ENS Drops 60%+ in 2022. Is There Any Hope Left?An update to the drama with Ethereum Name Service (ENS), which has been going through some tough times. This week I swapped out my ryangtanaka.eth ENS domain for ryangtanaka.org - a more traditional DNS domain for all of my #Web3 related activities. (My web hosting account is canceled, still - I'm planning on hosting all of my web activities on IPFS from now on.)
The idea of a decentralized domain system did appeal to me since I wanted to lead by example in my migration towards Web3. But after the controversies with ENS's Operations Director's (Brantly Milligan) bigoted comments surfaced last month it gave a lot of people pause about the whole project, including myself.
Looking into it further, .eth (and all other 3-letter domain names) are currently controlled by ICANN, who tends to be the gatekeeper for most DNS-related things today.) There were talks about using .eth for Ethiopia - though it's not clear right now - but either way, if you want to see .eth domains render in common browsers there's a need for the folks at ENS to strike a deal with the folks there.
discuss.ens.domains
They've been sitting on the problem for over 3 years, basically ignoring the biggest bottleneck for ENS's success, hoping that the problem will somehow resolve itself. Milligans' comment about "anything could happen" isn't exactly a plan, nor leadership, to say the least. He was removed from the non-profit company he was working for, but the DAO's move to remove him as the director of the Foundation Company failed last month. (Milligan has the highest delegate count by far and voted to keep himself, not surprisingly.)
discuss.ens.domains
So I sold all of my $ENS tokens that was airdropped to me as well, as of this week. (I know I'm not the only one.) I did turn a decent profit and I'm not going to turn down free money, but the fact that they couldn't get people to buy into the coin on its own merit should've been a red flag from the beginning, honestly.
Unstoppable Domains is having similar issues with their .crypto/.nft/.coin domains as well - this stuff isn't easy to do, despite how simple it appears to be on the surface. But they do at least have the advantage of not having tarnished their brand with unnecessary provocations so there might still be some path to success.
In a way, this is a perfect example of what Web3 ought to be - if you don't know how to play nice, you're out. The future of the internet lies in forming win-win scenarios out of the decentralized ecosystem, and those who don't know how to do that get weeded out, quickly.
