ENS

What is Ens? The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain.

Mission ENS is on a mission to map human-readable names like ‘alice.eth’ to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata.

Goals ENS has similar goals to DNS, the Internet’s Domain Name Service, but has significantly different architecture due to the capabilities and constraints provided by the Ethereum blockchain. 

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.

Configuration Because of the hierarchal nature of ENS, anyone who owns a domain at any level may configure subdomains - for themselves or others - as desired. For instance, if Alice owns 'alice.eth', she can create 'pay.alice.eth' and configure it as she wishes.

Deployed on? ENS is deployed on the Ethereum main network and on several test networks. If you use a library such as the ensjs Javascript library, or an end-user application, it will automatically detect the network you are interacting with and use the ENS deployment on that network.

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