Why can't the ENS community and DAO get along?

GM GM!

This is probably going to be the longest newsletter yet. Tons going on this week, as I predicted. Although I didn’t expect a massive dust-up between the community and the DAO on the first day of EthDenver.

• Twitter post about “squatting” from nick.eth, founder of ENS, frustrated many in the community and got another conversation going about the pros and cons of speculating on ENS names

• EthDenver happened; ENS booth, two ENS events on Thursday

• The booth was consistently busy the entire conference

• Massive Twitter meme about the small ENS booth

• Punk6529 (top 3 most influential people in NFTs) tweeting twice about how important it is to get your ENS name

• The NameWrapper is close to release; the ENS DAO has a bug bounty on testnet that could get you 5eth

I also wrote a thread that got a lot of attention about a conversation I had at the ENS event about trademarked names and what potential options the DAO may take in this regard.

I’ll do a long write-up about this in the next edition. I got sick after EthDenver and just haven’t had the ability to put something together, as I wrote most of this in Denver.

Let’s get into the details!

ENS Meme contest gone viral:

Many in the ENS community, myself included, believe the ENS DAO should create a marketing team to spread the word about the value prop of ENS.

We believe that for ENS to keep its massive lead in the Web3 domain name space, there needs to be some serious effort and money invested to show why ENS is different from Unstoppable Domains and the hundred other clones out there.

And as this conversation has heated up over the last month or so, a photo of the ENS booth at EthDenver was shared on Twitter. The booth is about as basic and small as they come. Exactly the type of thing the community would like to see more money put into, especially at an Ethereum-focused conference. Egg.eth started a meme contest for the photo of the DAO, and it took off.

Lots of hilarious ones in the thread, worth going through them all. My favorite is at the bottom of the newsletter.

But even better, the ENS DAO got in on the fun and posted this:

Love to see this from the ENS DAO! This kind of fun engagement with the community is what we need to see much more of.

EthDenver events

While the booth was small, it was pretty busy all the time. They gave out customer sticker name tags that were pretty slick. While I do think it makes sense to invest more in events like this, they did well with what they had.

There were two ENS events on Thursday, one at 3pm hosted by ENS Labs and one at 7pm hosted by the DAO.

I only went to the 3pm one, and it was great! Got to meet Sadaf who was just as kind and personable as she is on Twitter Spaces. Met some other members of the DAO/Labs who were all great people as individuals.

Also had a lengthy conversation with Chosen.eth who is the founder of Kodex.io, which is an ENS-specific marketplace with a ton of cool features that no other marketplace has. They haven’t done a ton of marketing yet, but they will soon. I’m going to dig deeper into it soon and do a full write-up. But for now, it’s definitely worth checking out!

Overall it was a great event and loved getting to meet a bunch of you in the community. My only gripe is that the events should have been on different days, so I could have made it to both. Was already at the Labs event for almost 4 hours, I didn’t have another 3 in me immediately after that.

ENS Community vs. ENS DAO: The Saga Continues

Crystal Zurn wrote a great piece about some disagreements between the DAO and the community.

It’s a longer piece, and you should click the link below to read it. But here is a snippet:

In the DAO forums, members have compared the purchase of DNS names to ENS names. For example, a DNS name can be registered for $9/year, regardless of character length. So what's to stop someone from buying a .com domain and then porting it over to ENS? If the goal is to onboard as many people as possible to the ENS ecosystem, then the DAO should lower the fees to be more aligned with DNS.

Check it out HERE

• 6-character forename

• 109k people listed on Forebears.io, most in India

• 3,900 listed on LinkedIn

• This is my domain, didn’t get a chance to do a shill Tweet

• Make sure you’re replying to this email with good domains to feature, or respond on twitter to @tjlarkin23 or @ens_hq

• Buy it here on ens.vision  

0.10eth ($162)

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

enshq.xyz

blarney.eth is the community member of the week!

• Wrote a ton of killer tweets this week

• Wrote a valuable thread about whether the ENS DAO should have a separate company or division that sells the domains vs the develops the protocol, which is how it works in DNS

• I haven’t gotten a chance to think through his suggestions deeply yet, but I always appreciate new ideas that are presented in a thoughtful way

• You should definitely follow him, and possibly go back through his tweets from the past week

• Keep up the good work, buddy!

Check out his Twitter page here: blarney.eth

This is the tweet about how to potentially restructure the ENS system:

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• 3 years of the Pro Pass for Consensus conference

• Perks during the conference

• Annual rewards you can sell, gift or use

• Lots of winnable bonuses worth $1,000s or $10,000s, such as a 15-minute session on stage or a free booth at the conference

• I love to see art + utility put together like this, especially real-world utility

• Minting is available for 1.5eth

• Check it out on their sight HERE

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.

ENS HQ Newsletter is written by:

TJ Larkin - @tjlarkin23
Crystal Zurn - @crystalzurn

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