What is ENS?
ENS stands for the Ethereum Name Service, a service that creates human-readable names for Ethereum addresses and other content. For example, you could send Ether (ETH) to Alice’s Ethereum address by entering her ENS domain alice.eth as the recipient.
How does ENS work?
It’s a lot like how when you want to visit a website. You don’t type the IP address of the website you’re trying to reach (i.e. 8.8.8.8). Instead. you enter the website’s domain name into your browser (i.e. www.ethgasstation.info/).
You’re able to do this because of the Internet’s DNS, or domain name service. From there, the domain you typed is located in the DNS registry and you’re redirected to the correct address. ENS aims to make interacting with addresses and content on the Ethereum blockchain easy in this same way.
Much like DNS web domains, ENS domain name owners choose where their domain name redirects to. Say just want an easy way for everyone to send you ETH. Just register a domain and set it to redirect to your Ethereum wallet address. Owners can also choose to issue subdomains like payments.alice.eth. Services will often issue subdomains to users making it easier for them to into act with their smart contracts.
How do I get my own .eth domain?
Register domain names 7 characters or longer at anytime here at a cost of $5 per year paid in ETH. Auctions for shorter names (3 to 6 characters) started Sept. 1, 2019 and will continue for several weeks. More details about the auction process and cost of these domains are found here.
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