Ethereum Name Service Hits All-Time High in Monthly Revenue—And May’s Not Over

It's been a record-breakingly good month for ENS domain name registrations as revenue tops $8 million, according to lead developer Nick Johnson. 

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a domain name provider for the Ethereum blockchain. The service itself, which was launched in 2017, is governed by a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization.

"May is now an all-time high for every single ENS metric we track—registrations, renewals, revenue (ETH & USD) and income (ETH & USD)," Johnson wrote in a tweet on Monday.

In a screenshot, Johnson shared that so far in May registrations, revenue, and income have all doubled. And renewals—users who register their domains for longer periods to save on gas fees—are up 55% from last month. 

"And there's still a week of May left," he added.

He also included a graph showing that the combined traffic from new and returning users has surpassed 160,000. That's another all-time high.

What's driving Ethereum Name Service?

ENS' recent success was helped by the fact that the first week of May included some of the highest volume days ever for ENS on NFT marketplace OpenSea. When an ENS domain is registered, it mints an NFT that can be sold and transferred like any other NFT.

On May 2, ENS domains accounted for 2,804.31 ETH (about $6 million) in volume on OpenSea and, as of Monday morning, had seen 16,367.3 ETH (about $34 million) in volume for the last 30 days. 

Take note: That metric currently includes a couple of days in April since May isn't over yet.

That makes ENS domains the fourteenth most-traded collection on the marketplace in the same period that Yuga Labs launched its Otherside metaverse project and amid a big sell-off of Azuki NFTs.

ENS is also far and away the most popular domain name collection on OpenSea. Unstoppable Domains and Decentraland Names, the second- and third-highest ranking domain name collections by volume, saw less than $25,000 worth of combined volume over the last 30 days.

ENS has also been helped, in part, by the relatively low gas fees on the Ethereum network. 

On Monday morning, it cost about 35 gwei ($1.09) for a low-priority transaction that would complete in roughly 10 minutes. To expedite a transaction, it would cost 36 gwei ($1.31) to shave seven minutes off the transaction that’s not gone unnoticed by the ENS community either.

In fact, the ENS DAO Twitter account has been reminding members to take advantage of them, as it is now cheaper to buy, renew, and otherwise manage domain names.