Ethereum Name Service Sees Retail Interest Hikes as Buyers Shell Out Hundreds of Dollars

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is gaining popularity as an investment and holding asset among members of the crypto community. Last week, after ‘000.eth’ – a rather interesting ENS – was purchased at a record ETH 300 or roughly Rs. 2.75 crore, ENS sales saw a hike. This particular ENS sale escalated their overall demand in the community. Daily ENS registrations also spiked, reaching over 30,000 new addresses on July 4 and over 20,000 on July 7. The findings were highlighted by Dune Analytics, a tracker of ENS.

A decentralised domain name protocol, an ENS provides a reasonable and easily readable crypto wallet addresses by replacing the traditional complex and long alpha-numeric ones.

Of late, ENS addresses have emerged among the most popular liquid assets trading on marketplaces for virtual assets.

On OpenSea NFT marketplace for instance, 1.5 million ENS domains are currently listed. Out of these, 445,000 ENS domains are already owned.

“The interest we are seeing in ENS is partly driven by the fact that it’s one of the very few pure true utility NFTs that are visible, widely known, liquid and traded on OpenSea. The fundamentals and value that ENS addresses bring far more certain than other opportunities for retail crypto investors,” CoinDesk quoted Anderson Mccutcheon, founder and CEO of Chains.com as saying. The platform is focused on enabling cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange at scale.

Any individual or company that owns an ENS becomes able to receive cryptocurrency, token, and other blockchain-based assets.

Easier ENS domains like ‘xyz.eth’ are usually more in value than others like ‘asd1as.eth’.

Presently, the slump in ETH and gas prices have further attracted members of the crypto fraternity to buy and exchange ENS addresses, the CoinDesk report added.

“Our findings suggest that ENS is showing gradually popularity during its four years’ evolution, mainly due to its distributed and open nature that ENS domain names can be set to any kinds of records, even censored and malicious contents. We have identified several security issues and misbehaviours including traditional DNS security issues and new issues introduced by ENS smart contracts,” a report by Cornell University had claimed last year.

The adoption of ENS addresses was catapulted to popularity after some high-end global brands invested in these domains.

For instance, in May 2022, Nike’s Web3 arm called ‘RTFKT’ purchased a new ENS domain for ETH 19.72 (roughly Rs. 29 lakh).

This year in February, Puma had also purchased a decentralised domain and changed its name to ‘Puma.eth’ on Twitter.

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