Recently, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly supported the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) through social media, highly praised it, and believed that ENS is "extremely important."
This strong support caused the price of the ENS token to increase by 72% on January 3, and soared to a peak of $26.95 on January 14.
What is ENS?
ENS, the full name of Ethereum Name Service, is a distributed, open and scalable naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. The project aims to improve the blockchain user experience and promote the development of decentralization by converting Ethereum addresses into simple domain names. Users can obtain Ethereum domain names through ENS registration, and bind domain names to various cryptocurrency addresses to replace cumbersome address hashes, achieving a simpler and user-friendly way of exchanging crypto assets. For example, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin resolved his wallet address starting with 0x to vitalik.eth. ENS's technological innovation and decentralized concept make it unique in the blockchain field and an important tool for crypto asset management.
The ENS project has recently achieved a sharp rise in price under the strong promotion of Vitalik Buterin. What factors have led to such an excellent performance of ENS under the support of Vitalik Buterin? Let us interpret the catalyst behind this rise.
The impetus for Ethereum’s Cancun upgrade
In 2024, Ethereum is about to usher in a highly anticipated upgrade: the Cancun upgrade. The Cancun upgrade is an important evolution in the Ethereum ecosystem, aimed at improving the scalability, security and availability of the network. According to the official blog of the Ethereum Foundation, the upgrade is scheduled to be activated on the Goerli testnet on January 17, 2024. Specifically, the Cancun upgrade is expected to reduce the gas fee of the Ethereum network and provide users with a more economical transaction experience, which will further promote user participation in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Vitalik Buterin also emphasized that the Cancun upgrade may bring about the explosion of Layer 2 (L2). L2 technology is known for its low cost and high efficiency, and the Cancun upgrade can provide a better environment for its development. As part of the Ethereum ecosystem, ENS will likely be used more on L2. It can be said that the Cancun upgrade will bring more opportunities for ENS.
Integration of ENS and Layer 2 (L2) Technology
Last year, ENS publicly announced its plans to expand to the Layer2 ecosystem and achieve L2 interoperability with ENS domain names. At the same time, ENS launched the EVM Gateway in November last year, which is the basis for the next-generation L2 resolver. It allows L1 smart contracts to efficiently and securely obtain and verify status from other EVM chains (L2), aiming to improve the interoperability between L1 and L2 chains. The low cost and high efficiency of Layer 2 will promote more developers and users to participate in ENS, which will further improve the efficiency and availability of ENS domain name services.
According to the ENS official website roadmap, the ENS team is currently working on optimizations such as Gasless DNS Names (using DNS domain names in ENS through CCIP-Read's Gas-free method) and L2 research. In the future, the ENS team also plans to explore how ENS interacts with the Layer2 ecosystem, use Ethereum login (SIWE), improve bookmarks, and introduce a dark mode for the ENS manager.
Potential for growth
Judging from market data, ENS's performance in December 2023 was particularly eye-catching. In that month, ENS registered 23,400 new ".eth" names. According to data from Dune Analytics, the total number of ENS domain name registrations has exceeded 2.1 million to date.
Identity Consensus
According to incomplete statistics from the ENS official website, there are currently more than 500 applications that have integrated ENS, including more than 60 wallets led by MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet, mainstream applications such as OpenSea, Uniswap, 1inch, and Etherscan. In recent years, ENS has been very popular and has almost become a symbol of identity for crypto users, with a very strong consensus. ENS domain names are seen as a business card in the crypto world that can represent individuals and companies. With the growth of the crypto market, the adoption of ENS is likely to leap in volume and become the focus of investors pursuing decentralization.
ENS still has a lot of room for development and is an important factor affecting the future development of Ethereum.
With the support of Vitalik Buterin, ENS tokens have once again successfully attracted the attention of the market. The increase is driven by multiple factors including Cancun upgrade, integration with L2 technology, growth potential and decentralized concept. The integration with L2 technology is an important turning point for the future development of ENS. ENS has shown strong growth potential through the integration with L2 technology. This strategic cooperation not only promotes ENS's performance in the market, but also helps ENS maintain its competitiveness in the ever-changing crypto market. It is worth the close attention of crypto users. As a highlight project in the Ethereum ecosystem, we expect ENS to continue to exert its potential in the crypto field in the future and bring more innovations and opportunities to the entire cryptocurrency market.