Like so many things in my life, I often need to see something more than once before I realize it’s important. In a short span I saw this same article show up twice.
The idea is very simple, and very cool. Wallets for any of the cryptocurrencies are a long string of random digits that no one will memorize, and certainly won’t want to type if they can avoid it. Namely, because if you get one character wrong, the token goes “into the ether” pun intended or the wrong person. So the concept with this is that you can go and register your own domain on the blockchain (Ethereum) that does a translation to your wallet (or wallets as the case may be). So just like a DNS server will translate a human readable name into an IP Address, this domain will translate your human readable name into your Ethereum (or multiple other wallets). Hence the name, Ethereum Name Service (ENS).
It takes some startup work. First you need an Ethereum wallet. Then you need to fund it with between $50 and $100 of Ether =(. All of this takes time, because the Ethereum blockchain takes some time to commit the block (and since I started by transferring money from BlockFi, it took 4 days to commit the transfer of funds into my personal wallet). You also need to setup a cool browser extension called Meta Mask (this is the first step to getting your browser to Web 3.0). Meta Mask lets you link your wallet(s) to your browser, so that a web application can talk to the blockchain behind it. If you haven’t played with any of this tech, I might be speaking gibberish, but for a nerd like me, it’s cool because it’s all finally starting to click in my brain.
piehlm.eth
This my ENS. And if someone is using cryptocurrency, they can send currency to me at that address. It also has the ability to hold many other tokens (I ran out of ETH in my account to pay for the update, so I need to transfer more before I can accept the other tokens I have wallets for). It’s not cheap. To get the domain for 5 years it cost me about $50 in ether, and it would cost me another $20 in ether to add more wallets and more data into my ENS.
I recognize, this is all speculation and may not ever pan out… but it’s pretty cool to know that I now own a domain that can work as my wallet. This is the sort of thing that has the ability to become like the new Venmo in the crypto world. It’s one step closer to getting people to adopt the technology by making it more accessible to the masses.
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike