“Ethereum Name Service Founder’s Insight on Vitalik Buterin’s Grant Intervention in Web 3.0”

The Development of Ethereum Name Service (ENS) in the Era of Web 3.0

When Nick Johnson submitted his capital requirements for building Ethereum Name Service (ENS) to the Ethereum Foundation, he was pleasantly surprised to receive double the amount from Vitalik Buterin himself.

At ETHGlobal in London, Cointelegraph had an exclusive conversation with Johnson, the founder of ENS, where he discussed the project’s evolution. ENS allows users to create human-readable Web3 addresses that serve as Web3 wallets for cryptocurrencies and NFTs, as well as decentralized website domains.

Originally from New Zealand, Johnson worked at Google before discovering Bitcoin and Ethereum. He was particularly drawn to Ethereum’s programmability, which led him to experiment with coding on the platform.

With a strong background in infrastructure, tooling, and libraries, Johnson was able to develop his own Ethereum strings library. This laid the foundation for his work on ENS.

The Complexity of String Manipulation in Programming

String manipulation is a crucial aspect of programming, involving the manipulation of text data rather than numerical data. This type of data typically consists of a sequence of characters, including letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces. According to front-end software engineer Jeffrey Jenkinson, string manipulation is one of the most intricate tasks in software development.

Jenkinson explained that any human-readable content can be considered a string, and when developers write code that needs to be converted into machine language, it begins with string manipulation. This process was especially important for the Ethereum Foundation, who eventually hired Jenkinson to work on their name service project.

Initially, Jenkinson was part of the EthSwarm team, responsible for the decentralized data storage and distribution technology within the foundation. However, he was also tasked with addressing a gap in the infrastructure, as the foundation’s content needed to be named. This sparked his project to create a naming system for all aspects of the foundation, including accounts.

As Jenkinson moved onto the Go Ethereum team, he continued to work on the name service project as a side project. This highlights the importance of string manipulation in the development of web 3.0, as it is crucial for creating a smooth and efficient user experience.

The Evolution of Web 3.0 and Its Impact on ENS

The Ethereum Foundation saw potential in Johnson’s project and offered him a grant to work on it full-time. With a small team, Johnson created a two-year roadmap for ENS, thanks to the support from Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin.

Since its launch, ENS has seen over two million registered addresses. However, Johnson believes that other metrics, such as the number of users using crypto addresses instead of traditional DNS names, are more important and challenging to measure.

While the number of registered ENS names is expected to grow gradually, the focus of the ENS team is on expanding the service to networks that can benefit from the utility of Web3.

“ENS must reach users where they are. If a new distributed content network gains popularity, ENS should support it. Our goal is to enhance usability for users,” Johnson explained.

In the near future, ENS plans to implement a layer-2 infrastructure for Ethereum, with a goal of creating a more user-friendly “plug-and-play” experience. This development is part of the ongoing evolution towards Web 3.0, which differs significantly from Web 2.0 in terms of artificial intelligence, investment opportunities, and the use of technologies like decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, and decentralized autonomous organizations.