Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain 000.eth was sold for 300 ETH, roughly $315,000, on 3rd July. This marked the second-largest purchase denominated not just in Ether but also in terms of US Dollars.
On-chain data revealed that the ENS name was sold by a user called EtheOS on the OpenSea marketplace who had received it in June 2020.
The ENS name was first listed for 100 ETH in September 2021, then valued at around $300,000. The user re-listed the name in January this year for 500 ETH and once again in March. The offer was listed for three months before being accepted. The latest sale stands second to the highest sale of 420 ETH of another ENS name – paradigm.eth – last October. It was valued at approximately $1.5 million at that time.
For the uninitiated Ethereum Name Service, also known as ENS, is a protocol that links machine-generated codes to human-friendly names. It is Web3-friendly, open, decentralized, and not-for-profit naming system powered by the Ethereum blockchain. ENS’ domain names are secured via smart contracts.
These names are also NFTs and can be sold on popular marketplaces such as OpenSea. According to stats, ENS is one of the most widely integrated naming standards with over 1.1 million names, 504 integrations, and over 400k owners.
Ethereum Naming System (ENS) has gained widespread adoption lately. Many prominent personalities, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have added the .ETH extension to their names. Even popular A-listers such as Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, and Snoop Dogg have acquired Web3 identities on Ethereum.
Last year, an unknown wallet bought the Ethereum domain name – paradigm.eth – for 420 ETH (around $1.5 million). Initially, many believed that crypto-dedicated VC giant Paradigm was behind the expensive purchase. However, it denied those reports.
Crypto firm, Blockchain.com also announced that it will allow its users to claim free “.blockchain” domain names supported by Unstoppable Domains in June 2021 as a potential challenge to Ethereum Name Service.
More recently, the Open Network (TON) Foundation launched a new service – TON DNS – to enable users to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, smart contracts, and websites.