October 7, 2022

ENS stands for Ethereum Name Service, and it acts in a similar fashion to domain names, but with an important distinction.

ENS allows you to own your identity. Under the hood, ENS is a smart contract that you have full control over. This means that (if you maintain proper security of your wallet) no one can ban you or take it away from you, as many owners of .com domains have found out for themselves over the years. It is a self-contained smart contract that sits in your wallet.

Wallets are usually long and unreadable for humans, such as 0x5305b2E1f42275Dd496a8022cDf8D97dd83fAd6E, so using a shorter ENS, ie sloika.eth, allows others to send money or NFTs safer. You don’t need to painstakingly verify every character of the wallet address if you know that your friend or service has a short and recognizable name.

At Sloika, getting ENS is a required step. It does add friction, especially if you are new to web3. However, we believe in the importance of establishing your digital identity, and have seen positive correlation between creators who buy and set up their ENS and those who didn’t do so. We have onboarded over 400 creators who have registered their ENS.

In fact, since Sloika has been strongly recommending getting ENS before they announced an airdrop in November 2021, the first 20 or so creators on Sloika received an airdrop of ENS tokens worth between US $5,000 and $15,000! That is the power of web3, where you get paid for simply using a service early.

Today, there are over 500,000 owners of an ENS. We expect that number to continue growing exponentially as web3 expands. Today there are 180 million dot-com domains, so it’s a great time to register and ENS with your name or a project name while it’s still available.

The costs associated with ENS registration and setup have been falling steadily, and today you can register an ENS for under 0.01 ETH. ****

PS: If you are applying to Sloika and need help registering ENS, please DM me at @tchebotarev — I’d be happy to cover the costs of registering ENS for 10 people, especially for artists from emerging economies.

<aside> 💡 Find ENS articles in the Sloika support portal.

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