foreign
[Music]
I'm Nick Johnson founder of ens and lead
developer and I'm here to give you an
update on what's happened with enes in
the last three years which is give or
take 300 years in crypto
before I actually start can anyone who's
got an ens card hold it up above their
head
wonderful probably about half of you I'm
so delighted with how everyone's been
doing with this if the person next to
you held a card up have a word with them
say hi tap your phone to their card and
you'll get a poab that proves that you
visit uh that you met them at Defcon uh
we still have a few of these cards left
at our booth on level three uh so after
the event come down we'll print one for
you with your ens name and your ens
avatar on it we expect we'll run out
sometime this evening so I'm sorry if we
don't get to everyone
um but this is a great opportunity to
meet the person next to you and have
cryptographic proof of that afterwards
so uh first off the agenda uh I'm going
to recap everything we've done in the
last three years and then go on to talk
about what we're working on now and what
we're working on next uh first of all in
the next category uh Thorin which is
ens's New Look and design system and new
app second of all talking about scaling
ens with off-chain reads and writes next
the name wrapper which you may have
heard about is a way to improve the
functionality of igneous names and the
ability to issue trustless subdomains
finally zero gas DNS integration how we
can use these other components we've
built to make ens integration possible
for DNS names without any guest fees and
then the conclusion
so first of all the recap it's been a
long long time since I've been at a
conference since I've talked on a stage
in front of a lot of people uh since
I've given anyone an update on ens last
time I spoke was at last Devcon October
2019 uh we're just transitioned from the
interim uh auction registrar to the
permanent registrar featuring its
current renewal model and that was a
mere five months ago and while it was
doing well at the time we had very
little idea of the phenomenon ens was
going to be coming in the next few years
we had about 50 Integrations with
various wallets including metamask
applications such as etherscan and so
forth that's changed a bit in the last
three years our set of Integrations now
looks more like this
laughs
so as you can see we've come a long way
from under 50 Integrations to over 500
we had about 300 000 registrations back
in the day that's now over two and a
half million uh we had about 96 000
ethereum addresses that had interacted
with ens in some way that's now over a
million addresses
um 66 700 years of registration had been
purchased that's now over six and a half
million uh if you strung them all into
in figuratively uh and the nascent EMS
treasury had a stunning 382 ethernet at
the time that's now 38 000 teeth and
I'll talk soon about the Dow and how
it's able to put that to use
of course it's not all about the numbers
ens has accomplished a lot on both
Technical and governance fronts in the
past three years uh some of it will seem
like old news but it's been a long time
uh at divcon 5 we had limited DNS
integration with only the dot XYZ TLD
supported uh you could take a neonessner
sorry.e XYZ name you could import it
into ens and use it just like you would
any dot ethname since then this has been
expanded to nearly every top level
domain uh that supports DNS Tech so
that's nearly 90 of all top level
domains nearly any name can now be
imported into enes and used as a native
name uh just ask our developer Advocate
Loop dot computer it's printed on his
badge I believe
there are transaction fees associated
with importing any of these names and at
times when gas prices have been very
high and The Ether price has been very
high it's been quite pricey but we've
got a plan to improve that massively
which I'll talk about shortly
another major Improvement has been ens's
transition away from being just a way to
name wallets and decentralized content
to being a web 3 native identity
platform with the introduction of Avatar
records and text fields that provide
information about your profiles such as
your Twitter handle your email address
your ens name now represents you as your
web3 identity it's a universal portable
identity and one project that's been
bringing that to more users is sign in
with ethereum it started out as an RFP
issued by ens and it was funded by a
joint Grant from ens and the ethereum
foundation
Spruce won the bid for that and has done
an outstanding job of growing it into
the primary way that people authenticate
with ethereum replacing a plethora of
incompatible and and different standards
for citing messages to assert your
identity with a symbol system that can
be thank you uh that can be um easily
plugged into existing systems including
web 2 Legacy systems
but of course when I talk about the last
three years and particularly the last
year top of most people's minds will be
the launch of the ens Dow which is now
one of the largest and most active
dowels in web3 which I am absolutely
both Blown Away about
ens has always aimed for gradual
decentralization starting with the
minimum set of emissions held by the
widest number of people we could which
was the original uh four of seven
multi-sig unlike most multi-seekers it
included participants from around the
ecosystem not team members and they had
limited powers to upgrade enes to
replace components our goal was always
to move from that to a system where ens
was governed by a decentralized
organization since we launched all the
way back in 2017 the only example we had
to go on was vdao which needless to say
was not a stunning success that inspired
us to immediately decentralize but
things changed a lot and the Dow space
is now a lot more mature than it was in
the past and we decided that you know
the time had come that things were
mature enough that we could let the ens
Community govern ens uh and the Dow is
the major Milestone along that path of
gradual decentralization uh the Dow was
now responsible for almost all
governance leaders and controls
available to ens including approving
contract upgrades changes to core
parameters such as pricing and how
expired names are used it's also
responsible for treasury grants and
projects using the funding gathered from
the protocol
in the years since the Dow's launch the
yiniest hour has shown that it can
maintain a high level of civilized
discussion uh made useful progress
forward and improving the protocol
besides budgeting and day-to-day
bookkeeping it's made meaningful changes
to the protocol including changing how
expired names are handled in order to
safeguard the stability and fairness of
the system the Dow has also started to
build out public goods and grants
programs of its own one example of this
is the small grants rounds that we now
run inspired by nouns props room this is
a regular system where anyone can submit
a proposal for work they want to do or
work they have done anyone with ens
tokens from the Dow can vote on them and
the top five in each category we have a
public goods category and an ecosystem
category then receive one e feature and
funding to pursue it the public goods is
focused on anything in the wider ens
ecosystem and the Eco ecosystem category
is focused more on things that relate
directly to ens
and we hope this can work to better
incubate and start up new projects both
for enes and for the wider public goods
on ethereum and web3 ecosystem working
groups have also funded initiatives on
scales small to large ranging from a 200
000 k Sorry 200k ens token Grant to the
protocol Guild who are formed to help
fund core developers throughout the
platform
169k Bitcoin matching pool and we
continue to fund and support Bitcoin and
smaller projects such as this plugin for
discourse forums which provides you with
insight into the roles of delegates and
their participation on the Forum which
is something that any dowel that uses
discourse can take and plug into their
own system
uh this was built by Karma and
integrates with all their stuff you can
also just use it to provide insight into
how your delegates are voted how active
they are how many tokens they have and
so forth the Dow has also resulted in
more Community participation in the core
protocol uh one major success story is
rafi's work on improving ans's
normalization functions
normalization is how we handle names
like uppercase neck being different from
lowercase neck and ambiguous emojis
hidden characters and so forth to start
we used a well-tested system called
uts-46 which is what the domain World
uses but it's become clear over time
that ens has some unique requirements
and we wanted to enable things such as
emoji and other characters that are
popular in the community but not
supported directly by DNS
uh so refi has been working on
harmonizing all of this we're very close
to rolling out their new standard for
Dow approval and it will enable a much
wider array of characters while also
providing more protections against
deceptive names
the last three years has also seen an
explosion in community-led ens
initiatives uh independent projects that
build on top of the ens ecosystem one
popular example you may have seen is the
ens leaderboard which shows people with
Twitter handles that contain Dot eth and
their ranking relative to followers
we've had some pretty popular ones
including Paris Hilton for instance
right up the top of the leaderboard I
myself am now ranked I don't know number
400 or something
um
we've uh had the launch of ens Vision
which is a third-party ens trading
Market
allows people to now register names from
scratch and also trade existing names
and projects such as nimi which is a web
3 profile
um site it lets you generate a
customized profile and in fact the
eth.limo Gateway folks have integrated
with nimi so if you have an ens name
that doesn't have content set up it will
automatically show your profile with
your pipes and so forth then you can
customize it as you wish
uh before we start talking about what's
new one small announcement true names
limited is the name of the development
company that builds enes the company I
founded that gets paid by the Dow
employees about dozen of us to build our
ens when we formed it we didn't really
think of it as a name that would be
visible to people that was purely an
internal thing but in the intervening
time it's become more and more visible
and every time we have to say we're from
True names limited the company that
develops ens and it gets a bit tiresome
so we're renaming to ens Labs limited to
better reflect what we do and Who We Are
uh so what's next uh first we're going
to talk about Thorin Thorin is ens's new
design system and it's built from the
ground up with usability and web3 in
mind we've used it to completely rewrite
the ens app from the ground up coupled
with improvements to the smart contracts
behind DNS this enables a huge
Improvement in usability for ens users
the ensui faces kind of a unique
Challenge from amongst web3 apps and in
fact kind of apps in general in that it
needs to provide an interface that is
both easy and user-friendly for new
users but has the advanced levers and
and sophisticated interaction required
by Advanced users we don't want to
create a situation where the app is
sufficiently flexible to do anything
with ens but deters existing users which
is a little bit the case in the current
APP or is so straightforward and
wizard-based that you need to go
somewhere else if you do have more than
basic needs
by surfacing the important details and
flows while still making Advanced
functionality available under the covers
the front-end team have done an
outstanding job of writing an app that
is all for all users
aside from the functional improvements
we've hugely improved the loading times
and made the new app 100 mobile friendly
the new app is at feature parity and
live now on the girly test net would be
live on robston but that's already been
deprecated
and you can try it out now at alpha.eds
domains just to emphasize it's only on
girly it is a little bit you know sharp
edges still the team really raced to get
it out in time and did an amazing job
please send us your bug reports but we
aim to have this launch on Main net
shortly after Devcon once the name
wrapper and other contracts are approved
by the Dow as I'll discuss shortly so
keep your eyes peeled
Thorin isn't just for ens either we've
made it available as a standard react
library that anyone can use for their
web 3 apps you can check it out on
sauron.ens domains and you may have
noticed it powering a number of our
other sites such as the swag microsite
and so forth
one of our major ongoing projects is
scaling ens for many projects this is
accomplished by going multi-chain
deploying to just multiple chains if
you're uniswap for instance you fragment
your liquidity a bit but you can work in
parallel across multiple chains ens is
in kind of a unique position here we
need to maintain a single cohesive
registry of names and it's far too early
in the L2 and the roll-up ecosystem to
pick a single Service as the winner that
we're going to migrate to instead we've
been pursuing options that make it
possible for people to host their ens
names anywhere without the resolving
having to know or care where that is
earlier this year we launched ccip read
as a collaboration between ens and chain
link
while previous systems such as bridging
often introduced new trust assumptions
and require L1 transactions to execute
ccip read uses a lower level primitive
proofs which means that in many cases
such as with l2s this can be done with
no additional trust assumptions over
those the L2 itself requires meaning you
could host your ens name on optimism
have users resolve it from any client
that doesn't know what optimism is
without introducing any additional trust
that relies on the Gateway operator for
instance now further the solutions far
more flexible than bridging allowing
data to be stored not just on l2s or
side chains but on arbitrary systems
including centralized databases
at its core enes is a way for any
contracts to fetch data from off-chain
resources because contracts can't
directly talk HTTP requests this ends up
being a little bit like having one of
those conversations with a couple who
have had a fight and refusing to talk to
each other well you tell the Gateway
that I think that they should give you
this data I need so the conversation
tends to go like that unfortunately just
ask them yourself isn't an option so the
client has no choice but to play
middleman the end result is good with
the resolver and the Gateway agreeing on
a protocol it's possible for the client
to facilitate a lookup of off-chain data
without any knowledge of what their
shared languages or what the off-chain
system in uses
uh the necessary proofs to make with
trustless are encapsulated in the
response sent by the Gateway and
verified by the resolver before
returning the result from the name
resolution
this means that implementing the base
protocol is enough to enable all current
and future l2s and off-chain storage
systems to be used in the ens name
resolution for instance ethers already
supports this which means that you can
resolve any ens name that uses it even
if it uses an L2 that didn't exist when
the ether's implementation was written
and ccip readers already in use in
production both ethers and Webster ejs
support it and so if you use either of
those libraries or in fact as of I
believe today
web3.pi
upgrading to the latest version will
mean you automatically support ens of
chain resolution some of the largest
apps and wallets have already upgraded
to support it too including metabase
metamask coinbase wallet as well as
ethereum etherscan there's a long way to
go in terms of making this latest change
Universal so please reach out to your
favorite wallets and apps if you see
that they don't support these new names
and ask them to let them know how
important it is uh like our Thorin ccip
reader also isn't just for ens it can be
used to add off-chain resolution support
to any project
coinbase has gone a step further than
just integrating ctip read for name
resolution they're using ccip read ens
wildcard support and ens's DNS
integration together to allow their
wallet their wallet users to create ens
names under the dot CB dot ID domain for
free these names will instantly work in
any wallet or dap that supports ens's
new resolution improvements and they
have no transaction fees to set up for
either users or coinbase
likewise lens is using ccip read to
integrate their own dot lens naming
system with ens any.lens name you can
add dot X sorry dot XYZ to the end and
it will resolve in metamask or any other
wallet that supports this
so off chain read support is great but
how do we enable writes the default
option for every platform is to provide
its own interface for users to update
their records meaning if you use
coinbase wallets you have to use
coinbase to update your records if you
use metamask you'd have to update with
metamask but this leads to fragmentation
and makes general purpose apps like our
own manager much less useful fixing this
is still a work in progress but Eep 5559
lays out a way forward by enabling a
discovery mechanism that allows clients
such as our manager to discover how they
can send a transaction or an HTTP
request to update data that's stored off
chain
um it's currently supports writing to
evm-based l2s or side chains or sending
signed messages to an HTTP API but this
is extensible with new methods as they
crop up adding support for this to the
NS manager and further standardizing the
best practices and making it as as
flexible and accessible as possible is
an active active area of research and
development for the team
so next up the name wrapper which you've
probably heard about of griping about on
Twitter because uh it's been underway
for a while
ens predates all of the nft standards
and while the dot eth registrar was
written after Eep 721 came out that
functionality only applies to dot e
second level domains so nick.heath but
not
wallet.beck.eth or nick.xyz or whatnot
as a result not Alliance names can be
transferred exchanged Etc using standard
nft interfaces
uh further one of the main advantages of
tradability is trustless ownership if
somebody sells you a name or a subdomain
or gives it to you you want to make sure
that they can't take it back next week
and set it to a different address
you're kind of reliant on their Goodwill
there are solutions to work around this
you can give net ownership of the name
to a contract and we've had a system for
that called
now.ens.domains for some time but it has
significant shortcomings in that you're
committing your name to a specific
contract where it has to live for the
rest of time which limits what you can
do with it the name ramper solves both
these problems it allows any EMS name at
any level whether it's a dodeath or a
subdomain or a DNS name to be wrapped as
an ERC 1155 nft it also allows owners of
wrapped names to revoke permissions such
as the ability to replace or delete
subdomains by mechanism we call fuses
fuses allow the owner of a name to
revoke their own control and that of any
subsequent owners over certain
functionality on a name such as the
ability to unwrap it again to create or
to replace subdomains to transfer it to
another user and so forth once a fuse is
burned that fuse can't be reset until
the name expires giving a user's a
guarantee as to what can be done to or
with their names until the name
expiration is reached the name ramp
attracts these permissions and provides
a very easy API for fetching the set of
restrictions currently applied to a name
and when they'll expire
alongside the name wrapper we've also
implemented a suite of other contract
improvements including to the dot Heath
registrar controller the reverse
registrar and the public resolver all
together these will prevent a much
smoother registration process for end
users and cut down on the number of
transactions and gas required as well as
other quality of life improvements like
allowing contract donors to set primary
names for their contracts the long and
short of us is that with the new DOT
ease registrar you will be able to
register a name wrap it in order to set
permissions burn fuses and set your
primary name all in a single transaction
and using less gas than doing those
operations would cost today
uh all of these updates are live now on
the Gurley test net and we're planning
to submit them to the Dow for approval
on mainnet very shortly after divcom
uh thank you
finally I'm going to talk about
something else I'm excited we'll be able
to release soon gasless DNS integration
presently claiming a DNS name in ens
cost a substantial amount of gas it's
about 100K to a million gas per
signature it has to verify depending on
the ether and gas price that can range
anywhere from 20 bucks to at the
extremes of the bull market a thousand
dollars
obviously this isn't a particularly
scalable solution and so this can be a
substantial barrier to DNS integration
fortunately we have a plan for reducing
this all the way to zero
uh so first a quick overview of how DNS
works it uses a chain of trust just like
SSL the root zone is signed by a
well-known certificate Authority and
they sign keys for each of the
subdomains such as.com dot link Etc uh
each of those zones uses its keys to
sign this subdomains and so on and so
forth our current DNS integration uses
this to allow users to claim DNS names
inside DNS our front end collects up all
the complete set of proofs necessary and
submits them to a Smart contract which
verifies the signatures and if they
match it lets them claim the name
uh if you've been paying attention to
the talk so far this may sound quite
familiar to you similar to something
else we've discussed ccip read if we
treat the whole of ens as a massive
off-chain distributed database we can
have a Gateway that fetches DNS data
collects all the proofs necessary and
submits it to the chain just like when
you're resolving a name so then we can
write a resolver for DNS names that uses
that gateway to resolve names in ens
entirely using data stored in DNS users
can set DNS records to configure their
name and they will resolve any from
their ens is supported with xero
on-chain transactions necessary claiming
on chain may still be useful in some
cases for example if you need granular
control over the subdomains but for most
users it'll be possible to claim your
DNS name just by setting some text
records we're working on this right now
the DNA SEC Oracle changes are done and
we're working on implementing fixes from
an audit before we roll it out we hope
you have it ready to go before the end
of the year there's been a lot more
going on and with ens but compressing
four years down into 25 minutes
naturally means I have to leave some
things out just one more thing the Dow
was nearly a year old but still in its
infancy we have a lot of a lot to learn
and a lot to do and we need your
expertise please take a look at our
governance page reach out to ens domains
on Twitter see how you can get involved
and help us build a truly decentralized
public good naming for web 3.
and that's all I have for you thank you
very much
[Applause]
awesome
do we have any questions for Nick please
raise your hand we'll get you a mic
there's a lot of things that we talked
about yeah we see a hand over there
keep your hands raised so we can find
you and get the mighty hi Nick thanks a
lot for the talk
um one thing I was thinking about uh you
should probably be able to use ens to uh
the problem is when you
use UI to to communicate with a page the
metamask will generate you it will
provide a transaction for you and
basically you have no idea like if
actually the UI is the right UI and you
if you are calling it a contract you
want to be calling and I guess you could
UNS you could you you you could UNS
for this for linking both the the domain
and the smart contracts with the same
ens and have metamask check it basically
to provide a lot of attacks connected
with the UI yes spoofing yeah definitely
uh better user insights into
transactions is I think probably the
major adoption barrier and and fishing
and so forth fourth issue in web 3 today
naming contracts of the units names is
one big step towards making that a bit
better and in fact the latest contract
out dates we're pushing out uh make it
easier for contracts to get ens primary
names
um I am also the author of a proposal
with Richard Moore on how to better
provide insight into transactions which
is also very relevant there
yeah and could you make uh
basically the the calls from the other
side meaning
um metamask could somehow check with DNS
like what what this contract uh is what
ens is this contract associated with
yes and further you could put authorized
frontings and your ens records so that
will warn you if you're making a
transaction to say uniswap from a scammy
site
is an excellent idea yeah perfect
perfect thanks cool thank you very much
awesome we have one last question here
just at the front row and uh it won't be
a time
oh hi I was wondering if you could kind
of give us a state of the union on
efforts to resolve Pages via browsers
and at the OS level
sure uh so at the OS level is depending
on you look at it tricky or easy you can
run your own DNS resolver in which case
you personally get to resolve all units
names getting it rolled out to everybody
is a very Steep Hill to climb
um I think we're going to have more
success getting this integration to
browsers such as Brave and Opera which
already support it rather than
integrated directly with os's
on the other hand there are efforts
around talking to Ethiopia about whether
they would be willing to relinquish that
this is all very nascent however so
there's there's nothing uh concrete for
that right now the shorter term solution
is as I said browsers I think
awesome that's all the time we have
please give Nick a big round of applause
[Applause]