The Blockchain UI Problem that ENS Solves

The blockchain world has a UI problem. This is what an Ethereum receiving address looks like:

0xfB6916095ca1df60bB79Ce92cE3Ea74c37c5d359

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have the same problem, as do related decentralized projects like IPFS. The computer-generated address system works great for computers but isn’t user-friendly.

This isn’t a new problem. The nascent Internet had a similar issue with IP addresses. For the Internet to eventually be used by millions and now billions of regular users, it needed a way to mask the machine-readable identifiers. So, in 1985, the “phone book of the Internet,” the Domain Name System (DNS), was born. While the DNS is used by many protocols, the World Wide Web really took the DNS mainstream. Can you imagine the web if users had to type in “72.125.224.72” rather than “google.com”?

The blockchain world needs the same thing. We could use the existing DNS, but it’s a relatively centralized server architecture which makes it unattractive for blockchain applications.

That’s where the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) comes in. ENS provides the same basic functionality of DNS (look up the records for “example.tld,” retrieve information), but replaces the hierarchical DNS server system with a few smart contracts on Ethereum.

ENS is the naming service of the new decentralized Internet - with less infrastructure, better security, and of course less centralized control.

ENS launched in 2017 with the native TLD.ETH, but we’ve been experimenting with allowing owners of DNS domains to use their domains on ENS and have successfully done this with .XYZ and .LUXE domains. We plan on rolling out this capability to most other TLDs later this year.

We want to make it as easy as possible for dapp developers to take advantage of the big UI gains that ENS provides, which is why we’re working with Truffle. We are excited to be announcing several useful ENS integrations built into TruffleSuite at TruffleCon, so stay tuned!

Register your domain name using ENS today!

Helpful Links: * Website: https://ens.domains/ * Manager: https://manager.ens.domains/ * Docs: https://docs.ens.domains/ * Gitter: https://gitter.im/ethereum/go-ethereum/name-registry * Forum: https://discuss.ens.domains/