What Is an ENS Domain? How Ethereum Names Work, and What ENSv2 Changed

Send ether to a friend and you are copying a string of 42 characters that looks like every other string of 42 characters. Get one character wrong and the money is gone. ENS exists to fix that one problem, and it has quietly become one of the most used pieces of infrastructure on Ethereum: a naming system where alice.eth resolves to an address, and where that name travels with you into wallets, apps and exchanges.

On 27 October 2026 the system was rebuilt underneath its users. ENSv2 went live on Ethereum mainnet, replacing the original registry design with a hierarchical one, and changing what a .eth name costs and how long you keep it after it expires. Here is what an ENS domain is, how it works, and what actually changed.

What an ENS domain actually is

The Ethereum Name Service is a naming protocol that maps human-readable names to machine-readable records. The best-known form is a .eth name, which is registered onchain, held in your wallet and controlled with your keys. Buy alice.eth and you control what that name points to, for as long as you keep renewing it.

A name can point to more than a payment address. The standard record is an Ethereum address, but a name can also carry addresses on other chains, a content hash for a decentralised website, an avatar, and arbitrary text fields such as an email, a Twitter handle or a description. Wallets and apps read whichever record they need.

The system also runs in reverse. Reverse resolution lets an address declare a primary name, which is how a wallet can show you alice.eth instead of 0x71c… when you are about to send funds. That primary name is a convenience and a claim by the address owner, not proof that the person behind it is who the name suggests.

How a name finds an address

Three contracts do the work, and the division matters if you ever need to debug a name that will not resolve.

The registry is the ownership layer. It records, for every name, who owns it, which resolver is responsible for it, and a time-to-live value. The resolver is the data layer: it holds the actual records — the ETH address, the Bitcoin address, the avatar — and answers queries about them. The registrar is the rulebook for a top-level domain, deciding who may register a name under it and for how much.

For .eth, that registrar is a smart contract, which is why a .eth name can be bought without a company in the middle. Under ENSv1 the name itself was an ERC-721 token: a transferable NFT whose owner also controlled the records. Names can also be imported from ordinary DNS through DNSSEC, which is how a .com or .xyz domain can be used inside ENS while remaining a normal domain.

Subnames extend the structure. If you own alice.eth you can create pay.alice.eth, or wallet.alice.eth, and give each one different records without asking anyone's permission. Communities and apps build on that: a project issues name.project.eth to its members and keeps control of the parent.

What people do with ENS names

Payments are the original use case and still the clearest one. Typing alice.eth into a wallet is less error-prone than pasting an address, and the name can be updated if the underlying address changes. This became mainstream enough that PayPal and Venmo added ENS name support for US users in September 2024, resolving a name to the wallet behind it inside the app.

Identity is the second use. A primary name gives you a consistent handle across apps that read ENS, including profile pictures and social links stored as records. Bitwise used the same idea for institutions in July 2024, publishing ENS-tagged addresses for its spot Ethereum ETF so anyone could match the fund's addresses to a verifiable label.

The third use is infrastructure: names for contracts, tokenised assets and, increasingly, communities that issue membership names as subnames. A name is easier to check than a contract address, and it can be re-pointed when a contract is upgraded. If you have ever pasted a token contract from a block explorer and hoped it was the right one, that is the problem this solves.

What a .eth name costs

Pricing is set by name length, on the theory that short names are scarce and should not be free for squatters. Until this week a 5+ character .eth name cost $5 a year, a 4-character name $160, and a 3-character name $640. Those base prices had not moved since May 2019. Names must be at least three characters, and the fee is paid in ETH at the moment you register or renew, converted through a price oracle.

As part of ENSv2, the 5+ character price rose to $8 a year. Three- and four-character base prices are unchanged. In exchange, registrations and renewals now get a multi-year discount: roughly 12.5% off for a two-year term, about 31% for three to five years, and about 44% for six years or more, measured against the one-year rate. Each transaction is priced on its own duration, so adding five years gets the five-year rate.

The practical effect is a nudge towards longer ownership. Renewing one year at a time costs slightly more than before; committing to several years costs less per year than the old flat $5 did. There is more on the fee mechanics in our explainer on Ethereum gas fees, since registration also carries an ordinary network fee.

What ENSv2 changed on mainnet

The upgrade was not a quiet patch. ENS Labs rebuilt the protocol and both of its main interfaces, shipping a new ENS App for everyday registration and a new ENS Explorer for inspecting how a name is owned, configured and resolved. Registration in the App is presented as a single action; under the old registrar it was a commit-reveal dance in which you committed a hash, waited at least 60 seconds, then registered, a design built to stop someone copying your name out of the public mempool.

The change went through governance rather than being shipped by the team alone. Founder Nick Johnson posted the activation proposal on 11 October 2026, the contracts were already deployed but the upgraded registrar was not authorised to accept registrations, and the executable proposal passed with about 1.69 million ENS in favour against roughly 25 against, clearing the one-million-token quorum. It was executed on 27 October, and new registrations and name resolution now run through the new system.

Hierarchical registries, in plain terms

The architectural change is easier to grasp than the name suggests. ENSv1 kept one flat registry for the whole namespace. ENSv2 lets an individual name act as its own registry for the names beneath it, so a name can carry its own rules about who may create subnames and what they may do.

That is paired with roles instead of the all-or-nothing ownership model. A company can authorise one administrator to manage every record, another to manage payment addresses, and a third to change the avatar, without handing anyone control of the whole namespace. A community can issue membership names and keep a manager scoped to that section only. ENS Labs describes the roles model as replacing the fuse-based permissions that the Name Wrapper introduced in 2023.

Records can also be linked, so several names can share one bundle of values rather than duplicating them. Unlinking one name leaves the records available to the others. There is a caveat worth knowing if you run a resolver: a delegated permission to edit one text key applies to every name that resolver instance serves, so restricting access to selected names means giving them their own resolver.

Expiry behaves more strictly too. An expired name stops resolving, and its entire subtree becomes inaccessible. If someone else registers the parent name afterwards, they start with a clean namespace rather than inheriting the old subnames and their records.

If you already own a .eth name

Nothing breaks. Existing names keep working and do not need to be registered again. Holders can upgrade a .eth name to ENSv2 from the ENS App whenever they want the new capabilities, and ENS Labs says there is no migration deadline. Names that have not migrated remain renewable through the ENSv1 renewal contract.

The expiry rules did change, and this is the part to act on. The grace period after a name expires shrank from 90 days to 28. During grace under the new system a name appears expired, does not resolve, cannot be transferred and cannot be edited, though it can still be recovered by renewing at the normal annual price. After 28 days it enters a 21-day price cooldown, where an additional premium decays exponentially to zero and anyone can register it. To avoid punishing existing holders, a name that upgrades gets 62 days added to its expiration date, preserving the grace-period end date it would have had under the old rules.

ENS also marked the launch with a commemorative NFT for eligible addresses, based on a 1 June 2026 snapshot, one per wallet, revealed after all eligible names are upgraded. Claiming is optional and costs gas.

Who governs the namespace

ENS is not a company product with a terms-of-service page. The protocol is governed by the ENS DAO, launched on 8 November 2021 with a 100 million token supply: 25% to a retroactive airdrop for anyone who had ever been the registrant of a .eth name, 25% to contributors, and 50% to the DAO treasury. More than 137,000 addresses were eligible, 19.6 million tokens were claimed by about 103,000 of them, and the unclaimed remainder went to the treasury.

The constitution ratified by token holders that November is unusually blunt. Its first article states that name ownership shall not be infringed: governance will not enact a change that takes names from their owners, and may only change registration costs on transparent criteria such as length. Article 2 frames fees as an anti-speculation mechanism first and a funding source second, which is the logic behind both the length-based pricing and this week's increase.

If you want the wider picture of how token-governed organisations actually operate, our guide to crypto DAOs covers the structures and their failure modes. ENS is one of the better-behaved examples: proposals are public, the executable vote that activated ENSv2 is onchain, and the team committed to publishing a script proving the deployer kept no administrative roles.

Where ENS names can mislead you

A name is a pointer, not a guarantee. Whoever holds the keys can re-point it, so a name you trusted last month can resolve somewhere else today. Treat a name as a claim about where funds will go right now, and check the resolved address rather than the label on screen.

Lookalike names are the other problem. Character substitutions, homoglyphs and extra hyphens are cheap to register, and a name that reads like a brand can be entirely unrelated to it. That is the same class of attack as address poisoning, where an attacker sends dust from a lookalike address hoping it ends up in your transaction history and then in your clipboard. A custom, easy-to-verify name of your own reduces the risk; our guide to vanity addresses explains the trade-offs of paying for a distinctive one.

Expiry is the quieter risk. A name that lapses enters a short grace window and then a public cooldown, and nothing stops someone else from registering it and inheriting your reputation with it. Renew early, and prefer multi-year terms now that they are discounted.

What to watch next

ENSv2 is days old, so the useful questions are practical rather than philosophical. Whether wallets and apps adopt the new permissions model, how quickly the subname-heavy projects migrate, and whether the shorter grace period causes a wave of accidental expiries are all open. ENS Labs says the protocol now supports more than 36 million names across .eth and other namespaces, resolved by more than 600 applications; its own 22 October post put the split at roughly 905,000 .eth names and about 34 million subnames, which tells you where the growth actually is.

The DAO has also committed to reviewing pricing every two years, so the $8 base is a policy choice rather than a fixed cost. For anyone holding a name, the practical checklist barely changes: know what the name points to, keep it renewed, and remember that a human-readable label makes an address easier to use and easier to fake in equal measure.