Nick Johnson, the founder of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), recently spoke about the development of the project at ETHGlobal in London. ENS allows users to create human-readable Web3 addresses that can function as both a Web3 wallet for cryptocurrencies and NFTs, as well as a domain for decentralized websites.
Prior to his involvement with ENS, Johnson worked at Google until he discovered Bitcoin and Ethereum. He was particularly drawn to Ethereum because of its programmability. With a strong background in infrastructure, tooling, and libraries, Johnson was able to write his own Ethereum strings library.
String manipulation, which involves working with text data, is considered a complex task in software development. According to front-end software engineer Jeffrey Jenkinson, anything that is human-readable can be considered a string, and developers often need to manipulate strings when writing code.
Johnson eventually joined the Ethereum Foundation and was tasked with addressing a gap in the infrastructure by creating the name service. Initially, he worked on the project as a side project while also working on the EthSwarm team. However, the Ethereum Foundation encouraged Johnson to work full-time on the project and provided funding through a grant.
When drawing up a two-year roadmap for the project, Johnson requested a certain amount of capital from the Ethereum Foundation. However, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin decided to double the amount Johnson had asked for, showing his support for the project.
Since its launch, over two million ENS addresses have been registered by users. However, Johnson believes that the number of registered addresses is not the most important metric to measure the success of the project. Instead, he wants to focus on understanding how many users are using crypto addresses instead of traditional DNS names in their wallets.
Moving forward, Johnson and the ENS team plan to expand the service to networks that can benefit from Web3 utility. They aim to roll out Ethereum layer-2 infrastructure in the coming years and make the service more user-friendly.
In conclusion, Johnson’s work on Ethereum Name Service has been supported by the Ethereum Foundation and has seen significant growth in user registrations. The team now aims to make the service more accessible and expand its reach to different networks.