ENS Labs, the company behind the Ethereum Name Service, said Tuesday that it has chosen Linea’s technology to build its upcoming layer-2 network, Namechain.
Linea is a zero-knowledge rollup released in July 2023 and built by Ethereum infrastructure giant Consensys. It is the seventh largest aggregation network, with $1 billion in its ecosystem, according to L2Beat.
ENS Labs says it selected Linea to build its network for two reasons. “One is a kind of alignment of values,” says Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS. The other has to do with speed.
Rollups are a special type of blockchain that allows transactions to be carried out faster and at lower costs. There are two types of rollups: optimistic and zero knowledge. Optimistic merges use optimistic proofs, which have a seven-day period to dispute transactions before they are completed (proofs are assumed to be ‘optimistic’ in that no one will dispute their contents). Zero-knowledge rollups, on the other hand, use zero-knowledge cryptography, seen by many as a superior technology, to secure proofs and complete those proofs in minutes.
ENS has been described as “the phone book for Web3”, but a more precise analogy is the Web’s domain name service (DNS). The domain name “CoinDesk.com” is easier to remember and type than a numeric IP address. Likewise, ENS handles like Parisilton.eth, which the eponymous heiress acquired in 2021, are more recognizable than the strings of letters and numbers that make up Ethereum wallet addresses.
For this service, “we need quick finality,” Johnson said. That’s because “you want to be able to update your ENS name and ensure that the chain reflects it in the smallest possible intervals. And to do that and ensure that it remains decentralized and secure.” We need quick finality, and optimistic roll-ups can’t deliver on that,” Johnson said.
The news comes as other major crypto projects announce their intentions to roll out layer 2 networks, although unlike ENS, some of the biggest names in blockchain have tapped Optimism’s OP Stack to build out their networks.
ENS will be one of the first major projects to build out a layer-2 blockchain based on Linea’s technology (Linea is also building a layer-2 network for the blockchain wallet application Status.)
The team behind Linea said last month that it plans to issue a Linea token. Both Johnson and Nicolas Liochon, the founder of Linea, told CoinDesk that there are no concrete plans yet for how that token would be used in the Namechain ecosystem.
Liochon said that having the Namechain team work on the Linea stack will help strengthen and decentralize the L2 protocol.
“We really want multiple organizations to contribute to Linea, and we are working to have more organizations as well, as a way to achieve that [the network] safer,” he said. “So basically we want to have multiple teams, so there is no point of centralization.”
Read more: Ethereum’s ENS Identity System Set to Launch Its Own Layer-2 Blockchain