[Music]
so good evening
so I'm Johnson lead developer for
earnest and I'm here to tell you about
what we've done in the last year and
what our plans are for the next year so
ENS launched on the public main network
on May the fourth as in may the fourth
be with you
it had an eight week soft launch period
during which we gradually released names
for availability in a randomized process
over that eight week period and like
there we go over the eight week period
180,000 names were auctioned as you can
see after an initial sort of gold rush
spike that was a fairly consistent rate
over the whole period and to buy those
180,000 names
roughly a hundred and seventy thousand
ether was deposited into a smart
contract users who purchased names have
their atha hold held for at least a year
or until they release the name as you
can see from the graph here the
contributions the the amount that was
being deposited on names reduced fairly
sharply at the end of the eight-week
launch period which is a fairly good
indication that most of the contentious
names were bought during that period so
it's interesting to look at how much
people paid on average for an ENS name
or rather how much they deposited and
what proportion of names were
contentious had more than one bid so if
we divide names up into names that were
in a shortlist that we have of common
domain names and dictionary words and
those that aren't about 35 percent of
those that were in the dictionary work
intended had more than one bid compared
to only about 7.2 percent of names that
weren't on the list as you can see again
for the names that were in the list
after a short sort of gold rush period
there was a gradual decrease
some contention rate while names that
weren't on the list the line on the
bottom there were fairly consistent in
terms of how often they were competed
for so again splitting up by whether the
name was known or not the average price
paid for an NS name in the list was
about 0.05 ether and the price for a
name not in the list was only 0.02 and
as you can see on the right side there
when the soft launch period came to an
end
the both of those bottled out to very
low contingent rates and very low median
prices indicating that most people that
wanted to compete for a name got up
during the launch period so one of the
main concerns about the auction process
was the potential for people to lose
their bids by failing to reveal during
the correct period and that was
something we can consume we shared in
the design of the registrar as you can
see here from an initial reasonably high
rate of loss for deposits that rapidly
decreased and we had an average of is
only 0.3 percent we're satisfied that
the rate is is quite low but we're not
sort of resting on our laurels we want
to continue to improve the auction
process make it easier for people to
interact with and less likely that they
will lose funds or harder to make
mistakes as we'll see soon it's also
interesting to look at the ownership
distribution of names because this gives
us an indication of how many names were
bought with active use in mind as
opposed to how many were bought with the
intention of hoarding them so roughly
8500 people bought names during the
launch period of those about a hundred
and twenty three of them 1.4 percent of
the total registrants own half the
registered names and in order to buy
those half the registered names they
paid only about twenty percent of the
total registration fees or about thirty
four thousand ether and from the
histogram here you can see that the vast
majority of accounts over five thousand
of them own no more than five names with
a long tail distribution
continuing off all the way to the
largest ENS named whale here at 17,500
and seven names client adoption since
the launch has been excellent we have
support in meta masks my ether wallet
ether scan a variety of other clients
and mobile wallets and one of our main
efforts for the ongoing ENS effort will
be to increase client adoption
particularly with exchanges you might
notice we only have one pioneering
exchange in this list and we really want
to improve that in August 2017 we had
the first ENS workshop this was a
gathering of people interested in
advancing the state-of-the-art with the
aeneas building out new infrastructure
and deciding what the permanent register
I'd look like we had 27 participants and
we discussed over three days a number of
issues including dispute resolution
design of a permanent registrar how to
secure subdomains and DNS integration
and I'll go briefly over what we
determined in the workshop and how we've
progressed things since then so the
first topic that we discussed quite
extensively was dispute resolution E&S
with the interim registrar on death has
no built-in dispute resolution mechanism
and this was a deliberate choice because
we wanted to build the simplest possible
registrar to get things started and then
learn from the experience in order to
build a better permanent registrar the
consensus decision at the workshop was
that the dispute resolution should
initially be built as a sort of a second
layer so we would have opted in black
lists they would follow their own
processes whatever they see fit for
black listing domains and users and
wallets could then voluntarily subscribe
to a blacklist that met their
requirements or none at all if they
prefer so for instance here we have an
example black lists in the middle the
user doing the resolution on the left
and ENS on the right the user wants to
resolve Saifu dot XYZ in this case the
domain isn't in the black list so the
blacklist simply passes the request onto
Egon es which
response as normal if the user then
wants to resolve a domain that is in the
blacklist like bad dot X Y Z the
blacklist detects this and returns a
null result ensuring that phishing and
spam domains and scanners don't get
resolved and sorry I should add the goal
in the long run is to build experience
with operating Lee's blacklist
registrar's as a second layer and then
evaluate further later whether they
should be integrated into the base layer
or whether it should continue to be a
separate opt-in solution
the second major topic of discussion was
design of the permanent NS registrar and
one of the unanticipated consequences of
the deposit based model for DNS is that
different participants in the market
have very different costs of capital on
the left here we have the user who is
registering a domain with the intention
of using it directly and to them the
cost of putting down a deposit was
effectively the whole cost of the
deposit because they intend to retain a
name indefinitely they can't count on
relinquishing the name and getting those
funds back on the other hand you have
the investor who is looking for some way
to invest their ether and the cost of
them is effectively the opportunity cost
of not being able to use it for other
things and finally you have the
speculator who would be holding ether
regardless and they see pianist names as
an almost risk-free way to hold Barrett
ether and so our conclusion from the
workshop is that we should transition to
a rent based model and in the rent based
model every name has an annual fee which
is assessed sort of continuously and as
a result everyone has effectively the
same cost for holding a domain it's also
important to note that the plan is that
all domains would have the same ongoing
rent this wouldn't depend on how much
you paid for the domain as option
because we have no desire to penalize
people merely for being popular the next
logical question is how you determine
the rent an ultimately unsatisfying
option is to simply have somebody sit by
Fiat as it were and revise it from times
but we think we have a more elegant
approach and this was suggested by Vlad
Cynthia at the workshop the insight is
that the goal of having rent is to
encourage deregistration of unpopular
names or unused names that aren't wanted
and so we can monitor the D registration
rate which is the blue line there and
set a target D registration rate the
contract can monitor how many names are
being deregistered and then it can
adjust the rent price to attempt to
maintain a fixed rate so in this example
here some external event perhaps an
increase in the price of ether results
in a spike in the D registration rate
and the Registrar responds by decreasing
the rent until it reaches a stable level
again and you can see here another event
perhaps increasing popularity and ENS
results in a decrease in the D
registration rate and the Registrar
responds by again increasing the price
until it's stable the next issue that we
addressed and this has actually come up
largely subsequent to the workshop and
as a result of discussions in our
internal gears or channels was ways to
simplify the option mechanism although
it's generally behaved quite well there
is some inevitable information leakage
in that you have to start an auction on
a name in order to bid on it and that
provides some information to people on
what names you're likely to be bidding
on and what names are up for auction in
general and this can be disguised by
opening sort of chaff options alongside
the real ones but this disguise isn't
perfect so our proposal for the
permanent registrar is to switch to a
rolling option mechanism the way this
works is auction period start every 48
hours in this example and you have a
48-hour bid period during which anybody
can bid on any unknown name and that's
immediately followed by a 48-hour reveal
period during which anyone who bids
needs to reveal the name simultaneous
with the start of the first reveal
period a second bid period starts and
again any unregistered name can be bid
on if somebody bid on a name in phase
one and then another person bids on the
name in phase two then when the name is
revealed they simply get a full refund
the result of this is
that there's no information leaked as to
what names are being optioned which
means that people have to bid the
legitimate value of the names they want
rather than sort of sniping and griefing
the system and this continues on an
ongoing basis with bid periods
automatically starting it also
simplifies the system it reduces the
number of interactions you need to
engage with the system by one so the
next feature I'd like to announce this
as you can see is a perfectly ordinary
my ether wallet instance this is on the
Internet publicans you can see it's
connected to Roxton and I as you know my
ether wallet has had support for DNS
names since day one what it hasn't had
is the support to resolve these names
last and that's the problem with doing a
presentation on screen if this was
working and I'm going to blame the
internet connection what you would have
seen there we go
it's correctly resolving an earnest
address for an XYZ domain and to figure
out why this how this works we need to
take a bit of a diversion and talk about
DNS SEC DNS SEC establishes a chain of
trust from the root key which is signed
by ICANN and down through each key so we
start off knowing only the hash of the
root key of D NS and this is coded into
a smart contract Oracle given that given
the hash of that key we can pass in the
actual key we can verify that it matches
the hash and we can add it to our set of
trusted records and given that key we
can now verify any record that is signed
with that key so in this case it's the
hash of the root key for the XYZ
top-level domain and given that then we
can recognize the key and so on and so
forth so next we can recognize the key
for F lab dot X Y Zed given that we can
recognize sorry the hash for the key and
then the key itself and finally we can
validate a signed text record containing
an aetherium address
so this is how the overall system works
given that chain of trust established
previously users can submit proofs to a
DNS SEC Oracle on the chain and the
proof is exactly what we saw earlier for
any records that it doesn't know about
it contains the record and it contains
the signature verifying its accuracy
once they've done that the user can call
the Registrar the new DNS SEC registrar
which has a claim function the Registrar
then queries the Oracle and says is
there a text record for the name they're
trying to claim and it responds with any
text records and the Registrar passes
those text records through to many in e
NS addresses if it finds one sry
aetherium addresses if it finds one it
checks it against the caller checks that
the person who's calling the Registrar
is and fax the address specified and if
they are then it calls a genious and
sets the record in ENS and this is now
fully functional on the robson test
network you can register any DNS domain
thank you so initially for testing
purposes we're starting only with the
dot X Y Zed top-level domain and we're
grateful to them to cooperating with us
on this
but in principle this can be expanded to
any DNS SEC domain that supports SiC
Peter sorry RSA and char 256 so well
will initially start off with this and
migrate to main it initially with it we
want to expand it out to support all of
those domains so that means not just X Y
Zed but also all of these domains and
all of these domains and these domains
and these domains and these domains and
these domains and these domains and it
ends at some point there we go and all
of those in total about three-quarters
of Internet TLDs currently support the
algorithms we need and if we integrate
sha-1 support that rises to about 96% so
the next thing I'd like to show off is
something that aims to
improve the usability of ESP and users
one of the major barriers to adoption
has been that for somebody to simply
name their wallet requires a multi-step
process involving an auction process and
it's always been our vision that most
users don't buy top-level domains in the
same way that most users signup to Gmail
rather than buying their own vanity
domain and E&S now is our attempt at
making this easier for users and it
makes the process of registering a
subdomain extremely easy that didn't go
quite it's supposed to so in this case
I'll search for Vitalik for instance if
I can spell his name which apparently I
can't and we see that we have different
top with our second-level domains gimme
thee and want some once some is already
taken so I'll click on gimme thee pops
up a meta mouse confirmation window
grossly enlarged here thanks to a full
screen as you can see it's going to cost
us about two dollars eighty four point
zero one ether takes a bit of gas click
Submit as soon as that's mind which is
instantaneous in this case the name is
registered and it's pointed at your
wallet that's one step and about thirty
Seconds to register in aeneas domain for
any wallet
[Music]
so before I go one more thing and I'm
going to pause to see if anybody gets
the pom maybe not I'm pleased to
announce that we're going to be forming
the ENS foundation an independent legal
organization whose goal will be thank
you will be to Ford the goals of ENS to
help promote its adoption and to help
standardize things it will be a
not-for-profit organization and in the
pattern of the w3c Orianna in sorry the
IETF intended to help promote E&S
adoption and no there will not be any
form of ACO finally I'd like to close by
thanking everyone who made this possible
particularly all the attendees at the
ENS workshop alex van der sent who
couldn't be here because he's having a
baby
Leonard tan Arrhenius volunteer who
recently presented some of this material
to I can including the ICANN Technical
Working Group and the board and I
honestly do not know how to pronounce
his name Ollie ollie who inspired the
rolling auction system by coming into
the getter channel and complaining about
how bad the existing system was easy DNS
for their support with DNS SEC
integration and Meno from ENS listing
for feedback on ENS now and that's all I
have for you thank you very much
[Applause]
[Music]