Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the Ethereum name service, shows the timely intervention of help
Nick Johnson wasn't sure how much capital he needed to build the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), but when he presented figures to the Ethereum Foundation for a grant, Vitalik Buterin gave him double what he asked for.
The founder of ENS spoke exclusively to Cointelegraph at ETHGlobal in London, reflecting the development of the project, which allows users to create human-readable Web3 addresses, as well as Web3 wallets for cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs), as well as domains. Decentralized websites.
The New Zealand-born software engineer worked for Google before being introduced to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Johnson said he was drawn to Ethereum because of its programming.
“I learned about Bitcoin shortly after it came out. At first I thought this was great, but then I realized it was just money. There is no program here. “
Johnson began tinkering with the Ethereum code in his personal capacity. His strong background in infrastructure, tools, and libraries allowed Johnson to write his own library of Ethereum strings.
A string is a programming data type that represents text rather than numbers. This is a sequence of characters, typically consisting of letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces. Front-end software engineer Jeffrey Jenkinson describes string manipulation as one of the most complex tasks in software.
“Anything human-readable can be considered a string, and when developers write code that needs to be parsed into machine language, it starts with string manipulation,” Jenkinson told Cointelegraph.
The Ethereum Foundation eventually hired Johnson, and one of his first projects was to start work on a name service. Initially working for the EthSwarm team – an in-house decentralized data storage and distribution technology – Johnson was charged with fixing a gap in the infrastructure.
“They recognized that there was a flaw; their content needed naming. I said, well, everything is like that, tags and so on. So that became my project. When I left the Herd team and joined the GoEthereum team, I put it as a side project.” Johnson said.
The Ethereum Foundation encouraged Johnson to create a separate grant-funded organization to work full-time on the project. The founder of ENS released rough figures to support a two-year roadmap with a small team. As Johnson explains, that's where Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin steps in:
“They took him to Vitalik and he said, ‘No, that's not enough, take double.' That's how it started. If he hadn't been involved, the ENS would have failed.
Since the service went live, users have registered more than two million ENS addresses. For Johnson, this measure is not as critical as others, which are arguably more difficult to measure. What segment of users prefers to better gauge what crypto addresses are entering into their wallets than DNS names?
“Unfortunately, that's almost impossible to measure directly. So instead we should look at adoption in terms of number of names, registrations and renewals.
While he anticipates a gradual growth in the number of registered ENS names, Johnson said the group will focus on taking the service to networks that use the Web3 utility.
RELATED: Ethereum Naming Service Founder Reflects on Approaching 2 Million Signups Mark
“In other words, ENS should come to where users are. If there is a new distributed content network that is widely used by users, ENS should support it. We need to be there to allow people to experience that improvement in usage,” the founder said.
ENS plans to deploy Ethereum's layer-2 infrastructure over the next two years, and Johnson hopes to make the service more “plug-and-play” friendly.
Magazine: Is Measuring Blockchain Transactions Per Second (TPS) Foolish in 2024? Big questions
