Episode 1: Brantly Millegan | ENS - Human-readable and decentralized naming for wallets, and websites
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A discussion and Q&A session with Brantly Millegan, Director of Operations with ENS Domains. Recorded on July 6, 2021.
Title: Decentralized naming systems - Brantly Millegan
Description: Brantly Millegan, Director of Operations at ENS (Ethereum Naming Service) joins us to talk about the distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain and being the number one product for human-readable and decentralized naming for crypto wallets, and websites.
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Full Transcript from Descript (published episode - manually edited)
ENS and Decentralized Naming Systems - Brantly Millegan
[00:00:00] Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative web 3 builders to help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Ethereum, Bitcoin and DeFi. The podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. And it is not financial advice. Crypto Sapiens is presented in partnership with BanklessDAO; a movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system.
[00:00:31] BanklessDAO will help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly on-ramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
[00:00:46] Hi everyone. I'm your host Humpty Calderon. Today we are speaking to Brantley Milligan with ENS: a distributed, open, and extensible naming system. Based on the Ethereum blockchain. We will be discussing human-readable and decentralized naming for wallets and websites. So without further ado, let's get started. The purpose of today's discussion is to, first of all, get to know you, get to get to learn a little bit about you, and, get to learn what ENS is, because I think that it's, you know, I've explored it.
[00:01:21] I wouldn't say that I know it completely, but I've explored it to the point where I haven't ENS and I've done the, reverse resolution. I believe that it’s called reverse lookups. Yeah. So I think that, but there's a lot to learn here. And so I think that today will be a really good conversation for people to learn what ENS is.
[00:01:42] So let's just get started on an introduction about you, and let us know, you know, who you are, what your role is at ENS and how you got started.
Brantly:
Okay. So I live near Eatonville and South Carolina United States on. I married, had six kids, our oldest is 11 years old, down to a baby who's I don't know, eight or nine months old or something I've been in crypto a long time.
[00:02:13 Okay. So, where ENS started. I guess I'll explain when I came on by giving a little bit of history of me and us, and, started as a side project of Nick Johnson at the Ethereum foundation in 2016. So probably more than five years ago at this point he was on the guest team. I think originally he was actually on the swarm team, but then put the left that and went to the guest team and then launched, attempted to launch in March 2017.
[00:02:45] But it had like a problem or something. So they aborted that attempt and then they launched for real in May 2017. And it was sort of like an experiment at that point, it was very successful. And then by 2018 the Ethereum foundation said, ‘Hey, Nick, why don't you just focus on DNS?’ So he left that summer 2018 left Ethereum that Summer, with the big brands and with this mandate to kind of build the team.
[00:03:14] And I joined as soon after that in January of 2019. And I am now director of operations, which just means I, kind of help Nick, run things with strategy and with integrations and communications, and just like a lot of the administrative work of the team, Nick is still in charge, but he's, you know, like our lead developer, he wants to focus on developing, but it's great.
[00:03:41] We have a great team of people and ENS. It's a great project to be a part of that's actually good. I didn't know the history going that far back to it being, you know, I guess the Kickstarter by the theory and foundation. So when you jumped on how far along was the project? Well, so, a lot of the core parts of ENS obviously were there in January of 2019.
[00:04:05] I mean, it had been launched in May, 2017. It had the core parts. So, it was fairly minimal. So you could, you could only get .ETH names. You could not important DNS names. I think you could only have the point at an Ethereum address. I think that's it like you couldn't do anything else.
[00:04:27] Early on, there were a handful of wallets that supported it. But then it's, you know, it's, it's grown and developed immensely since then. So, especially, the last one and a half to two years, we've added multi-point support. So now, you can have it so you receive payments than any cryptocurrency address and records.
[00:04:48] We have this great content record that supports swarm hashes, IPFS, ashes, Skynet, hashes addresses. They have texts records which can have like profile information and really any arbitrary information about. We have parts of the DNS Thinkspace integrates the products. Lizzie got lock, stock, art dot Fred, and a couple others.
[00:05:10] And that is soon going to be all of the, you know, basically the entire DNS namespace. That's actually, you're in Boston right now. ENS is a naming system. Now what is the naming system? Some ways the naming system is really simple. You have names, you have people that own or console those names and you have information attached to those.
[00:05:32] You can support any, ultimately any generic, any kind of name, it can support, you know, that we decide to support and it can score any arbitrary information. But practically speaking, ENS does three things, where I say the three primary use cases that we kind of are kind of trying to do the DNS, at least right now, the first is a portable Web3 username.
[00:05:56] So basically you can this was the reverse record thing that Humpty, you mentioned. Even if you have multiple ENS things, you can pick one of them to be your reverse record, sort of like your Ethereum username. And when you log into a wide range of depths, they will also showing like an abbreviated form of here's your WEX address will actually show your ENS name and that works across Dapps.
[00:06:18] So it's your portable web for username. That is super powerful. The second use case is crypto payments. So you have your name, you have one name and you can. Tons of different cryptocurrency addresses. And they're obviously in the theme of dress like a Bitcoin address, the dozens point address a Etherum address, EOS address, a rootstock address, whatever you want, and then you can receive payments or really have any crypto assets, sent to you at those addresses.
[00:06:46] So it's not just tokens at the NFTs, et cetera. And then the third, primary use case is decentralized websites. So I mentioned earlier our content record, right? So I will support a bunch of different things. Although the primary thing that's used there is IPFS websites and that is actually support has native support in browsers like Brave, Opera…
[00:07:07] It's in the Metamask extensions, if you have that work in your browser. And, we also have the linked services it can be used. So those are the three main things that you can practically do with.
Humpty:
Looking at, and, in terms of the accessibility of address schemes today, they're very complicated, right?
[00:07:30] They aren't something that are familiar to us, you know, that's not necessarily how we deal with account numbers. Today I think a lot of the formatting for account numbers down from a phone number to a social security number; they're all formatted in a way that hopefully has some sort of memorable elements...
[00:07:48] Elements, but, you know, a cryptocurrency address is not that. So for me, at least very, very simply, and of course not looking at the complete package of what ENS, enables is a memorable, I guess, more recognizable, naming scheme for addresses, right? So, for example, instead of using your zero X address, which is long and, easily forgettable, Brently.Eth.
[00:08:22] Super simple. You can remember that. And you can associate that with correctable accounts, correct?
Brantly:
Not multiple Ethereum accounts, but multiple cryptocurrencies, right?
Humpty:
And I think that goes back to one of the things you were talking about. In fact, one of the things that I guess I was, that was, I was leading into in terms of where was the product…
[00:08:43] …before you joined and how far has it come since you've joined? so I just doing a quick scan on the ENS website, I think, provides a good glimpse of the ecosystem. And in terms of the different integrations that are available for ENS. So you were talking about, how in the beginning there was, I guess some limitations.
[00:09:10] In terms of the different or the type of addresses that you can use. So it was only supporting Ethereum addresses and now it's supporting multiple cryptocurrencies or blockchains, I should say. So you can have different cryptocurrency addresses. You were also talking about being important, being able to import DNS addresses.
[00:09:30] Maybe, can you talk a little bit about that part of the ecosystem first in terms of, you know, supporting different blockchains? What that means? Because at least for me, when I first started looking at ENS, my assumption and because of the name ENS, I assumed it was Ethereum only.
Brantly:
[00:09:51] Yeah, so, the name of theory and name service, we've thought about changing it sometimes, you know it's, we're not shooting it right now, but maybe possible future. So it runs on the Ethereum blockchain. And in fact, when it started, it was really we serve. And if you need the system, you remember though, when this launched in early 2017, there wasn't really much else going on.
[00:10:12] I mean, it was a Bitcoin. but Ethereum, was much smaller. You weren't in this like extremely multichannel chain world. It wasn't clear that that's necessarily where we were going. So in some ways it's ENS was just sort of focused on ecosystem early on. But there's nothing about it that prevents it from serving all this other information because it can store any arbitrary information.
[00:10:37] So now it's, you know, about two years now, it's been fully multi-point now in terms of the DNS namespace. Yeah. So this is a critical thing also about ENS. Some people think ENS = .Eth names and that is false. ENS has .Eth names, but ENS proper is just a naming system.
[00:11:03] And then those that infrastructure, those pipes, right? Those smart contracts can, could support any names. There's nothing inherent about .Eth names that it could only do that it can support. Now .Eth names and those are native to ENS and it launched for that. But, we want to of course expand the namespace that you can use on the ENS rails.
[00:11:32] Right. And what we've decided to do is to allow people to import in DNS names that they already have. So if you already own a DNS name, let's say, Brantley dot. You can also import that into ENS. Now you have to own it on DNS first and then you can have on ENS and it's not really that easy. That's, that's a separate name.com.org.
[00:11:59] You know, Brent, if you import entities still the same suffix, and we have this, this is works right now without. XYZ names, .LUX, .Cred., .Art and we're about ready to roll it out soon. So that just that any DNS thing will be able to be imported into.
Humpty:
Yeah. So I think that's, that's probably one of the more valuable probably not as widely recognized parts of what ENS is.
[00:12:25] I think may maybe because of the popularity of .Eth, there seems to be a belief that that is really where it starts and where it ends. So it's, I think really great to see that there is. I guess a much more wide ranging, application of it or implementation of it. And you know, maybe for those of us more familiar with DNS structures and how that works and the purpose of DNS really.
[00:12:52] Right. And how dextrous or how flexible it is. Maybe that can give us a better understanding of where ENS is going. And I did see that on one of your tweets, you talked about how brentley.xyz, which is a domain extension is really kind of is utilizing ENS for that name resolution, right?
Brantly:
[00:13:20] Yeah. Brantly.XYZ. I own and it exists on both systems. So like, I have my personal, if you, if you just like type in your browser, it's a normal DNS. Same. I have a website, some, some local weed, WordPress personal, that's it. I have there. And, but I also have it on ENS. So like, if you're in coinbase wallets and you want to send me Dogecoin, you can send me those coins through XYZ and it's using ENS.
Humpty:
[00:13:48] That's interesting, actually. So I won't get too far into it in this conversation, but I'd love to chat with you or maybe just towards the end of the conversation that reminds me, and I'm not sure how familiar you are with decentralized identity, but that reminds me a little bit about what Certeau is doing with, NFTs and did, and being able to kind of reference the metadata of a website in order to.
[00:14:10] use that as some sort of, identity verification, you know, your website, you're kind of doing something similar, but it's really like crypto payments and your website. So the integration is a little bit different, but it all, I think goes back to referencing your real-world identity and your, on chain.
[00:14:31] I think that's super interesting.
Brantly:
Yeah, I remember. So, you know, crypto-payments, that, that is a primary use case, but you know, obviously essential as websites. And then also this portable web for username thing is a widely used ecosystem. And in fact, my expectation is that that is probably going to be the most important ENS use case long term.
Humpty:
[00:14:52] 100%. Personally I am pretty heavily involved in the identity space, decentralized identity space to be, to be specific. And I've seen the, the growth or maybe just more attention being given to the space, from. Players, not just on a theory, but across the entire blockchain space. And I 100% believe that ENS will have a strong role to play in that.
[00:15:22] Because again, I think that there's something to be said in terms of that ease of use, recognizing and address, and also being able to take that address to various applications like, like it does today. So maybe talk a little bit about the ecosystem that ENS has developed both in terms of wallets and apps and browsers and how that works a little bit.
Brantly:
[00:15:47] Yeah. So it's a really big, a strong, strong point ENS, is in at least, you know, around 208 different services and that's huge. Just quick breakdown on that. I think that's like around 47 wallets and 48 wallets, almost 200 Dapps of various kinds. You know, several browsers, like I mentioned, Brave, Opera some mobile browsers like Status, Metamask on mobile.
[00:16:19] also pull them out as another browser. If you haven't met to your browser, no, you can access to centralized websites. New Clouflare runs a gateway service, you know, that Eth.link. It's the service where if you have a .Eth name and you want to access it in a centralized website in any browser, and it will dissolve like a normal website.
[00:16:39] Now there's still tons of tons of room for, for growth and for ENS. But I think this is significant because there have been many other blockchain based naming attempts. And in fact, blockchain based naming was the first, non-currency use case that people launched. Back in the day. So of course, Bitcoin launched in January, 2009, but I think like 2010, 2011, people said, Hey, why don't we use this for decentralized naming system?
[00:17:12] And originally it was called bit DNS and Satoshi talked about and how fitting. And we'll talk about this on Twitter recently, you know, that even Satoshi support the creation of another blockchain, other than Bitcoin for some. This is sometimes used as an argument against the absurdity of Bitcoin maximalism.
[00:17:29] That Satoshi himself as supported. That launched as namecoin. That project Dean has ended up launching as named point a, which is still technically around. although it's a dead project to this point has virtually no trading volume and nobody uses it for anything. But NameCoin is so important in the history of blockchain technology and specifically blockchain based naming.
[00:17:53] It was the first attempt at this. But it just never got adoption. It had problems in its, mechanics around, how you get names, name squatting and pricing. And it just, it's never, never got any traction. Then, there were other attempts to things some which kind of tried to use NameCoin or build off of it.
[00:18:16] One was called OneName. This was like an early thing that the stacks people were doing, which was formally called Blockstack. And they were doing this thing before that called one plane and started one name. I'm sorry. Again, one name didn't go anywhere there for years for different attempts to try to do naming for Bitcoin addresses, something caught on.
[00:18:37] And then Ethereum of course launched in 2005. I'm sorry, 2015. And that was like a watershed moment in the history of blockchain technology because it made it really easy to launch new dapps and to experiment and iterate quickly. prior to that, if you wanted a need dapp, you had to launch a blockchain just specific for that.
[00:18:59] I mean, it seems ridiculous now, but that was sort of like the model like NameCoin, right. ENS though, you can have this, iteration and ENS, you know, last, 2017, as I said, and it's really. there've been lots of other naming projects out there that have been attempted as like, they're going to start naming service, third name, name, service, and FIO, and start names on cosmos.
[00:19:23] And there's a law in know EOS naming service and blah, blah, blah, a long tail of projects that just never went anywhere. But ENS is the first blockchain based naming system has gotten escape velocity. It has significant use and adoption.
Humpty:
So I think it kind of tapping into what was going to be my next question is why do you think ENS has been able to succeed where others maybe not necessarily failed, but didn't get the traction that ENS has.
Brantly:
[00:19:58] No, it's okay. I mean, it's bad. There's, you know, this true in any space, you have a lot of attempts at something and you're maybe most fail. but DNS is the first one that actually has significance adoption and by a wide margin. So like, you know, this has more integrations than all other blockchain-based naming projects, combined lifetimes.
[00:20:20] And it has like almost five times as many integrations as like the thing in second place. I mean, it's like, it's way bigger. It is not like exactly peers. Right. It's, you know, it's like ENS and then there's like a long tail of like other attempts. So why has it gotten attraction? One, I think one is the power.
[00:20:42] So, we didn't have the bootstrap, our own blockchains. So I think that was a failure of NameCoin. I think it's also been a big problem with things like handshake and FEO, other attempts. they have their own tokens are siloed off from the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm missing out on all the network effects of the ecosystem in us. ENS doesn't have to create new wallets, or services, or, you know, we can just plug into the infrastructure that already exists for Ethereum, which is of course going to way better than anything else that we could create.
[00:21:15] You know, we don't have a special token that you have to use to buy names and just use ether. There's obviously already widely available. Why would use super high liquidity, that is super valuable. We can make use of a theory of ecosystem standards. So like all .Eth names are ERC-721 NFTs, and we can only do that because we're on Ethereum.
[00:21:37] I think we've also taken the right approach, which is that the naming system really should not be private or proprietary. We really do it as a public good, you know, for the community. So, you know, it's of course it's open source. We don't run. We're not gatekeepers that this used on gatekeepers, any way you can interact with the protocols directly, the team that is sort of maintaining it as a non-profits.
[00:22:04] We have no investors, you know, nothing like that. And, all the ether, all the funds raised from registrations renewals of .Eth names (there is a fee for anti squatting purposes). It doesn't even go to us. It actually goes to a community multisig, six of the seven. Are not on the ENS team so far, actually none of that money has been spent because we haven't needed to, but there's like tens of millions of dollars there now, that we'll need to be working out with the community of how to spend.
[00:22:34] So I think all those things have just come together. Yeah. I mean, this has been able to be successful.
Humpty:
Yeah, that's good. I mean, I think, you know, having been on the Ethereum ecosystem, I mean, not, not as long as others, I'm sure in this channel, but you know, for quite some time, I've, I've learned that there is the power of community.
[00:22:52] There is the power of just building. There's just a ton of different, applications that are being that are built, that can make use of this technology, right? You brought up something that maybe for me lent itself for a different question. Will ENS, well, first of all, is ENS tokenized. Is there an ENS coin and will it ever be tokenized if it's not?
Brantly:
[00:23:20] It's a good question. Well, so you know, this has been around a while. And, if you were around in early 2017, it was a different era. Okay. So when it launched just a year earlier, there had been the Dao hack. There were there wasn't well-developed governance structures at all. even the ICO boom was, was just kind of starting to take off, but we didn't want to, they didn't want to do that because.
[00:23:49] Yeah, I agree. Money grab. And, but there are a couple aspects of ENS that require some discretion. So things like, well, what do we do with the money that's raised? Right. also how do we set pricing? We, you know, we could set pricing automatic into the protocol, but the problem with that is that we have to hard-code it in like a denominated ether, but the price of ether is so, fluctuate so much that that's not valuable.
[00:24:19] So they actually price do our prices in USD, use the chain-link, use Oracle. And at some point let's say 50 years from now, we probably want to maybe update the prices or something, you know, right? That, that requires some discretion. So there's like a couple of pieces here that, that do require some discretion right now.
[00:24:37] It's just this force. There's a four out of seven multisig. again, we're six of the members are not on the ENS team and it's really what we want to decentralize this. So on our website, actually we say this for the long-term, we would like the root multisig to be replaced by some form of distributed decision-making process as such systems become available.
[00:24:58] So we're very interested in looking at the DAO space and tokens and different ways of governing. we're not totally committed to any one thing right now, but we're not like a DAO experiment organization, we’re ENS, but we definitely want to take the best practices and use them to give as much control the protocol to the community.
Humpty:
[00:25:24] That's fantastic. I mean, I think right now with what we're seeing, as far as the explosion of DAOs, I think that there's a lot of exploration, a lot experimentation going on, to find a use case or to expand, the vision or the mission of an organization like the Bankless DAO as an example, being a media culture DAO. I mean, I think, you know, has, has a product that's proven, and if it decided to do something like that, I could see it.
[00:25:53] well, and being able to utilize some of that, flexibility and power of DAO - again, but if it chose to do that. So, you touched on something just a little bit ago that I was. Retrace back, you were talking about, ENS names being, ERC-721, or basically NFTs. So what is, what does ENS and NFTs mean in terms of trading usernames?
[00:26:23] And just, I guess for a bit of a reference, I popped into OpenSea and I checked out, the naming, market and there were a few others in that space, but obviously ENS was right at the top. What does it mean to trade ENS as NFTs?
Brantly:
Yeah. So, a little bit of history on this. So when ENS launched and we'll only .Eth names and names, of course, domain names are by definition and empties and that they're non fungible right.
[00:26:56] By their very nature. But that time there was no, there wasn't an NFT standard. In fact. I don't even remember hearing the term and it's used at that time. Later that year, people started talking about that. And of course, CryptoPunks launched a month after ENS and then in June, 2017, but let's do standardization versus central non-standard and then perfectly later that year.
[00:27:20] So, so, some, some names you actually talk about this, there are some ENS names that are pre punk. Oh, gee. You know, ENS NFTs, was kind of a funny way of thinking about. You know, pre punk.
Humpty:
That's a good branding strategy. We're pre punk, right?
Brantly:
I mean, because maybe people talk about crypto punks is like the first set of tea and it certainly was an important marker in the history of NFTs.
[00:27:45] Of course, there were lots of things and NFTs for years, even previously. And then May, 2019, we had a 19 six years after launch. We had a, kind of a big upgrade and we adopted versus something on standard. And so all .Eth names are ERC-721 NFTs, which means they plug into any NFT infrastructure automatically. You can trade them around.
[00:28:11] You can fold them, do anything that you could do with a normal NFT. We are actually working on a new feature right now that will upgrade the NFT capabilities of ENS names. We're gonna upgrade, we're gonna start using the ERC-1155 standards because we think it's better. We are going to make it so that all ENS name follow that standard.
[00:28:38] Not only .Eth names, but subdomains and at ENS names important to DNS previously, that was all. And we're also going to give users more control over some of the NFT aspects. So like the image that shows up for the NFT right now, it's just some automatically generated thing from OpenSea that, you know, we don't have much control over, we're, we're going to update that to something that's much better.
[00:29:02] And we're going to give users the ability to customize that image. So that's exciting.
Humpty:
Yeah, that's really good. So I know that we have several people in this chat that we're talking about. Something like this specifically who are probably like really excited to jump on up here and ask you questions because they were talking about ENS marketplaces and seeing how, maybe this DAO could also help…
[00:29:29] Facilitate that, because as, and I, and I don't want to misquote, but I think they were saying ENS is the best kept secret of Ethereum, which, you know, I wouldn't disagree. I think that ENS brings a lot of value to the blockchain. And it is definitely not as popular as, it should be. Especially as we're talking about NFTs, I think that there is a lot of value in the collectability, but probably more importantly, in the usage of these ENS domain names of you're talking about there's a rich ecosystem that goes beyond just the name itself, but also looking at the implementation, for wallet addresses, for websites.
[00:30:12] So there, before I just say this is fantastic, we've had a great chat and in closing. I there's something on your website that really struck a chord with me. And I was wondering if you wouldn't mind kind of talking a little bit about that and it's really discussing the aspect of censorship resistant, decentralized websites.
[00:30:33] What is that and why is that important to eat just in general? And why is that important to ENS?
Brantly:
Yeah, so the fact that right, you can put a website on IPFS, which is a distributed file network, and then you can get a, an IPFS hash, right. And then you can put that in your ENS records since you have the name point at that.
[00:30:59] And, yeah, this is a great use case. By the way, censorship resistant doesn't mean there is no way for this ever to go away. some people oversell the censorship resistance of the systems, just in general, if any of you guys remember prior to the DAO act it's basic scene, it was very prominent.
[00:31:20] If you're in community use terms like immutable, uncensorable unstoppable, things like this. And then the DAO thing happened. Now people don't use those terms, or I'd say people who are responsible to use terms like, trust and minimizing censorship resistance. By the way, IPFS is not uncensorable or immutable or anything like that.
[00:31:42] As somebody in IPFS node, it has two posts, mobile styles, and they don't have to host any given files. So if you're not running your own IPFS node, the people who are can decide not to host the files, but it's much harder for an outside actor to censor an IPFS plus ENS websites. So the IPFS part, you know is censorship resistant.
[00:32:06] The only way that your ENS name can be censored is if they get, get ahold of your private key. We have no censorship whatsoever, our roots doesn't, so that is very censorship resistant, but of course there's always like, you know, guns at the head of diplomacy, right? They, if they just come to you, they could get you to censor of your website.
[00:32:26] So it just means that it's much harder to take down and that's useful. You know, maybe it's still accompany, can't send your governments or something. So I think that that's useful use case.
Humpty:
That's it! I hoped you learned a lot. I know I did. If you would like to learn more about them, please go to ENS.domains or on Twitter at @ENSdomains
[00:32:49] Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a five star review wherever you enjoy your podcasts, and stay tuned for our next discussion.