchain for naming and a separate blockchain for keeping track of assets and a separate asset and a separate blockchain for some kinds of financial transactions. Ideally, there should be one single blockchain that allows more contracts. So in a sense, trying to build name, disenfranchised name systems to date Ethereum and help,

I would say help launch the whole platform. Cool. So one question that comes to my mind is we've had name coin. which was based on like a Bitcoin like architecture where there's like inputs and outputs to a transaction and then on top of Bitcoin one of the famous

projects that was trying to do naming of another type was the one name project right? So so like tell us how Ethereum offers something different compared to

compared to these systems so so you're On Ethereum you have ENS and then on a Bitcoin architecture you had name coin and one name. When you go from those architectures to Ethereum, what kind of capability opens up? So I think probably one of the main points is that those other systems have started off by trying to solve the naming problem for the whole world. they've affected, they're trying to build a replacement for DNS right off the bat. They try to resolve internet domain names and so forth. And while that's something that I look forward to seeing with ENS,

our initial goal is to solve naming for Ethereum. So we're not going up against the entire mass of the entire legacy internet. We're attempting to make Ethereum easier to use and easier to interact with and other related resources like Swarm and IPFS easier to interact with. And then, you know, once we've fixed that, as if that's not a big enough problem, we can try and tackle the entire internet. Yeah, and I think the whole interoperability of the Tudium is also a great way in how it works better in the Tune, because for us, it's not,

because once you are using one blockchain, once you are using, an app can connect with you in, if you understand the token, if you understand an ether, if you want to interact with, let's say, a crowd sale contract, you can use ENF directly from it. So the more apps we have an ecosystem, the more they will be able to use the unit itself. So I think that's, they sort of fit in each other. So speaking of apps, I mean, when you think about it, perhaps it's not obvious to everyone, to everyone, but a DNS system is really a way of improving user experience. It's taking, you know, addresses that are not friendly, human-friendly, human-readable, and making them human-friendly and

human-readable. So from that perspective, I think that it's an interesting way to, perhaps perhaps, you know, in one sense, make user adoption a bit better, or help user adoption through improving the user experience. Like, you know, we had status on recently, you know, they're doing something else in that realm. And it seems that this, although it's perhaps an obvious, you know, when you look at it, because it's a sort of technical thing, it is a user experience play in a sense. And so I'd like to ask you then as a follow-up as a developer, how will I integrate this

into my DAPs and how will it change the experience for my users? Okay. Can I answer first the user perspective? Because I think that helps the developer side. So we are building this, which is an Ethereum browser that allows you to load applications. Just by developing myth, we have two main problems. that we've been able to notice. First of all, it's just sending names around, right?

As Nick has spoken before, just in order to send a transaction to anyone, you have to have their their team address, which, I mean, it's not immutable. I cannot tell you over the phone what my team address is. I have to copy-based it, and of course you can add a typo there. So right there is a problem. and we want our users to be able to type if they want to let's say make a donation to epicenter to epicenter tv we should be able to just go to your wallet and type epicenter and they would be able to know that okay that's their correct address and the second thing is that this is also a browser

and is we are implementing swarm for it which allows you to connect to a site that is not hosted hosted anywhere, it's actually you're downloading it from a peer-to-peer network. And it's great because you are, you can be sure that you are always downloading the, instead of typing an address or an IP address that tells you where something is, a hash describes you what exactly you are trying to download. So instead of having an IP address, what you have is sort of a hash. It describes really a version of an application, which calls you. of the files, which of all the assets you need.

But of course, then we have the same problem that IP address is held in the beginning, and the same problem we have with a digital address, which is in order for you to connect to an app, you need to type a hash, which are 64 characters in which you cannot mistake a single, any one of them. And then that's another problem that we need a DNS to help it. So right now, and then you'll be able to be able. to say, look, I want you to, or users to download the Epicenter, go to the Epicenter app to interact

to us. So you can just type Epicenter.if on your myth browser and you can download either from Swarm or from the FS. Just turns out also this kind of problems that we are having with M is the kind of problems that everyone has, right? So Stato's IM has the same issues by sending the same issue. And Metamath has the same issues. have this issue. So by solving it in a global scale, it's any, anyone, any developer can just plug E and ask into it and help solve it in their app. And then so from the developer's perspective, you know, if I make the comparison to a browser, the browser calls up, you know, a DNS server and then that gets the information from the server for, you know, the corresponding

IP address and domain name. As an app developer, I plug in the E&S smart contract and call up that smart contract to get the corresponding domain name and ether address. If your app interacts with the blockchain,

you can ask it to you have any information about an email, right? So you have a name and it's epicenter.com. And you can request them anything you want the sounds like, look, I want, what do you want from it? I want a digital address so I can send funds. I'm a wallet.

Okay, here's the, here's what you have. Oh no, I'm a Bitcoin wallet and I want, what is the Bitcoin address for Epicenter or not if? Here you are. You can query that particular software. Oh no, I want, I'm looking for a hash of content or maybe an IP address or something like that. Then you just query the smart contract and it will be able to tell you,

any sort of information that is attached to that particular name. And actually, recently in one of the token sales, there was this token sale for this project called token card, right? And a very interesting incident happened. I'm sure the two of you know that incident, that there was this person who was trying to send like 250 Ether to the smart contact with token sale contract. And this guy had the wallet like my ether wallet loaded up on his screen and he was searching for the address to which he ought to send that money to.

And in order to get that address, what he did was he went to the Slack of this token card project. And he browsed through the Slack and he saw a message where it seemed like one of the administrators of that Slack had put in the address to which the fund's ought to be sent to. He took that address, sent it to that particular address, he sent 250 Ether. And then, I think, like, 30 minutes later, he realized that he had been scammed. Because on the Slack, that particular message wasn't put by the admin, but was rather put by some kind of attacker for lack of a better word. And he ended up sending all those 250 Ether to this other address and basically lost that money. And like when I was reading that thing,

I was like, okay, we do need human readable names for smart contracts, right? So, so that, you know, in the future token sales, I can just say, okay, I want to send to the cosmos token sale, I can just type like cosmos token sale and send the money and be sure it's safe,

something like that. I think that's a good example, yeah. Although a note of caution, of course, is that anyone can buy a name, so anyone could have bought that. a properly handled token sale, of course, would buy the name ahead of time, and they would declare this is the name that the contract will be available on when it's ready. And that gives you the advantage that you can spread that information far and wide ahead of time. And then when

there's a rush, you don't have to wait for, you know, somebody who looks legit, but as you point out, it turns out they weren't to post a mysterious address that everyone just takes on faith. Yeah, I would say that ENF felt the problem. And I would say that the client's themselves should try to solve the second part, which is to check that. EnS can tell you what is the address related to that name, right? Let's say if you have a type on your name, or if you're having, if you bought, if you're typing a similarly sounding name, probably in your wallet it should have some sort of check saying,

look, this is actually a name that it sends money to before. So it's another way in which you can, I would say that we always need to be building more and more protections to user on top of it. Because we can never underestimate the kinds of issues that user can, users will find itself. Yeah. And I think the other thing that looks interesting about ENS to me is, and this really falls out of the nature of the Ethereum platform is. So we started off the show with DNS and like comparing it to ENS. And when I look at DNS, as far as I'm aware, it's a system that maps like human readable names like Amazon.com to IP addresses. But and you can say that ENS is like sort of a better version of DNS or decentralized version of DNS eventually.

But in reality like what ENS is doing is something that. probably even DNS doesn't because like a smart contract is essentially like an execution of a program right and this is this program and there's this execution of a program and ENS maps names to executions of programs like not just IP address but names to executions of programs and maybe even names to previous versions of a particular website right so if you map an ENS name to an IPFS address, then maybe every new version of that website gets a slightly different name, and you can actually map names to different versions of websites as well, right?

So it seems to me like a system that has the potential to offer much bigger capabilities down the line than much, much bigger UX advantages down the line than the DNS system itself. You're exactly right to point out versioning. There's already a package management system being built for Solidity, Ethereum's main programming language, that relies on this in ENS. So it uses ENS to register package names and allows you to register different versions against different names. Likewise, there's people working on a decentralized version of Git, which uses E&S to register the heads, you know, the tags and branches of Git. So it's a perfect example of where it extends beyond regular DNS. Also, I would say that just the fact that one big difference is that ENS itself is a digital property, right?

When you own the domain, what you actually own, you're just owning a promise that there is someone who holds your domain for you, then you keep your domain for you and then you charge your credit card for it. You cannot actually do something with your domain. So we are talking about, just for instance, token sale. right? You're talking about raising money into a token sale. Right now the token say just goes into a molystick account and then that molystick account just is controlled by your founders. In theory, what you could have is that you could have a contract that controls also the ENF domain for that the name. So let's say that you want to run a epicenter proud sale, right? And you could make so that you could make a contract that

controls epicenter. If, and then if, let's say, if your crowd sale token are not happy with yourself, they could own the domain and take it elsewhere, or you could get that domain and loan it to someone or put it as a collateral of a law. You could have a sale for, let's say, oh, I want to raise 10,000, I want to get 10,000, borrow $1,000, and if I don't pay this back by the end of the month, then you have to get to control my name for, let's say, 24 hours. And you can, like, post it on social media or something. Like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm a terrible pair. I never paid my deal.

Or you can use the deposit that was used to register the name itself as a collateral as well. Exactly. It's like the name itself becomes a smart asset, right? Yes. So we might think of a DNS name as still like sort of a dumb asset, Like you can do very limited things with it. But like ENS names could be smart, smart assets. So I think these things, these things like seem non-obvious,

but I think they could be very important down the line. So with that, like let's kind of walk down into the technical architecture of ENS. So explain to us like how it works, how the system works from 10,000 feet up. So I sort of described earlier how DNS works in terms of you have your root servers and they redirect to the next ones and so on and so forth. E&S attempts to retain that sort of abstraction and the diffusion of responsibility such that you can delegate ownership to other parties at different levels of the domain tree without some of its advantages of that system if you applied it to Ethereum. So if we went directly with mirroring DNS onto ENS, then if you wanted to resolve, you know,

foo. bar, dot baz, baz, dot bas, blah, dot ENS, you would have to do a whole series of lookups, and that would either be, depending on whether you're doing it on-chain or off, expensive in terms of gas or slow in terms of real time. And if you're doing it on-chain, of course, you have very little opportunity to cash any of that, so you incur that cost every time. So the ENS structure is a little different.

it has a single central contract called the registry, and the registry maintains a tree of every single name in the E&S system. But it's a very sort of barebones tree. The only thing it knows about each name, so by name I mean dot-eath and then foo dot-eath and then bar. comfoo.com and so on is who owns it, and that's the person who has permission to make changes, and what the resolver is for it.

And then the Resolver is another contract that can be, you know, anyone can write a Resolver, anyone can deploy a Resolver, and if you own a name, you can point at that Resolver. And the Resolver's job is to actually do the lookups. So every name lookup in the E&S system is a two-step thing, a two-step process. First you ask the Central Registry, which Resolver is responsible for Epicenter.eath, and it returns an address. and then the software asks that address, what is the Ethereum wallet address, or what is the swarm hash or whatnot of RepaCenter.eath to answer the query. So the advantage of this is that everything only ever requires two steps, but you get the same decentralized nature,

you get the same distribution of authority and distribution of implementation, so people can implement their own resolvers. They can add new features without having to centrally coordinate it that you get from a system like DNA. names. Okay, so I basically, I'm starting to imagine this giant list of, uh, what, like name and the resolver at which you have to query in order to figure out what that name leads to. Yes, exactly. That's so, but that is the registry and it's, it's like this, this giant list and that is, that list is what, uh, is the key component of what you have built. And in order

to figure out what that name exactly leads to, anybody could write their own resolvers as smart contracts. So maybe those resolvers could also reside on systems other than Ethereum. Well, yes and no. They need to exist as a theory of smart contracts in order to call them. So the sort of the two components are the actual implementation of the registry, the big list, and the interface that resolvers have to obey. So they do need to exist as a, Ethereum smart contracts, but they can get their data from anywhere. So you can write a resolver that updates its data from any sort of resource you want. You know, for off-chain, it can be signed, it could be a multi-sig.

It can be, you know, as Alex was suggesting, you could have something where it's owned by a token contract and so forth. So this sort of starts to be like the registry itself is like very dumb. and then all of the smartness that we are talking about that on an ENS a name can be loaned, it can be part of financial transaction, all these smartness arises because you can make smart resolvers do different things. Yes, and not just smart resolvers, you can also have smart owners. So the owner of a name can be just an external account. I can own a name myself, but if I want, I can make a contract that owns a name.

And when the contract owns a name, it gets to set the rules for how the resolver is updated or what subdomains it creates and so on and so forth. So that's actually how registrars work on Ennis. All they are is they're a contract that owns a name and they set the rules for when they will hand out subdomains and who they'll get them to. That's really amazing. So I think, yeah, for me, like this kind of thing kind of demonstrates the power of Ethereum, right? like you have something that is absolutely dumb, which is just like a list of, okay,

like here's a name and here's a contract, go to that contract to figure out what this name is, right? It's an absolutely dumb list, but like it's like you can build all of these smart things on the edges and like slowly as people build smart things on the edges, you keep getting all sorts of emergent behavior that is unexpected. Before we kind of go down into technical details, tell us some of these emergent behaviors that can sort of happen when, like, programs own names or the resolvers are smart in some way. So I mean, I think the first ones that occurred to us were the possibility of registrars, like I mentioned.

So the, you know, Dot-Eath is owned by a contract and because that contract owns a name, it's a registrar. And we can set arbitrarily complex rules for how it hands things out. So we use an auction-based system on the main net, but on the test net deployment, we use a first-and-first-serve type system that gives you any name you ask for, but expires them after 28 days. If you want to buy wallets.com, then you can set up your own wallets.cometh registrar, which can then hand out names according to your own set of rules, which might be free to everyone, or they might have to pay you a deposit, or, you know, pay your... an outright fee or any number of things. And, you know, what makes a registrar is effectively just what the interface is. So if you have a multi-sig that owns a name, is that a registrar? I don't know.

You know, it's just a bunch of people deciding to do stuff. If you think back about the early days of the DNS system where you had to call them up during working hours to ask for a new name, was that a registrar? I suppose it was. It was a person whose job was to type date names. In terms of the resolve range of things, where the sort of smartness comes in there is, I guess it's twofold. One is that the set of resources that you can resolve, so, you know, swarm hashes and Ethereum addresses and IPFS addresses and so on and so forth, depends only on the resolve, but not on the registry. The registry knows nothing about resource types.

So if you come up with a new resource type that you want to be able to resolve, say you decide that, you know, the latest topness is, is, you know, a new token registry or something. You can write up a short spec saying this is the interface that resolvers must implement in order to be able to resolve this. And then anyone can invent a new resolver and deploy it. And the ENS system instantly supports this new type of information without any sort of, the only coordination you need is making sure other people know that they can do it as well. and I guess the final bit is that you can add smartness to the resolvers in other ways

for instance we know radin is coming soon there's no built-in support in ethereum for radin but it doesn't really need it because you can write a resolver that's raden compatible and it's capable of taking updates and you know from radin channels and then now your name supports raiden because your resolver does and that didn't require any central coordination or hard forks or upgrades or anything.

I think it's important to note that. I think there's two things that Nick said it bears the bidding because, so first of all, let's say that Whisper is a protocol, right? Maybe your whisper ID might be another one or someone can come up with another D2P protocol where you can control, that you can connect to, that it requires some other sort of connection. You can add that to your EMS. That means that let's say that you are building a chat application on Ethereum. You can have the same name that you use on EMS.

You can use it as your chat interface. So if someone builds Twitter on Ethereum, you already have your username. That means that if you got Epicenter. At some point, you will be Epicenter. If you will be, you own the name Epicenter on every single app, connects to ENF for their own protocol. And I think that's important because then your name belongs to the user.

Your name doesn't necessarily belong to the social media platform or whatever platform you're using right now. I think that's important. Let's take a short break to talk about Jax. Jax is your wallet, your complete user interface to cover all your blockchain needs. I've been using it and I've been loving it. Now, Jax supports a lot of different cryptocurrencies. I suppose Bitcoin, Ether, Lycone, Ethereum Classic, Zcash,

or the RECA rep, and they're adding many more, keep responding to users' needs. Now, with Jacks, the nice thing is that you can manage all of those coins within a single wallet, and you are in control of your own private keys, they're not on their server, and there's a single 12-word seed that you can use to back up your wallet, all your coins, and sync them across different devices. Talking about devices, they're on pretty much any device that you can think of. You can get it on PC, Mac, Linux, you can get it on software, smartphones like Android and Apple and iPhone.

You can get it on tablets or even browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. And on top of that, in JAX, you can actually exchange different cryptocurrencies for each other because they've integrated a shape shift. And more partnerships and integrations are coming down the line in 2017 that are going to make Jax even better. So Jax is really making blockchain and cryptocurrency successful for the masses, easy to use for the masses. Make sure to get you. own Jacks wallet at jacks.io or you can get it from any of the app stores you are using.

We'd like to thank Jacks for their supportive epicenter. You guys are essentially running a, you're running a Resolver and a registrar. So the registrar is the part that allows people to register the domain name. So right now it's at registrar.enS.domains. And good domain, by the way. And you're also going to be running the Resolver that is going to be returned. turning the corresponding smart contract address or, you know, wallet address for any domain that somebody, yeah, for any domain name that someone queries.

So I guess we wrote and deployed the registry, but when somebody registers a name, we deploy a sort of a default resolver for them, but they can if they choose deploy their own, you know, their own version of resolver and so. Okay. And so then let's say I register wallet studies and, you know, I'm a nice guy, so I'm letting people register domain names for free, like subdomains of Wallet Studies. So I can have like Nick.wallis.8.Eath. I can have Meher.orgat.com. And I then essentially run a Resolver.

So when people query that top, well, that, yeah, that Wallace.D.Eth domain name, then I'm providing the subdomain, the corresponding addresses for the subdomain. So it's sort of cascading. You have like resolvers over resolvers, over resolvers. I think that's very important because one of the issues is how do you select a name, right? So right now, in order to own a name, it takes about five days incomplete. From the moment you say you want to own a name, then there's three days where anyone can also claim the same name and bid for it, and then there are two days which you can review your bids.

And so you cannot get a name faster than five days by the time. But for some cases, what you really want, you don't want any bids, you don't want any. So it requires five days and at least two or three transactions, different transactions for you to complete a name purchase. But for most cases, what you want, you just want a user to click one button and own a name immediately. So if you own, let's say, wallet. If you could give away subdomains for your own users. and then I can be Alex that wallet,

or Nick. that wallet. If, and it could work short of like an email address, right? So you are Alex at Ethereum. if as it, right? Okay.

And what would present anyone from, you're sort of establishing yourself as a dot-eath top level domain, what would prevent anyone else from, you know, just forking your project and having a competing top-level domain that is conflicting with your namespace?

So the short version is network effect. The way that somebody starts resolving things on the ENS system is that they get the address of the registry, that sort of central tree, big list of domains. And once they've got that, they can look up every other name under it, they can look up all the registrars and so forth. If somebody wanted to establish their own ultimate hierarchy of DNS, they could absolutely

do that. They just deploy their own registry. They set up their own registrars if they want, and that name is under whatever rule they want. But the same thing happened on DNS. There are, you know, alternate DNS registries, but they suffer from the network effect in that unless somebody knows to use your version of the registry as the, you know, the source of one, they're not going to actually be able to look up the names that you registered.

So one of the things that we also have to consider is that in order, so you mentioned registrar.e.Ns. Domains, right? You mentioned that as if it's the place where you can buy a name. So that's not necessarily true in the sense that, I mean, we built an app where you can register a name, particularly on registrar.comstor.com. But the magic of Ethereum is that anyone can deploy their own app to register domains. And actually, they have. So my iterative wallet has deployed their own registered app. My inters can have deployed their own ENF connection, ENS support.

And I think that connects to the reason on why I think it's hard for, where it becomes interesting because the process of doing ENS means that we connected, we contacted my Eater wallet, connected to the GER scan, we connected the guys from parity. We connect, contact the guys from Metamask. And everyone sort of, and status as I am, and everyone agreed and wanted to get support for ENS. So I think that's what you need to have if anyone, anyone could deploy their own ENF system, I mean, they would have to have all the client support in that.

Right. Okay. So the network effect is really important. So, you know, in a sense, a competing top-level domain might be hard. It may be hard to, like, move you out of that dominant position. But someone could register or could decide to do like a dot Ethereum or, I don't know, like a dot DAP or something like that. and make that available for any wallet provider to query that resolver and, you know, they could have their own registration service and whatnot. I'd like to talk about the auction system that you've put in place in order to register domains.

Can you explain how that works? Yeah, of course. So the way we are doing it works. So we went through many iterations with the community, going back and forth, giving ideas and people coming back to us. And the way we are working right now is what it's called the VICRE option, right? So what we want is that there is no rush. There is no, you don't need to be there first. We really didn't want to create a land rush where everyone, whoever was the first to register or something,

we just immediately get it. right so that's why we sort of created this the thing that takes necessarily five days total so the way it works is that you put it you put a single bid for how much you value a domain right so if you if let's say you'll see a domain and say i would pay a thousand dollars for it right i would pay 10 eaters in order to be able to own that domain you put uh so you put a few few bid no one can know how much you put no one can know which domain you can know which domain is you can't you can't know which domain you you're trying to try to win. And then you put that few bit. There's this period of three days in which anyone can see that that domain is open for and they can also put bids down there. After those three days, there are two days which people can reveal those bids. And then at the end, what happens is the person who wanted to value their name the boss.

So that means if you evaluate $1,000, you will win. the name. You only pay what is necessary for the second highest price. So basically, you only pay what is necessary for you to overbid the second highest person. So if you were willing to pay $1,000, if someone, someone offer $100, then you only need to pay, you only need to deposit $100. Okay. So I mean, sort of similar to like an eBay auction, I guess, in a sense. So once I've registered that domain name, and it's, it's mine. And let's say, I want, win that auction, how long do I have that domain name for? Because with DNS, you know, typically you register a domain name for a year and then after

you have to pay for it again. So how does that work with ENS? So right now, what you're doing is that you're not paying anyone, you're just locking that net, that each amount of each year for one year, right? So, so, so you're just, you're just locking that that amount for the, for one year or for how long we want to keep that domain. And right now we have to buy the part. a temporary register.

And the idea is that we want to see how people act, how people react, how people buy domains, how people try to squat on domain names. And after one or two years, we intend to deploy a new, more permanent register. And the main

difference will be that currently right now, all you need to do is that right now there is no sort of registration fee. We need to have a recurrent fee that you need to keep buying. What do you on the moral permits

register there will probably be some way that there will be a recurring some sort of fee that you need to pay just to prove

that you are alive and you are not actually just quad in the name right so how is that going to work we don't know but we know that

I think we have something to say here so I was just going to say that the I guess the Ruzian site with Alex is getting at is we realize that it's not really practical to design an entirely new system for allocating and managing names entirely from scratch when very few people are involved so far.

So in some ways we're following a sort of a startup methodology of the minimum viable product. So we've launched a registrar that is capable of allocating names using a fair auction system, of allowing you to use those to interact with the NS. but it's not the permanent government system. The goal is that we'll use the first couple of years' experience to build expertise, both with ourselves and with others, and the community, to raise awareness about the, you know, and raise the profile of the NS,

and then to, together with the rest of the community, design and build a permanent registrar that, you know, that we believe will function well for the environment it lives in. So the registrar you see today is the interim one and implements what's necessary to sort of goodstrap things and get them off the ground. Okay, so this auction system currently, it's an auction system where you bid on a domain. Once that the sort of auction period has expired, the highest bidder gets the domain name and that money is locked. for a year. And at that point, then sort of auctions, I presume, would start again,

and that whole process would start once again a year later? Not quite. So your name, your deposit is locked for at least a year, and that's to prevent people from sort of bidding on something and immediately giving it up and getting it back. After a year, you can, if you want, relinquish the name and get the deposit back. but if you want to keep using the name, you can do that. You just leave the deposit where it is and you can continue using the name.

Okay. And the name is yours effectively until the permanent registrar rolls out, at which point how it works is up to the what the community decides the permanent registrar should do. Okay. So I see perhaps a problem there where, you know, if I'm locking, let's say I put in, I don't know, like five eth right now, right, for a domain and that's worth like, okay, $500. is around $500 at today's price. In a year from now, if ether is worth $1,000, all of a sudden, I'm no longer locking $500,

but I'm locking $5,000, whereas the value of that domain name has not gone up, you know, tenfold. The money that I'm effectively locking in is now worth ten times as much. Is there any way that you plan to mitigate that? Can I review my sort of bid at the end of that year period? We considered proposals like that when we were initially building the registrar. And one of the problems is that it introduces both complexities and opportunities to gain the system. You can't hold another option for the name unless you're willing to take the risk that the name gets taken off the person who originally registered it.

and we've got a very high value on stability of names, on the idea that once you've registered a name, it should take some fairly extraordinary circumstances for it to no longer be yours. So it's difficult to sort of impartially assess, you know, what the deposit should be now, what the name is worth now, without either introducing, you know, game theory problems or without introducing opportunities to exploit it or just significant additional complexity.

So when you're bidding on a name today, you should be doing so in the knowledge that you're going to have to tie up the deposit for at least a year, no matter how much ether moons. And when that time comes up, you're going to have to make the decision of which is more valuable to you being guaranteed to retain the name or the deposit money. And if you want to take the risk, you could relinquish the name and get your deposit back and then immediately start a new auction. But you're doing that and the knowledge that somebody's... else might decide that it's more valuable to the in than it was to you. Let's now move on to one of the final topics for this show, which is, so the core thing that you're building is a registry that tracks dot-enS names, right? Names that end with dot-enS.

Tell us about the governance of the dot-ETH registry. So in the short term, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's. entirely automated. So the interim registrar has rules for options, allocating names. It has no dispute process. It has no way to revoke, you know, legitimate names. Once you've got a name, you have it for the duration of the interim registry. In the long run, you know, the governance is something that will evolve with the community and whatever we deploy for the permanent registry will decide what that looks like. And I really hope that some of the people listening will get involved in the discussions about how

that should look because I think we both Alex and I, although we have slightly different views on how the permanent governance should work, both want lots of input from, both from the outside, and just to learn how it functions in the interim. I also get the sense you might be asking about the root and the multi-circ, is that right? Yeah. So the other component to ENS governance is at a level above the dot East, the Dot East register. and that's the root. So like we talked about earlier in DNS, how there are root name servers

that are responsible for telling your name server where to find.com.net.org. There is a root node in the DNS, which is the sort of the empty name. And that is the record, the node that is allowed to create new top level domains and reassign registrars for top level domains and so forth. And so, of course,

there's a problem of how do you govern that for you? and again in the sort of a minimum viable product line at the moment what we're doing is we have a multi-sig that is owned by seven individuals in the Ethereum community and they together have to sign four out of seven majority is necessary in order to make any changes to the root of EMS and everyone who signed up agreed to a very sort of specific

and fairly restrictive agreement on what circumstances that would happen in, which is effectively, in case of mitigating and impending disaster, in the case of technical upgrades, like replacing the interim registrar with a permanent one, or in the case of, you know, other changes to the systems that the community as a whole, you know, is in consensus on and the individual keyholders feel is not an appallingly terrible idea. You can see the exact list of what the keyholders agreed to on enS.domains. In the long run, we would like to see the multi-sig-based governance replaced with something more distributed, which might be some form of DAO that is capable of taking votes from stakeholders in the system and so on.

but I think designing that government system, especially since I think we both believe it should have a significant bias in favor of stability, is going to be, I think, at least as big a challenge as designing the DOTE's permanent registrar. So in the short term, we've handed it over to these keyholders in order to sort of secure it and make sure that things don't go horribly wrong in the short term. Okay. So the long, what's the, do you have like a roadmap that you've sort of set out to, you know, have a governance system by, you know, this time or this timeframe? So the roadmap for DOTEth is basically a year from now starts soliciting submissions and working on design for a permanent registrar with a goal of rolling that out two years from now. We haven't seen an explicit timeline for a place in the multi-sig because I think we'd like to see how. things work out with the Dot-Eath governance first. But I think the goal is that we could start working on that

in terms of a permanent thing, more or less as soon as we're happy with Dot-Eath. And I think what will inform us a lot there is other attempts at DAO's, things like Colony and so forth and how well they function and where their strengths and weaknesses lie to help us build something permanent for the route. Also, it's interesting to know the limitations of the current policy polls, right? Because they have the control to upgrade the DNS, but they do not have controls or any access of any of the funds that are locked into the NS system. So if they, the worst thing they could do is to create a new sort of DNS that would not,

that would not assign names into a way that other people would like to. And what that means is that everyone could just migrate to a new ENS system and use the previous version and get all their iterator holding back. After a year, they'd be able to get their ether back? Yes. Okay. So if for some reason, like Vlad and New Nick and Juan and even like Aaron Fisher, decides that they want... If they change the current rules, if they deploy a new contract, you can immediately take your eater back, right?

If you can choose. Okay. And if they don't change anything, and then after a year, you define that holding that name is not worth for you. You can relieve back the name to the wild and then get your age of back. Okay. Because I was kind of concerned about this four of seven multi-sig, although, you know, it sort of makes sense to, you know, look at the community and respected people in the community. to hold, you know, have this responsibility.

At the same time, it's sort of a homogeneous bunch of people that, you know, the risk of collusion is quite, is quite high if you think about it. A better, more heterogeneous option would be like to take people that, you know, are from different communities or perhaps even different, you know, types of open source projects or people, people that are not even involved with, you know,

with the blockchain space. But, you know, it's sort of reassuring to know that at least there are some safeguards there that would prevent them from taking funds, from specifically taking funds. And that if anything like that were to happen, not that it's likely, you know, domain name holders would be able to get their funds back at the end? Exactly. Should ENS collapse under some sort of, you know, massive collusion between like Vlad and Nick and Juan? that, you know, the fund funding members would be reimbursed. I think there's a definite sort of network effect going on there too, which is that we selected the people we did because we knew and trusted them

and the people we know and trust are searching to be part of the same community. And also we need them to have some level of awareness. We don't need them to have a detailed technical understanding of how the system works, but they need to have at least a basic level of awareness of the system and its constraints in order to act an informed way because we really don't want a rather stamp bureaucracy. We want the keyholders to actually listen to our arguments about why a change should be made and make up their own minds. So before we wrap up, tell us where can people find you? How can people get involved? Is there any, are you looking for people to join the

project? This is your chance to call out to the community. Great. So you can, you can Find us, if you want information, on E&S. Domains. If you want to join in the conversation in the community on Gitter, we're in the Ethereum slash Name-Registry Channel. And yes, we are absolutely looking for people to contribute. Read up the documentation, have a chat with us, come up with new ideas, submit EIPs, sorry, EIPs. And yeah, please do get involved because the system's going to be

The more successful, the more people build on top of us, the more people improve on it. All right, cool. And we'll add those links to the show notes. So anybody who's interested can look up the registrar, try to register a domain or join the committee on Gitter. So thanks a lot, guys, for joining us today on Episenter. It was a pleasure speaking with you and learning about ENS.

My pleasure. Thank you for inviting us. And thank you for our listeners for tuning in. Epicenter is part of the Let's Talk Bitcoin Network. you can find this show and lots of other great shows at let's talk bitcoin.com. Of course, if you like the show, there's lots of different ways you can support us. Of course, you can tell all your friends about it. You know, you can just go like, just go tell all your friends that Epicenter is great and you love it

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