Protocol Explainer @ensdomains | ex-DevRel Lead for @Soneium | ex-@paritytech | @AcademyPolkadot graduate
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- Following 200
- Followers 195
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RT @ensdomains: ENS Labs and @GLEIF are exploring how organizations can link their ENS name to a verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI),…
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RT @ensdomains: Not every ENSv2 subname needs its own token. Some can live as records in a resolver; others can have separate owners, permi…
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workemon.eth retweeted
Simple check if your (or any) application is ENSv2 ready:
Try to resolve `ur.integration-tests.eth` => It should resolve to `0x2222222222222222222222222222222222222222`. If not, updating to the latest version of Viem, Ethers, etc. usually does the trick.
For years, ENS names have helped make crypto feel a little more human.
ENSv2 is the next chapter.
Are you ready for it?
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RT @ensdomains: From New York to Lisbon, the ENS team has been showing builders what becomes possible when names are treated as infrastruct…
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workemon.eth retweeted
Hack something cool about @ensdomains at @ETHGlobal Lisbon hackathon . @yash_goyal_dev @workem0n and myself are here to help
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workemon.eth retweeted
worth a read, especially if you’ve been larping like you understand ens governance
That's what we've been trying to build. It's why the team allocation was only 25% of the tokens, and my own allocation less than 6%. It's why we structured the airdrop to give tokens to people based on their commitment to ENS, not how many names they'd registered or how much they'd spent.
Unfortunately, delegation rates have only gone down over time, because people have a clear financial incentive to sell and no financial incentive to govern well. As a result my proportional voting power has *increased* over time rather than decreased. I still held back from using it because I wanted to keep the DAO as decentralised as possible.
At some point something has to be done, though. Two successive rounds of millions of dollars of grant funding have produced a couple of outstanding teams amongst a much larger amount of wasted money. The endowment is competently managed but gives disappointing returns that are outperformed by a savings account. The DAO is down to 1 working group whose only mandate is to keep the lights on, and half a dozen proposals for how to fix it have failed to gain traction.
Everyone agrees it's broken, but nobody agrees on how to fix it. If we want a functioning DAO for the long term, we need a substantial reform, and without an intervention such as my finally stepping up and delegating my founder tokens, it seems unlikely we were going to get it - just continued limping along as everyone argues on what's broken and how it should be fixed.
We're pretty much the last major DAO with direct voting on treasury allocation, because other DAOs have discovered the same thing: direct token-weighted voting on funding doesn't work well. It puts enormous load on delegates, does a poor job of holding funding recipients accountable for performance, and actively encourages conflicts of interest. Other DAOs have outright moved the treasury into their Labs' orgs; we don't believe that's the best approach and instead want to empower the existing foundation to oversee day-to-day operations and fund management, while leaving the protocol levers with the DAO as they always have been.
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workemon.eth retweeted
I've been at ENS for 9 years now. The first 4 years it was basically just me, Nick, Makoto and a few people that have come and left since then. We were always less than 10 people. Nick has been building ENS for a decade. 10 fucking years. blog.ethereum.org/2016/07/11… This is a blog post from the EF in 2016.
Write a list off the top of your head of crypto founders still building and CEOing their own company after a decade. I'll wait. It's short.
When ENS released in 2017 I was just one of the community, and only shortly after did I join and build the first version of the ENS app. At the beginning of 2018 we formed ENS Labs (True Names Limited back then) and we were finally a real company, with a $1 million grant from the EF. For the next 3 years we survived on this. We built something that was integrated into all the major Ethereum wallets, helped the UX of web3, and were an example of what a non-financial application on Ethereum looks like. We were builders, we were optimists, and we were purists.
In 2021 we started the process of decentralising ENS. Why? Because as purists we believed the protocol should not just be governed by us. The protocol, not the treasury.
To do that we went with a DAO that uses token voting. It was an experiment compound, uniswap and others had tried and it seemed 'battle-tested'. There are many things wrong with token voting, but only 5 years dealing with a DAO actually shows you the real one. It isn't just plutocracy, it's the politics of everyone having an opinion about who gets a part of this huge treasury.
We wanted to decentralise the levers it takes to govern the protocol, pricing, upgrades etc… we didn't actually have to send the treasury to the governor contract. But we did, because we felt the DAO had more legitimacy, and it did. It also attracted a hoard of people that labs had to govern. We tried to be welcoming, to be open to people and not exert our influence so the grass could grow. But what it also did is create a honey pot with 0 accountability that anyone that is willing to make an account on our forums has the chance of taking a piece of. And we have given, a lot. Given over 50% of all grants to parties outside of ENS Labs. Labs took less than 50% of the treasury spend to date. Name another protocol whose core team has taken less of the revenue than outsiders.
Labs has always been about building ENS, and so for many years we decided not to use our tokens, but to let the "community" find a way to properly allocate the funds. But this has failed. In hindsight it was so clear, how could we expect to give millions of dollars to a contract that is governed by token holders (that we as labs are refraining from voting in) who aren't qualified (and it's not their job to be) to do treasury management. Yes we were stupid to do this, but we were idealists.
We've turned from idealists to pragmatists. We spent two years building Namechain, our own L2, and we killed it the moment Ethereum scaled and the maths changed. We're not precious about our own work, and the DAO is no different. I would like for DAOs to work as much as anyone else, but they don't, and not a single DAO out there is the vision of what we thought it could be half a decade ago. But ENS is not just a DAO, it's a protocol, a successful protocol that needs longevity and stewards for decades and not to be pillaged by DAO opportunists. A foundation does not remove the ability for the community to be funded, but there will be more accountability, more RFPs, and more value being driven to the protocol.
This isn't to say nothing worthwhile has been funded by the DAO. It has, but the ratio of cruft to worth is far too high. It is not how you build a universal protocol for the internet. To those that think it is, you are thinking too short term. ENS needs to keep building. We are nowhere close to the size of DNS, or the size of a single large username system (X, whatsapp, telegram). We need to keep integrating. If we wanted to exit scam and run, it would be far easier to just dump all our ENS and call it a day.
And to everyone suddenly worried about voting power: labs didn't vote for years. We stayed out on purpose, to let the grass grow, and that is the exact thing that let this honey pot fester. The one time Nick actually votes, you call it tyranny?
And this isn't to say that labs is perfect either, but we really do want ENS to succeed, we want it to flourish, first we need to rectify the mistakes of the past. When something is broken, you fix it. ENS is as decentralised as it was before, the .eth registrar has been locked for years and no one can steal your name. The only thing that is changing is we need a proper organisation to manage and allocate these funds.
And for those personally attacking Nick.
Nick isn't stealing anything.
Nick is one of the smartest and most morally upright people I know.
No one could have built ENS the way Nick has built ENS. And they have tried.
Nick could have left a long time ago, but he hasn't.
Whilst you guys are arguing over the end of ENS, we'll keep on building.
P.S. AI image is so the main image was not the blog from EF
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RT @ensdomains: It’s our birthday 🎉
9 years of ENS on Ethereum, naming the internet one .eth at a time.
May the 4th be with you ✨ https:/…
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workemon.eth retweeted
NEW Open Agents workshop added 🤖
Tomorrow: Identity for Apps, Agents & More with @ensdomains
A high-level intro to ENS plus a walkthrough of the latest features, including naming autonomous AI agents and interoperable names.
🗓️ April 29 • 2:30PM ET
Livestream link ↓
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workemon.eth retweeted
If you have open technical questions about @ensdomains, come to our Developer Office Hours this Thursday at 11am EDT / 3pm GMT
This is the best place to get quick answers! There is no agenda, so no reason to tune in if you don't have specific questions luma.com/r2htane6
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RT @ensdomains: ENS names were built for moments like this. defiunited.eth is serving as a transparent, open address for public contributio…
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something's cooking: @ensdomains is joining @ETHGlobal Open Agents — $5,000 across two tracks:
🤖 Best ENS Integration for AI Agents — $2,500
✨ Most Creative Use of ENS — $2,500
put your name on the menu 🍽️
ethglobal.com/events/openage…
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RT @ensdomains: ENSv2 is coming.
A new foundation for names, built for integrations and subnames at scale.
What will you build? https://t…
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RT @ensdomains: Recovering assets from a compromised wallet is one thing. Recovering identity is another.
At ETHGlobal Cannes, a new tool…
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RT @ensdomains: Winners of ETHGlobal Cannes just dropped.
Seven projects, all building on ENS. Here's the rundown 🧵
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workemon.eth retweeted
it's really crazy that when an EOA gets its private key compromised, the attacker can now just prevent any funds from actually landing in the wallet with EIP-7702
it took us hours to figure out why we couldn't get funds into the compromised wallet
but -- i built a solution!👇
some crazy work that I found with @gregskril and @workem0n: a very frustrating account "lockout" with a compromised private key and EIP-7702
tl;dr: overwrite receive() so ETH never stays in the hacked account, preventing the recovery of leftover assets using Flashbots bundles
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workemon.eth retweeted
Congrats to the hackers who won prizes from @ensdomains at @ETHGlobal Cannes! 🇫🇷
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RT @ensdomains: Issue #3 of The Reverse Record is out.
@saniyamore covers the ENS offsite in Taipei, the latest ENSv2 progress, shifts in…
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RT @ensdomains: Out of 685 hackathon projects, ~90–100 teams built with ENS.
Naming is no longer just a UX layer. It's becoming a part of…
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