Nick Johnson, the founder of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), was pleasantly surprised when he received double the amount of capital he had requested from Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph at ETHGlobal in London, Johnson discussed the progress of ENS, which enables users to create user-friendly Web3 addresses that can also function as wallets for cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs), as well as domains for decentralized websites.
Prior to his involvement with Ethereum, Johnson worked at Google. However, his interest in Ethereum was sparked by its programmability. Armed with a strong background in infrastructure, tooling, and libraries, Johnson began experimenting with Ethereum coding in his spare time, ultimately developing his own Ethereum strings library.
String manipulation, the process of working with text-based data, is considered one of the most complex tasks in software development. Jeffrey Jenkinson, a front-end software engineer, explained that strings, being human-readable, are fundamental to coding and need to be parsed into machine language.
Eventually, Johnson was hired by the Ethereum Foundation, and one of his initial projects was to create a name service. Initially, he worked with the EthSwarm team, which focused on decentralized data storage and distribution technology, to address a gap in the infrastructure. As Johnson moved on to the Go Ethereum team, he continued to work on the name service as a side project.
Impressed by Johnson’s work, the Ethereum Foundation encouraged him to dedicate himself fully to the project and provided funding through a grant to establish a separate organization. Johnson devised a two-year roadmap and estimated the resources required to support a small team. However, Buterin decided to contribute twice the amount requested, further bolstering the development of ENS.
Since its launch, over two million ENS addresses have been registered by users. However, Johnson believes that the number of registrations is not the most critical metric to assess the success of ENS. Instead, he is more interested in determining how many users are using crypto addresses instead of traditional DNS names in their wallets.
Looking ahead, Johnson envisions a gradual increase in the number of registered ENS names. However, he emphasizes the importance of expanding the service to networks that can benefit from Web3 utility. ENS plans to introduce Ethereum layer-2 infrastructure in the coming years and aims to make the service more user-friendly and accessible.
In conclusion, Johnson’s vision for ENS is to make it available to users wherever they are, ensuring that the service can support new distributed content networks that gain widespread adoption. The focus is on improving usability and providing users with an enhanced experience.