History
Last updated
Last updated
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) officially launched on May 4th, 2017, marking a major step toward making Ethereum more user-friendly by allowing users to register human-readable .eth names instead of complex hexadecimal addresses.
Unlike the instant registration model used today, ENS initially distributed names via a Vickrey auction, a type of sealed-bid auction. This mechanism was designed to fairly allocate names, prevent front-running, and reduce squatting. The auction process unfolded in :
1. Bidding Period
Users initiated an auction for a name they wanted by placing a bid.
This triggered a 3-day bidding window during which other users could also place bids on the same name.
Bids were blind: neither the bid amount nor the name being bid on was publicly visible.
To protect their bids, users included a secret phrase that would later be used to reveal their bid.
2. Reveal Period
After the bidding period ended, a 2-day reveal phase began.
Bidders had to reveal their bids by submitting the bid amount and the secret phrase.
Failure to reveal resulted in loss of the entire bid, which was burned.
Users who were outbid were refunded, minus a 0.5% burn fee.
3. Determining the Winner
The highest revealed bidder won the auction.
However, in keeping with the Vickrey model, the winner only paid the amount of the second-highest bid.
The winning bid amount was locked in a contract for as long as the winner retained the name.
To finalize ownership, the winner needed to send a "finalize" transaction, which also returned any excess funds.
Minimum Length Restriction
Initially, only .eth names with seven or more characters were eligible for auction.
This prevented a land rush on short, highly valuable names and reserved them for a later release.
Allowed Characters
A wide range of characters, including emojis and non-ASCII characters, were supported.
Some names with unusual characters including some with less than seven characters were registered by directly interacting with the ENS smart contracts, bypassing the official UI.
Scheduled Soft Launch
ENS did not release all names for auction immediately.
Names were made available gradually over an 8-week period, based on their hash value.
Only names whose hash fell below a certain (decreasing) threshold could be auctioned at any given time.
This staggered release prevented a land grab and encouraged creative bidding strategies.
For example, "ethereum.eth" became auctionable ~59 days after launch.
This explains why early ENS registrations often included misspellings, creative variations, or less common terms.
The period from May 9th to June 23rd, 2017 is now referred to as the "Prepunk" era. These early .eth names, registered during ENS's original auction period, represent the first wave of ENS adoption and are considered historically significant digital assets. They predate many other Ethereum projects, including major NFT releases, and form a foundational piece of the ENS and Ethereum ecosystem's history.
Instead, a "soft launch" mechanism was implemented (ENS PR #105), as proposed by and discussed by .