YNWA: I'm excited for this one because your company, ENS Domains is dominating on OpenSea as you have been around for a while. Maybe you can share ENS Domains with a broader audience.

Yes, with pleasure, ENS stands for the Ethereum Name Service, and on a very basic level, it is a naming system. Which means that it is easy to read and remember. Let's talk practically so there are three things you can do with ENS:

• The first is that it can be your portable username. You get a name, add an avatar, link your Twitter account or other information about yourself, and you own that name. When you connect to a dApp, you can use your ENS as your username. Cross-platform use is the main power of ENS.
• The second primary use case is the simplification of crypto payments. You can link addresses to ENS and receive any crypto with your username.
• The third and last major use case is decentralized websites. You can store your websites decentrally with distributed files.

Another critical thing worth mentioning is that ENS is an open-source protocol, which means that even if the developers run away, ENS and its functions will still be there.

If you want to register at app.ens.domains, it is pretty easy. It is just a UI interacting with blockchains. You can register your name that way. But there is also a secondary market where you can trade names (buy or sell names that already exist). So when you see the sell volume on OpenSea, it is just the secondary market. That is exploding currently. In the blockchain domains category, ENS is the leader of this market.

Even going back, internet names were one of the first things people realize you can do. For blockchains, it is pretty much the same. ENS has the chance to become the blockchain naming system of the world.

YNWA: From a new user perspective, I am curious now, how many addresses are inactive? What is the average use? What do users do first?

Nothing goes to our servers, so we do not collect and track data. We are trying to build usernames to be used and decide on a pricing model that does not encourage speculation. Five characters' names or longer are 5 dollars a year, 4 characters cost 160$ a year, and for 3 characters, it is 640$ a year. All these prices should be paid, of course, in ETH. Another interesting thing is that you can pay ahead as long as you want. The longer you want to register, the more you have to pay. I recommend you pay for 10 years or something like this in order for you not to forget to renew.

Hibee: You can also set reminders, can't you?

Yes, of course. Something we have been working on is that you can import DNS names into ENS.

Hibee: How many users do you see are using that?

The full DNS is very new, so I do not know. The importing process is a one-time but is very expensive. We have some plans on our roadmap to reduce that costs (90%).

YNWA: What are the risks for users? Because replacing the long chains of characters for ETH addresses reduces the chances of errors, but what do users need to be aware of when registering? Because, if you lose ownership of that address, users will simply send money to someone else.

That's true. There are a couple of things to say about this. Firstly, if we decide on a policy of "you pay once for life" then the price will be too high. But we need to find a way to give ownership forever, and that is one of the problems. Another problem is that some people think they will use domain names, but in the end, they don't. There is another problem if you lose your private key or something terrible happens because you saved that in the wrong place, and the names cannot be used anymore. We can also double-check the address to verify the transactions before sending.

YNWA: I am sure that tutorials can help to use your tools a little bit more. There is a need to explain what should be done or not to get the best practices.

Yes, we are working on a total redesign. ENS has grown enormously in terms of what is possible. So it should be much more straightforward. Our focus is to make things clear and simple but it is a big battle.

YNWA: Is there a way to get subdomains on ENS?

Yes, subdomains are one of the most powerful features of ENS. There are not used right now because we need more tools and better functions. In the long term, most users will have a subdomain and not the main domain. There is a gas fee to set up, but we can work on reducing it. You can create as many subdomains as you want.