The company behind the ENS blockchain domain service has come up with a plan to build its own layer 2 blockchain, called ‘Namechain’.
Namechain will be a zero-knowledge rollup and will likely go live around the end of 2025.
ENS Labs, the company behind the Ethereum Name Service, is moving forward with a plan to launch its own Layer-2 network.
Namechain, as the new network is being called, should go live around the end of next year, ENS Labs Chief Operating Officer Katherine Wu told CoinDesk. It will use zero-knowledge rollups, a scaling technology that accelerates blockchain transactions and reduces the cost of executing them by compressing the amount of data published on the chain.
“This technology allows Namechain to process and execute transactions outside of Ethereum’s main network, while still inheriting the full security of Ethereum, but at a fraction of the cost,” ENS Labs said in a press release on Monday.
The new network will use the infrastructure of an existing zero-knowledge chain that is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, Wu said. The team is in the final stages of choosing which zkEVM it will use, she told CoinDesk via Telegram.
ENS is blockchain’s answer to the web’s domain name service. Just as domain names (Amazon.com, WhiteHouse.gov) are human readable and easier to remember than numeric IP addresses, ENS names are more recognizable than crypto wallet addresses. For example, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s ENS handle is Vitalik.eth, which rolls off the tongue better than his address (0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045, in case you were wondering.)
In May, ENS Labs proposed to overhaul the project’s registration system by converting it to an L2. It had not yet committed to the ZK rollup model at the time.
The revision, ENSv2, will entail a complete rearchitecture of the ENS protocol as well as its extension to a layer-2, Wu said.
“The tough technical step here will be to ensure that Namechain is backwards compatible with ENSv1 (the current setup on the Ethereum mainnet) from day one of launch,” Wu wrote. “[To] a user, there should be no difference in the front end/user experience when we launch Namechain other than lower gas costs.”
ENS’s decision to move forward with ENSv2 follows a series of other announcements from major crypto companies coming up with their own layer 2 projects. Recently, teams behind decentralized finance project Uniswap, crypto exchange Kraken, and Sony’s Blockchain Labs unveiled plans to launch their own rollup networks. However, instead of ZK rollups, these projects use Layer-2 Optimism technology known as the OP Stack, which allows developers to clone the code to create their own blockchains.
“Namechain represents the next evolution of ENS, and I’m excited about the dramatic improvements it will deliver in scalability and cost, and the new applications it will enable,” said Nick Johnson, co-founder and lead developer of ENS Labs . press release.