Nick Johnson: ENS - Multichain ENS Domains and Decentralised Identities

The very nature of Ethereum addresses, expressed as random hexadecimal character strings, represents a big hurdle for mass adoption, as they are not human-readable. ENS domains were envisioned to not only solve this and provide a seamless UX, but to also be the cornerstone of on-chain identities. However, in the current multichain landscape, a plethora of decentralised naming services arose, which led to a heterogeneous domain name pool. As a result, ENS aims to expand to L2s and non-EVM chains, attempting to provide consistency, in order to further reduce user friction and limit conflicting domain names.

We were joined by Nick Johnson, founder of ENS, to discuss the current state of decentralised naming services from a multichain and L2 perspective, and how these ultimately tie into decentralised identities.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Nick’s background and ENS history
• The plethora of decentralised naming services
• ENS use cases
• Interacting with Web2 DNS
• L2 compatibility for ENS via CCIP Read
• ENS wrapper and subdomains
• CCIP Read
• Bridging ENS to non-EVM L2s
• Coinbase’s cb.id
• ENS and on-chain privacy OPSEC
• Account abstraction
• The future of ENS
• Governance

Episode links:

• Nick Johnson on Twitter
• ENS on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/520