Ethereum Name Service (ENS)

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Historical price evolution of Ethereum Name Service

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

On 4th April 2016, Nick Johnson, former Google software engineer specialising in site reliability and developer at the Ethereum Foundation, published EIP-137 proposing the Ethereum Name Service. The inspiration arose from a fundamental problem: Ethereum addresses are 42-character hexadecimal strings impossible to memorise, similar to how internet IP addresses were before the existence of DNS. Although Namecoin had attempted something similar on Bitcoin, Johnson's approach was specifically directed at the Ethereum network.

On 4th May 2017, ENS officially launched on Ethereum mainnet. The date was deliberately chosen to coincide with "Star Wars Day" (May the 4th). Initially only .eth domains of 7 or more characters were available, which were allocated through Vickrey auctions on Ethereum. The launch generated such expectation that VICE magazine described it as a "gold rush". During 2018, the Ethereum Foundation granted Johnson a $1 million fellowship, which allowed him to found True Names Ltd. (currently ENS Labs Ltd.) in Singapore, making the project independent from the Ethereum Foundation. That same year, traditional DNS extensions such as .luxe, .kred and .xyz were integrated.

In January 2019, ENS added support for decentralised websites hosted on IPFS and Swarm, in addition to implementing multicurrency support that allowed a .eth name to resolve Bitcoin, Litecoin and other network addresses. In May 2020, the Ethereum Foundation granted a second fellowship of $1.5 million to continue the project's development.

8th November 2021 marked an important milestone with the launch of the ENS token and the formation of the ENS DAO. A retroactive airdrop was conducted distributing 25% of the total supply (25 million ENS tokens) amongst all .eth domain holders registered before 31st October 2021. The eligibility formula considered domain seniority with a 2x multiplier for those who had configured a reverse primary record. The token reached an all-time high of approximately $83.41, with a total supply of 100 million ENS tokens.

By 2024, more than 2.5 million .eth names had been registered and ENS had integrated into major platforms such as MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Rainbow, Uniswap, Etherscan, Brave and Opera. Short names of 3-4 letters began selling for more than $100,000 on secondary markets such as OpenSea. In 2025, Ethereum's gas limit upgrade from 30M to 60M (Fusaka upgrade) reduced ENS registration costs by 99% in one year, whilst the service expanded its support to more than 60 chains including Bitcoin, Solana and Celo.

In February 2026, ENS Labs cancelled Namechain, the proprietary L2 that was planned as part of ENSv2. The reason was that the 99% drop in gas costs on Ethereum L1 had made a dedicated network unnecessary. ENSv2 will be deployed exclusively on Ethereum mainnet, offering single-step registration, purchase with stablecoins from any chain, new registration design and greater control per name. Public alpha versions of the new ENS App and ENS Explorer were published, with ENSv2 in active development until May 2026.

ENS functions as the domain name system (DNS) of the internet, but applied to the Ethereum ecosystem. Its main function consists of translating complex cryptographic addresses, such as 0x71C7656EC7ab88b098defB751B7401B5f6d8976F, into human-readable names, such as vitalik.eth. ENS domains are ERC-721 tokens (NFTs) that reside on the Ethereum blockchain, which guarantees verifiable ownership, transferability and the possibility of trading on secondary markets. The system is structured around three fundamental technical components: the Registry, which is the central smart contract where all domains and their owners are stored; the Resolvers, specialised contracts that translate names to multiple types of data such as addresses from different blockchains, IPFS content hashes or contact information; and the Registrars, contracts that administer the registration and renewal processes for domains.

The registration of .eth domains operates through a system of annual fees paid in ETH, where the cost varies according to the length of the name, with shorter names being considerably more expensive. Once a domain is acquired, the owner can create unlimited subdomains without additional restrictions, such as wallet.miempresa.eth. The governance of the protocol lies with the ENS DAO, controlled by holders of the ENS token, who have the ability to modify protocol parameters, adjust fees and manage the community treasury. ENS operates as a universal identity layer on Web3, allowing a single .eth name to point simultaneously to multiple resources: an Ethereum wallet, a Bitcoin address, a website hosted on IPFS, an NFT avatar and various profile metadata, consolidating the user's decentralised digital identity.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.