Nick Johnson, the founder of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), shared insights on the project’s development in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph during ETHGlobal in London. Johnson, who previously worked at Google, was drawn to Ethereum‘s programmability and began experimenting with Ethereum coding. His strong background in infrastructure and libraries enabled him to write his own Ethereum strings library, a crucial component for human-readable Web3 addresses.
Initially working for the EthSwarm team at the Ethereum Foundation, Johnson identified a need for naming within the Ethereum ecosystem. This led to the inception of ENS as his side project, aimed at providing naming services for Ethereum accounts and other components. Recognizing the potential of ENS, the Ethereum Foundation encouraged Johnson to work full-time on the project, allocating a grant to support its development.
However, when Johnson submitted his initial budget for a two-year roadmap with a small team, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin intervened and doubled the amount, ensuring sufficient resources for ENS’s success. Since then, ENS has gained significant traction, with over two million registrations of human-readable addresses. Johnson emphasized the importance of measuring adoption beyond registration numbers, focusing on metrics like the proportion of users entering crypto addresses into their wallets instead of traditional DNS names.
Looking ahead, Johnson envisions gradual growth in registered ENS names and aims to expand the service’s reach to networks that could benefit from Web3 utility. ENS plans to integrate with Ethereum layer-2 infrastructure in the coming years and aims to enhance user-friendliness to make the service more accessible and convenient.
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