The proliferation of the internet brought the world to the fingertips of users, and with it came a rush to register domains on the nascent network. Businesses like Amazon were born on the internet, while many others took their real-life business online by registering a website.
Domain names remain an integral part of the internet, acting as the flagpole of the biggest brands, companies, institutions and individuals. But, the advent of blockchain technology and Web3 has ushered in a new paradigm for domain name hosting.
That is where things got interesting. Savvy tech sleuths realized that there was tangible value in registering websites with the names of prominent brands, companies or famous individuals knowing those same people would eventually want to do the same. Thus domain squatting as it is known today was born.
There have been some mind-boggling sums paid for domain names as the world gradually went online. Cars.com now holds the record for the most expensive domain name ever sold, with the website itself valued at $872 million as part of its assets in the company’s high-profile sale in 2015.
CarInsurance.com fetched almost $50 million and is ranked as the second most expensive domain sold in history. The list goes on and differs according to different sources, with domains like internet.com, sex.com, beer.com and hotels.com ranked as some of the most lucrative DNS addresses to be traded.
The practice is still common today, with anecdotes of famous individuals having to fork out large sums to buy a parked domain bearing their name. The process is now repeating itself with the rise of Web3 and blockchain-based domains.
ENS blooms
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is seemingly following in the footsteps of conventional domain names, surpassing 1.8 million registrations at the end of July 2022. 378,000 .eth domains were registered in that month alone, generating a monthly record of 5,400 Ether (ETH) in revenue.
July 2022 stats for ENS
– 378K new .eth registrations (total 1.86m names)
– $6.8m in protocol revenue (all goes to the DAO)
– 5,400 ETH in revenue (highest ever month)
– 48K new eth accounts w/ at least 1 ENS name (total 508k)
– >99% of OpenSea domain vol pic.twitter.com/TdD16FOX2d— ens.eth (@ensdomains) August 1, 2022
ENS describes itself as a “distributed, open, and extensible naming system” that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. Its purpose is to map human-readable names like “alice.eth” to machine-readable information like cryptocurrency…
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