ENS at EthCC4: Scaling ENS, Lots of Mentions, & More
I have attended ETHcc every year since 2017 (when it was still called EDCON). I was so glad to be able to come back to it in-person this year! Here’s a recap of how ENS participated.
ENS mentioned everywhere
I have attended a couple of key notes and it was great that many speakers mentioned ENS as a way to tie in their on-chain identities.
During one of side events, I also met an attendee who showed me her collection of ENS names with pride!
At the closing event, there was a raffle prize event using POAP and it was great to see that probably half of top 10 winners actually had their ENS reverse records set up.
Login with Ethereum
One of the surprise guest of the conference was Vitalik Buterin. His name was not in the conference page so it took me surprised to see him speaking at the event (I was outside of the venue and rushed back to the main stage by checking someone’s tweet about him talking).
By the time I got there, he was in the right middle of talking about “Login with Ethereum” idea which our team member Brantly initially brought up on Twitter a few months ago. Using Ethereum accounts as user accounts is nothing new for dapp developers as it is a common practice to use signatures for login. What’s interesting is to bring the idea to beyond web3 dapps.
Here is the quote from the Decrypt article
At the heart of his proposed approach was the use of Ethereum wallets as multipurpose online identities that could be used to sign into a wide variety of Ethereum-based applications, similar to how Gmail and Facebook accounts are used. He said existing login providers like Google have a tendency to arbitrarily de-platform users, while often refusing to help those who have been locked out of their accounts.
Ethereum-based login options, on the other hand, would provide “credible neutrality,” censorship resistance, and a “built-in economic layer that makes it easier to do mechanism design.” He imagined social networks that only allowed vested members of an Ethereum DAO to post.
The more apps that integrate with Ethereum Login, the more your ENS name can be used as a universal username.
When we talked about the topic a few months ago, we initially thought about making a standard on our own. But this is outside of the core ENS protocol and also we didn’t have enough resource to tackle it. After speaking with the Ethereum Foundation, we decided to co-sponsor an RFP to standardise the effort.
If you are working on the relevant field, please look into the RFP and consider submitting a proposal.
Scaling ENS
On day 2, I gave a talk about “ENS on Layer2”. You can see my talk slides and video below.
The first half of the talk is something we already discussed at our last ENS workshop back in April.
Since then, we have made progress on two things. First, Nick Johnson turned the general “gateway” concept into an EIP draft called “Durin”.
Durin provides a secure mechanism for fetching offchain data without additional trust assumptions. This has applications beyond ENS.
Second, we acknowledged that non rollup based EVM chain have gained momentum and we can’t ignore about it. We came up the notion of non-rolleup Gateway solutions with different trust assumptions.
Trusted and App Gateway are for more trusted setting but it is probably the easier to integrate and they can gradually transition into less trusted settings.
The beauty of the overall approach is that domain owners can pick their choice of L2/EVM chains and issue subdomains under the specific chain with lower or no gas cost.
We are looking for dapps which can issue subdomains as usernames (e.g., as Argent wallet used to issue makoto.argent.xyz ENS subdomains) on their preferred scaling solutions. If you are interested in becoming one of the first dapps to take your ENS subdomains to your choice of network, please get in touch.
Summary
It’s great to see ENS is getting more mention at Ethereum events and people are actually using the names they own. We still have a lot to do to make ENS more useful, scalable and ubiquitous and your help and participations are much appreciated.
