April, May, and June 2026+ ENS Referral Program Editions (earn up to a 50% revenue share)

lightwalker.eth · April 1, 2026, 9:00am

New ENS Referral Program editions

Up to a 50% revenue share!
Benefits for you, your community, and for ENS!
New ENS referral program editions are now live!

Introduction

Following on the success of ENS Holiday Awards, these new editions of the ENS Referral Program aim to encourage growth in ENS adoption. They do this by offering awards that incentivize builders to invest in shipping features and marketing campaigns that promote .eth name registrations and renewals.

Overview

Award Pools:
- April 2026: $10,000.00 USDC. Now live , check the April 2026 Leaderboard!
- May 2026: $30,000.00 USDC. Build now to get ahead of the competition!
- June 2026+: To be announced.
Referral Awards: A 50% revenue share of the “base revenue contribution” from each qualified referral until an edition period ends or its award pool is exhausted.
Participation: Permissionless (anyone can become a participating referrer).
Qualification Criteria: To qualify for referral awards within an edition, a referrer must abide by the rules of the edition (including the applicable Code of Conduct) and produce a “base revenue contribution” to the ENS DAO of $100.00 USDC or more before the edition period ends or its award pool is exhausted.
Award Distribution: No later than 15 days after each edition period ends.
Administration: Led by NameHash Labs.

Significant Rule Enhancements

Our team has made significant upgrades to the rules and associated “referrals engine” for these new referral program editions. We hope that these upgrades will demonstrate a foundational framework that all future ENS Referral Program editions can build upon.

For details, read the full April Rules or May Rules (identical rules, changing only dates and award pool size).

Key design considerations for these upgraded rules include:

Strengthen the value proposition for orgs with large existing audiences to invest in and prioritize the way they promote the registration and renewal of .eth names.
Direct orgs participating in the ENS Referral Program to use referral awards in ways that grow and improve the ENS ecosystem rather than
Defend against incentivizing undesired outcomes (such as self-referrals) through operationally efficient mechanisms.

The new rules implement disqualification mechanics for rule violations. All who are interested to participate should carefully study the rules to ensure they maintain compliance or they will be disqualified and lose all their referral awards for the impacted edition. We anticipate strict enforcement of the rules. Please don’t take them lightly! We don’t want to ruin your day with a disqualification.

We anticipate that learnings from these next ENS Referral Program editions will reveal further important lessons for how the rules and edition administration can be further refined. We have purposefully used broader language in some areas of the rules for now to provide more flexibility in the case that unexpected situations occur. In future editions we look forward to more language refinements. Critiques and feedback welcome.

And of course, all code for the rules engine is completely open source in our GitHub. See the developer resources link below for details. You can run the engine yourself and even define your own custom variations of referral program editions and rules.

Participation Is Open & Easy!

The easiest way to participate is through an ENS Referral Program link. Generate your ENS Referral Program link at the ENSAwards site.

Distribute your ENS Referral Program link to your audience on social media or to the users of your app. For example: Consider notifying your users of the .eth names they own and that will expire soon if not renewed.

Developers can also achieve total UX control in their referrals by integrating directly with ENS smart contracts. This gives full flexibility and control over the user journey. Build the ultimate .eth name registration and renewal features directly into your app or wallet.

Read the full developer integration guide.

What’s Next?

What are you waiting for? Go make some ENS referrals and earn awards!

Have Questions?

Join the ENSAwards Telegram and let us know how we can help.