| > Another factor could be the fact ENS names expire and require a renewal fee I have no proof, but I doubt any of them were paying for it. I tried to figure out how some of them got their names by looking at the blockchain. There were some patterns where I thought it looked like someone bought up a bunch of popular names and transferred them to the influencers. I'm not very well versed in blockchain though, so I couldn't follow it well enough to do anything more than speculate. I think it was nothing more than promotion. It would be interesting to know if anyone got paid because they should be disclosing it as paid promotion if they did. Having the domain given to you is a type of payment (if that happened). > I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active If you weren't looking at a 3 or 4 letter domain you were probably seeing super high transaction fees which made the initial transaction very expensive. The registration is supposed to cost about $5 per year. I bought one a few months ago and that's how it worked. I paid $11 in transaction fees for the first transaction where you submit your order + secret. Then I paid $72 in transaction fees for the registration plus $55 for 10 years of registration. I also got about $5 transferred back to me by the ETH ENS registrar. So the cost of the domain registration was $5 / year, but the transaction fees were around $85. I watched gas prices for a week and tried to time my order with low fees. The cost of the second transaction went up by $20 while I waited for the 1 minute delay required between transactions. It's crazy. You also need to pay transaction fees every time you want to update the record. Now imagine a proof of stake system where the rich (ie: early adopters) get a cut of transaction fees just for holding a bunch of tokens. I think that's why enthusiasts are so excited. Imagine getting paid every time someone needs to update a record in a database. I don't think blockchain domains have any benefits. In fact I think they're significantly worse than our current system. However, I did buy one to match my favorite / best .com domain because even if they're a terrible idea they could still get popular and I thought it was worth $135 USD to ensure I didn't have to worry about someone squatting on my name. |