What's Your ENS? - The Daily Gwei #521
What's Your ENS? - The Daily Gwei #521
The future of finance is human-readable Ethereum.
An Ethereum wallet is incredibly powerful - from allowing you to store your precious ETH to being the gateway to on-chain ecosystems such as DeFi. On top of this, creating an Ethereum wallet is as simple as generating a public/private key pair which many apps allow you to do easily (MetaMask, Rainbow, Argent etc). Once your keys are generated (and your wallet has some ETH), the entire world of Ethereum is available to you.
I always find it a bit archaic when I have to ask someone for their bank account details as it’s always a game of making sure you’ve got the account numbers exactly right. ‘FinTech’ improved on this somewhat over the last decade or so with solutions like PayPal, Venmo, Cash App and more but these are just bandaid solutions. The heart of the issue here is that the traditional finance system was never built as a digital-first system - this is where blockchains came in and gave us the first real and global digitally-native value transfer system - not some pseudo-digital thing that the modern traditional finance system passes off as “internet banking”.
Ethereum takes this even further by allowing people to attach a unique name to their wallet address (like how website can attach unique words to their IP addresses). This is incredibly powerful and completely simplifies the entire experience of transferring value around. For example, I can simply tell someone that they can “reach me” at sassal.eth and they can send me ETH and tokens, send me NFTs, send me liquidity pool tokens or a yield bearing token and even hit me up on a web3-enabled chat app. Because of the open nature of Ethereum, there’s no need for them to ask for anything beyond my ENS name because it’s attached to my Ethereum address which is plug-and-play with the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
Obviously the current state of privacy on Ethereum leaves much to be desired and we only have a few early products/services that allow people to achieve some level of privacy. I think this is the number 1 thing (beside scaling) that is hampering mainstream adoption of crypto - after all, no one wants all of their finances completely exposed to the world on an immutable ledger (no matter how much better the experience is compared to the traditional finance system). We also need to make all of this stuff much easier to use as Ethereum UI/UX is typically quite confusing and can be very scary for newcomers (especially since money is involved).
I think that once scaling, privacy and general UI/UX issues are no longer a concern for Ethereum, we’re going to see an absolute explosion in the adoption of this technology that we all know and love. Not only will individuals be using Ethereum, so too will corporations, institutions, small businesses and more.
And they’ll all be doing it with an ENS name attached to their address!
Have a great weekend everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.