Nick Johnson, founder of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), shared exclusive insight into the pivotal role Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin played in the development of ENS. When Johnson submitted figures to the Ethereum Foundation for a grant to build ENS, he said he doubled the amount Buterin had requested.
ENS, a project that allows users to generate human-readable Web3 addresses that can act as Web3 wallets for cryptocurrencies and NFTs and domains for decentralized websites, represents a significant advancement in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Johnson, who previously worked at Google, was attracted to Ethereum after noticing that Bitcoin lacked programmability. His strong background in infrastructure, tools, and libraries allowed him to write his own Ethereum string library, a critical component of Ethereum development.
The Ethereum Foundation hired Johnson, and one of his first projects was to start working on the Ethereum Naming Service. Johnson, who initially worked on the EthSwarm team, eventually moved to the Go Ethereum team but kept ENS as his side project.
The foundation created a separate organization funded by grants and encouraged Johnson to work full-time at ENS. Buterin stepped in and ensured ENS’ success by doubling the grant amount to support a two-year roadmap with a small team.
Since launch, users have registered over 2 million ENS addresses. However, Johnson believes that metrics such as the number of users entering cryptocurrency addresses into their wallets instead of DNS names are more important, but difficult to measure directly.
ENS plans to launch Ethereum layer-2 infrastructure in the next few years and aims to make its services more user-friendly and accessible on the network that can benefit from Web3 utilities.