Lost names

The Mystery of "Blank Spaces"

Within the historical data of Prepunk ENS domains, you'll find entries where the name field is empty or blank, but a valid _hash (keccak256) and row_number exist. These are often referred to as "Blank Spaces" or "Lost Names".

What caused Blank Spaces?

These occurred primarily due to the complexities of the initial ENS launch and subsequent contract migrations:

Hidden Bids: During the Vickrey auction, bidders could hide the name they were bidding on by submitting only its hash. This was done to protect their desired name from being revealed too early.
Migration Issues: When ENS migrated to a new registrar contract in 2019, some of these hashed names, particularly those using disallowed characters or encountering other edge cases, were not correctly transferred with their original human-readable name. Only the hash remained associated with the registration record in some datasets.
Hashing: The keccak256 hashing algorithm used is one-way. You can easily generate a hash from a name, but you cannot reverse the hash to get the original name back directly.

Significance:

Blank Spaces are unique historical artifacts representing names that were successfully registered during the Prepunk era but whose original string representation was lost in the migration process or was never revealed publicly in the initial data.

They are still valid Prepunks based on their hash and registration timestamp/row number.
They represent a challenge and opportunity for digital archeologists.

Recovery Efforts ("Blank Busting"):

Recovering the original name for a Blank Space involves trying to find the input string that produces the known hash. This is often called "Blank Busting" and uses methods like:

Brute-forcing: Trying vast combinations of characters (computationally intensive).
Dictionary Attacks: Hashing words from known dictionaries or wordlists.
Database Lookups: Comparing hashes against known databases of common words, names, or previously hashed strings (like the preimages.js file from the original ENS DApp).
Contextual Clues: Analyzing surrounding transactions or related on-chain activity.

Community efforts, like those within the Prepunk Club, have successfully recovered a significant number of these lost names, particularly within the Top 1k and Top 10k ranks.

Verification:

When using verification tools or Dune queries, look for those specifically designed to handle Blank Spaces. They will often cross-reference the hash against lists of recovered names.
Makoto Inoue's original Dune query will typically show these entries with an empty name field.

Blank Spaces add a layer of intrigue and rarity to the Prepunk collection, highlighting the technical evolution and challenges of the early Ethereum ecosystem.

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Last updated 8 days ago

The Mystery of "Blank Spaces"

What caused Blank Spaces?

These occurred primarily due to the complexities of the initial ENS launch and subsequent contract migrations:

Hidden Bids: During the Vickrey auction, bidders could hide the name they were bidding on by submitting only its hash. This was done to protect their desired name from being revealed too early.

Migration Issues: When ENS migrated to a new registrar contract in 2019, some of these hashed names, particularly those using disallowed characters or encountering other edge cases, were not correctly transferred with their original human-readable name. Only the hash remained associated with the registration record in some datasets.

Hashing: The keccak256 hashing algorithm used is one-way. You can easily generate a hash from a name, but you cannot reverse the hash to get the original name back directly.

Significance:

They are still valid Prepunks based on their hash and registration timestamp/row number.

They represent a challenge and opportunity for digital archeologists.

Recovery Efforts ("Blank Busting"):

Recovering the original name for a Blank Space involves trying to find the input string that produces the known hash. This is often called "Blank Busting" and uses methods like:

Brute-forcing: Trying vast combinations of characters (computationally intensive).

Dictionary Attacks: Hashing words from known dictionaries or wordlists.

Database Lookups: Comparing hashes against known databases of common words, names, or previously hashed strings (like the preimages.js file from the original ENS DApp).

Contextual Clues: Analyzing surrounding transactions or related on-chain activity.

Community efforts, like those within the Prepunk Club, have successfully recovered a significant number of these lost names, particularly within the Top 1k and Top 10k ranks.

Verification:

When using verification tools or Dune queries, look for those specifically designed to handle Blank Spaces. They will often cross-reference the hash against lists of recovered names.

Makoto Inoue's original Dune query will typically show these entries with an empty name field.

Tools like incorporate data on recovered names.

Blank Spaces add a layer of intrigue and rarity to the Prepunk collection, highlighting the technical evolution and challenges of the early Ethereum ecosystem.