The Last Massive ENS Airdrop in 2021

[CoinEx]

In 2020, Uniswap impressed the entire crypto community with its incredible airdrops — On average, every participant received airdrops worth an iPhone. To this day, the Uniswap airdrop remains the “ace of airdrops”, and crypto users can still recall this feat. This year, the title goes to ENS, which sparked the enthusiasm of the whole crypto space. Some claim that there is a user who got $2.78 million in this airdrop spree, which could be a new crypto record.

Since ENS announced the airdrop on November 2, 2021, it has burned gas fees of 2,535 ETH within seven days in terms of application interaction alone. As users flocked to claim their airdrops on November 9, the Ethereum blockchain became congested for a short period, and the gas fee of all Ethereum transactions stayed at around 0.04 ETH for a few days, which shows how popular ENS has been. So, what is the story behind ENS and its airdrop craze?

ENS (Ethereum Name Service) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. ENS’s job is to map human-readable names like “alice.eth” to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata. ENS also supports “reverse resolution”, making it possible to associate metadata such as canonical names or interface descriptions with Ethereum addresses. Simply put, ENS creates an Ethereum domain name ending in “.eth” by converting an Ethereum address into readable, memorable characters, and turns a human-readable domain name back into a machine-readable format through “reverse resolution”. This replaces the lengthy hash value and improves the ease of use of Dapps.

It is well known that web domains generally end with “.com”, “.org”, “.me”, etc., and netizens have grown used to such websites. In fact, computers can only read IP addresses composed of decimal numbers, but because such number combinations are difficult to remember and not convenient to use, domains were born in response, converting IP addresses into a human-readable format.

In reality, the most famous domain name server is DNS (Domain Name System). As the domain service of the Internet, DNS is a conversion server between domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. For example, when we enter URLs like “xx.com” and “xx.org” in the address bar to visit a webpage, DNS will automatically translate the domain name we entered into the corresponding IP address, thereby sending us to the target page.

ENS has similar goals to DNS. The only difference is that the latter converts domain names into IP addresses, whereas the former turns “.eth” domains into Ethereum addresses. Like DNS, ENS operates on a system of dot-separated hierarchical names called domains, with the owner of a domain having full control over subdomains. In addition, ENS also allows users to import DNS names they already own for later use.

Founded in May 2017 by Nick Johnson, ENS is an ecosystem project incubated by the Ethereum Foundation. It is currently managed and developed by a non-profit organization called True Names LTD. According to its official website, the current ENS ecosystem includes wallets like MetaMask, applications such as OpenSea, and explorers. As of November 22, there have been 460,000 registered ENS domain names with over 180,000 users.



With a total supply of 100 million, 25% of the governance tokens of ENS were airdropped to addresses that have registered ENS domain names, and another 25% was distributed to community members who have contributed to ENS in the past five years, including administrators at the Discord community. The remaining 50% was reserved for its DAO. It is noteworthy that the ENS airdrops covered all addresses that have registered ENS domain names before November 1, 2021.

It is noteworthy that the ENS airdrop adopted a fair accounting system — The independent address was relied on as the accounting basis. This means that users could not receive more airdrops even if they had multiple ENS domain names. Although such a distribution method is not in the interest of big holders, it is more friendly to the average ENS user. In many airdrop programs, there are always droves of speculators who intentionally create new addresses and drive up their interaction records just to get airdrops. ENS’s approach minimized this problem.

With investments from institutions like Chainlink, Protocol Labs, and Binance, apart from the Ethereum Foundation, ENS has been listed on trading platforms such as Uniswap and CoinEx. Although many crypto users missed the ENS airdrop feat, they are still intrigued by ENS. How well will the final massive airdrop of 2021 perform in the future? Let’s wait and see.