Nick Johnson, the founder of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), received double the amount of capital he requested from Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, to build the project. Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph at ETHGlobal in London, Johnson discussed the progress of ENS, which allows users to create human-readable Web3 addresses that serve as a Web3 wallet for cryptocurrencies and NFTs, as well as a domain for decentralized websites.
Before getting involved with Bitcoin and Ethereum, Johnson worked for Google. He was attracted to Ethereum because of its programmability. With a strong background in infrastructure and tooling, Johnson developed his own Ethereum strings library, which is used to manipulate text in programming.
After being hired by the Ethereum Foundation, Johnson started working on the name service as part of the EthSwarm team. The foundation recognized the need for naming in their content, and Johnson saw that this need extended to other aspects such as accounts. When he moved to the Go Ethereum team, he continued working on the name service as a side project.
Encouraged by the Ethereum Foundation, Johnson created a separate organization funded by a grant to work full-time on the ENS project. He presented a two-year roadmap with rough figures to support a small team. However, Buterin intervened and provided double the requested amount of capital.
Since its launch, over two million ENS addresses have been registered by users. However, Johnson believes that the number of registered addresses is not as important as other metrics that are harder to measure. He is more interested in gauging how many users are entering crypto addresses into their wallets instead of DNS names.
While Johnson expects a gradual increase in the number of registered ENS names, he and his team are focused on expanding the service to networks that can benefit from Web3 utility. Johnson believes that ENS needs to be accessible to users wherever they are. If a new distributed content network gains popularity, ENS should support it to improve usability.
In the coming years, ENS plans to introduce Ethereum layer-2 infrastructure and make the service more user-friendly and easy to integrate. Johnson aims to create a “plug-and-play” experience for users.