Swap ENS at the Best Rate

What is ENS?

ENS is an ERC-20 token whose only job is governance. It carries no claim on .eth names and is not needed to register one: names are bought and renewed in ETH through the protocol's registrar contracts. What the token controls is the system around those contracts, including the price oracle for .eth names, protocol parameters and the DAO treasury that registration revenue flows into.

The Ethereum Name Service itself maps human-readable names such as alice.eth to addresses, content hashes and profile records, and it predates the token by several years. One hundred million ENS were minted on 8 November 2021, the day the ENS DAO took shape, with a quarter of the supply claimable by the more than 137,000 addresses that had registered .eth names before 31 October 2021.

How ENS works

Voting power comes from delegation. A holder assigns their tokens' votes to a delegate, or to themselves, and delegates submit and vote on proposals through the DAO's OpenZeppelin governor contract behind a timelock. At launch, putting a proposal on-chain required the support of 100,000 ENS, with a quorum of 1% of all tokens and a simple majority to pass.

Executable proposals change contracts and move treasury funds directly, so a passing vote is the mechanism by which .eth pricing, protocol upgrades and spending decisions actually happen. Registration and renewal fees, paid in ETH, accumulate in the DAO treasury and fund grants, development work by ENS Labs and the other programs the DAO approves.

ENS supply and tokenomics

The 100 million supply was split three ways at launch: 25% to the community airdrop, 25% to more than one hundred contributors, and 50% to the DAO treasury, of which a tenth was available immediately and the rest unlocked linearly over four years. Airdrop claims stayed open until 4 May 2022; about 19.6 million tokens were claimed by 103,000 addresses, and the unclaimed remainder was swept into the treasury.

Supply is not strictly fixed. As owner of the token contract, the DAO may mint up to 2% of the total supply, and after doing so it must wait a full year before it can mint again. Any such issuance needs a passing governance vote, and none of it happens automatically.

Who builds ENS

Development is led by ENS Labs, a Singapore-based non-profit, with Nick Johnson as the protocol's founder and lead developer. The DAO rather than the company holds the protocol's economic levers: ENS Labs proposes work and receives funding through governance votes, and the community of delegates decides.

The current engineering effort is ENSv2, a rewrite that gives every name its own registry and simplifies registration. ENS Labs announced a dedicated Layer 2 called Namechain in November 2024, then cancelled it in February 2026 and committed to deploying ENSv2 exclusively on Ethereum, citing a roughly 99% fall in registration gas costs as mainnet scaled.

What people use ENS for

Most holders interact with the token through delegation, since votes only count once they are assigned. The things the token decides are concrete: what a .eth name costs per year, which protocol upgrades ship, and how the DAO treasury is spent.

• Delegate voting power to an ENS DAO delegate without giving up custody of the tokens.
• Self-delegate and vote directly on executable and social proposals.
• Propose changes when backed by enough delegated tokens.
• Pair or lend ENS in DeFi markets that support it.

ENS risks and considerations

The token's entire value proposition is governance, and governance is concentrated in practice: large delegates carry most of the voting weight, and turnout decides outcomes. Because the DAO sets .eth pricing and controls the treasury, decisions that upset name holders or token holders can still pass, and the yearly 2% mint right means dilution is possible whenever a majority wants it.

Holding ENS gives no rights over any name, and owning a name grants no tokens. The token also floats freely against the fees it governs, which are denominated in dollars and paid in ETH, so growth in registrations does not mechanically translate into demand for the token.