Newsletter #2

GM GM.

• Been a wild week in the ENS space.

• Lots of very high offers ($50-90k) on great names. 2nd ever ENS name minted (voicciov.eth) being bid up to $50k. LooksRare engaging the community on Twitter and creating ENS categories on their site.

• But obviously, the drama around the ENS DAO and taking names for ENS Fairy is all that’s being talked about on Twitter.

We’ll get into this in detail below.

Still working on a better chart. Hopefully next week, but no promises.

ENS DAO PROPOSAL ANGERS THE COMMUNITY

The relative peace between the DAO and the community ended this week due to a small part of a larger proposal from the DAO.

The gist of the proposal was to allow the DAO to “buy” names off the expiry list that have “natural owners” such as brands or celebs.

Sounds potentially good in theory, but lots of potential problems in practice.

• They’re not really buying them, because the money goes right back to them

• What names would qualify? For celeb names, could that be screwing over regular people with the same name?

• Could this lead down a path where the DAO gets more involved in who can get what names and why?

Nick Johnson (founder of ENS) was asked on Twitter if the DAO would use the same process to take names that were deemed “offensive” and send them to a burn address, and he stated that he would not see a problem with that.

This is exactly where the main concern is. Once the protocol itself starts getting involved in what happens to individual names, it will lead toward serious controversy, due to the obvious political nature of what is deemed “offensive” and by whom. The last 5+ years of discourse in the world have shown us how little agreement exists about what should be deemed offensive or not.

Once they open that door, there will be a massive backlash from all sides no matter what is done. The backlash from those who want something burned that isn’t, or those that are mad something was burned they don’t think should have been.

I don’t think the community wants to see ENS on Fox News or MSNBC being blasted for the decisions they’re making regarding offensive names.

The obvious solution is to just stay neutral. 

I wrote a detailed thread about this if you want to read more. It’s linked below.

499th most common first name with 1.4 million people shown on Forebears.io

• Extremely rare to get this quality of a first name for under 1eth

• IRMA - Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance

• Was a famous hurricane 6 years ago

0.85eth

• Buy it now on ENS.Vision

Make sure you’re checking the ENS HQ website every day for the best tweets!

enshq.xyz

Checks by Jack Butcher

• Jack is an amazing visual artist who simplifies complex ideas into beautiful, simple images

• Checks were an open edition a month ago, costing $8 each, the same as getting a blue check on Twitter

• Amazing game theory built-in via a burn mechanism to get a rare Check

• Has gone from $8 to $1061 in a month.

from: fry.eth (@notfrydoteth)

Episode 9: Balaji, Telsa.eth and the fight over 2523.eth

• Mike is back! We discuss Balaji’s great tweet about having an ENS list being better than an email list.

• We also discuss the $80k bid for Tesla.eth and why that doesn’t mean you should go out and invest in corporate names.

• Finally, we discuss the huge 20eth bid for 2523.eth, and how this perfectly encapsulates what will happen frequently in ENS in the future. Which is when two rich people want the same name, the bidding for it can go extremely high.

For you newbies who want to learn what all the hype with ENS is about but don't know where to start, check out our free Intro to ENS course on Gumroad.

• Great twice weekly NFT newsletter giving you an overview of what’s been happening in the market

• Written by @bivnft, who is also an awesome member of the ENS community

• Check it out and let us know what you think!

bivnft.com

PS. If you want a chance to have your domain featured in this newsletter, respond to this email with your BEST (only one) domain at the absolute lowest price you'd let it go. The more reasonable the price, the higher likelihood we'll feature it. If it needs an explanation of why it's valuable, write no more than three bullet points as to why it's valuable.