ENS at Berlin Blockchain Week

Berlin Blockchain was one of the biggest blockchain events this summer. Though ENS team did not have official appearances, I participated in various events here and there and met so many people passionate about the potential of ENS and what it brings to the whole Ethereum ecosystem. A small gathering we had at the beginning of the week lead to something bigger and more tangible and I would like to share the story with you.

MetaCartel Demo day (Mon)

MetaCartel Demo day kicked off with Alex Van de Sande talking about the state of Web3 logins. He is the one who created Mist, one of the first Dapp browser and now works on Universal login.

What was interesting from ENS point is about his suggestion of using ENS not just for Universal Login but making it more generic way to handle any Web3 logins.

Without ENS, every provider is fighting for the exposure

ENS logins acting as an identity beyond universal login

This leads to an interesting discussion in the afternoon.

ENS Mini ring (Mon)

With the courtesy of the fellowship of Ethereum Magicians, ENS team had a room dedicated for ENS related topics.

Even though my initial intention was to talk about the cross chain naming standard, it quickly turned out that there are fewer demands. Chris Seifert from imToken which supports other chains such as EOS and Cosmos mentioned that EOS is mainly used for gaming and Cosmos is for participating as validator hence less needs on sending its cryptocurrencies (yet). Chris S suggested that using ENS as a login may be more useful which lead to Chris Whinfrey from Authereum proposing his idea of “ENS Login”.

The basic idea was to store Web3 provider information into ENS (as IPFS hash) so that each ENS is self-aware of which wallet provider to connect.

With the rise of contract-based, meta transaction “smart wallet”, it is becoming a pain for dapp developers to integrate into every single one due to fragmentation. You may want to check the excellent wallet comparison table compiled by Shane Fontaine .

There isn’t single wallet which ticks all boxes

Providing a consistent interface to connect and interact with Web3 providers (and similar wallet SDK) is the feature critical to the success of the next generation of wallet providers. It was great to bring creators of Authereum, ImToken, Universal Login, LinkDrop and Portis into one room to discuss the spec.

Decentralised Storage Summit (Fri)

I participated at a lightning talk session and presented EthDNS , a special purposed DNS server which has tight integration with IPFS and ENS so that anyone who put contenthash into ENS has .eth.link based URL.

Even though I presented pretty much the same talk at IPFS camp a month ago and the half of audience had ENS names, no one there were still aware of this cool new project so I was glad that I presented again.

Here is my talk slide

ETHBerlin (Fri-Sun)

The alliance which was formed during Metacartel continued and they formed a team to tackle the problem of unifying Web3 logins with ENS.

Team ENS login pitching to judges (the photos courtesy of Scott Gralnick from Portis)

You can access their hack entry below.

enslogin/Hackathon

Within the very short timeframe of the hackathon, they managed to integrate the following providers

• Authereum
• Portis
• Ledger
• Metamask
• Torus

For more detail, I will recommend reading the words of members who actually BUIDLed.

Introducing ENS Login

PoCo Series 6 - ENSLogin

I can already feel that this will become one of the most important alliances for all wallet providers. If you are one of wallet providers and keen to find out more, I recommend you talk to the team!

Last, but not least

What’s even more impressive is the collaboration they made among so many different teams. That was the power of Department of Decentralization + ETHBerlin team and all other event organisers who managed to bring so many teams around the world into one location for the condensed period and hats off to all of them who worked hard leading up to this week.