ENSv1 Referral Programs
Love the prospect of a new .eth Registrar Controller that would include an optional referrer field 
We’ve previously implemented contracts that wrap the existing .eth Registrar Controllers. Based on that testing, the incremental gas costs for implementing referral functionality in this way on mainnet were too high. It didn’t help that the cost of gas was much higher on average at that time. However, I appreciate that this strategy being proposed is different as it would implement directly within a new .eth Registrar Controller rather than a wrapper contract. Approximately what incremental gas cost do you anticipate? Best to avoid a situation where, for example, a registrant who is being referred pays incremental gas costs of more than $1 to provide a $1 referral reward. That wouldn’t make economic sense.
Additionally, is it correct to assume:
- The optional referrer field will take as input the address of the referrer wishing to be credited and will be permissionless.
- If the registration is successful and a referrer is defined, an event will be emitted enabling indexers to attribute the referral.
- It will be possible to track referrers for both registrations and renewals.
- The average incremental gas fees paid by a registrant (or account making a renewal) to give attribution to a referrer are expected to be trivial (ex: below $0.10).
- That the new .eth Registrar Controller will make no consideration of any financial referral program rewards. Instead any financial reward scheme would be left to a separate exercise.
As part of our SPP2 proposal, NameHash Labs has committed to $50,000 in reward funding for ENSv2 Referral Programs. The plan there has assumed we would need to wait for ENSv2 to go live first, but if the there’s a good opportunity for this to go live within ENSv1 (such as where the 5 assumptions above are true) that would be fantastic 
1- and 2- character .eth 2LDs
I also love this prospect, but have some alternative suggestions:
- DAO revenues need more attention. For example, please see the latest quarterly financial report from Limes. This reflects an ENS DAO revenue from from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025 dropping from $8.1m to $4.9m. This drop is highly concerning and we should use opportunities like this to support stabilizing DAO revenues.
- A quick suggestion might be: $10,000 / year for a 2-character name and $100,000 / year for a 1-character name. These short names are luxuries in short supply. I expect there’s a market of people who want to make a social flex with these names. For example, consider the phenomena with digits, etc.
- Consideration might also be given to requiring a minimum 1+ year registration period on any 1 or 2 character name. This would scare away most squatters.
- As you explained, if the DAO wishes to reserve any 1 or 2 character name for special purposes (x.eth, fb.eth, l2.eth, zk.eth, etc…), the DAO can register and pay for that themselves with a net 0 financial impact excluding trivial gas costs. For the accounting question, will leave that to the experts on that subject.
- I’m fully aware the DAO does not have the objective to maximize revenues. This suggestion doesn’t have a goal of maximizing revenues, but rather stabilizing revenues that have been collapsing such that the mission of ENS retains a healthy runway.
The DAO might potentially earn several million a year (and restore revenues back to Q1 2024 levels) under this scheme. If we’re lucky, maybe it could completely or substantially finance the Service Provider Program that funds so many enhancements to the ENS protocol and ecosystem.