DNS Integration, L1 with high gas now or L2 with lower gas in 1~3 months?

đź’¬ General Discussion
1

As announced at the beginning of January, we have a new DNSRegistrar & DNSSECOracle contract which allows you to integrate with over 1000s of DNS domains. It is currently deployed to Ropsten and you can claim your DNS based ENS name by following this guide.

One known issue of the current approach is the very high gas cost to compute the proof when you submit the claim to gain the name (no registration fee to ENS as no one can squat on your DNS domain name ). It would take up to 1.5M gas which would be worth 1.5 ETH with 100 gwei gas price (approx $256 at the ETH price $1712).

@nick.eth suggested the use of Optimistic Rollup to compute the proof verification on L2 then only submit the result back to L1 which would cut down the computation cost (we expect that registration price becomes similar to registering .ETH name which is not cheap but x5 cheaper than the current DNS registration).

NOTE: This proposal is different to the general-purpose bridge for Ethereum Layer 2 which would take longer than 3 months and require significant coordination effort with other dapps and wallets.

We were debating whether we should release the current version right now or wait until the OR version will be ready in 1~3 months (though it could take more than 6 months given how DNS integration has been kept being pushed).

Pros of deploying the expensive version now

  • It’s been over 2 years since we initially announced and we should really ship it now.
  • Some people may want to use it now even paying the high gas cost.
  • The new version may take longer than 3 months

Pros of delaying until Optimistic Rollup version is ready

  • Deploying the new DNSRegistrar and DNSOracle would cost up to 1000 USD on gas which would be a waste if we are going to deploy another version soon.
  • Getting multisig sign off takes a coordination effort (the last price oracle update took 3 weeks to get all the signatures) so should be avoided if possible.
  • Knowing people can claim cheaply in 1~3 months, they may prefer to just wait (in reverse, people may get upset paying high gas if later found out that we had a plan to make the gas cheap in a relatively short period).

We would like your opinion on this proposal. Feel free to put your comment below or apply to our upcoming ENS workshop and discuss it in the “DNS Integration” session.

2

I put my personal opinion here.

I am in general hesitant of deploying the version right now knowing that it is very expensive for most people (certainly I wouldn’t claim). However, the bigger organisation may not care too much about the cost. It would be nice if we can secure some commitment from bigger exchanges like coinbase.com, binance.com, gemini.com, kraken.com or celebrities who have their name taken by squatters such as garyvaynerchuk.com then it’s worth spending gas and coordination effort to do it now as it will have big marketing impact. We could even cover their gas cost if they can commit to using their names as soon as they can register their DNS names as ENS.

3

Another idea for gauging the interest is to have the campaign asking people to claim names on Ropsten and submit their names in a form. If we get 100 registrations, then we deploy right now without waiting for OU and pay gas for 10 among them (or we claim on their behalf).

Currently, only 5 DNS names have been claimed on Ropsten and they are only via me or @brantlymillegan so this incentivisation may be needed regardless.

4

My vote: Wait for the Optimistic Rollup to be ready.

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5

Not to be miss-understood here, I think we need to use this hype around ENS now, onboard as many people as possible, adoption is key to success. I fear we’ll get a few more (other protocol) aidrops, new projects and suddenly frENS will become silent, focused elsewhere, just human nature. We’re all dipping our fingers in multiple projects and waiting for those that will dominate and take our attention. I hope there is a way to choose any L2 integration and make it possible asap, promote heavily. Once there is wide adoption, then find creative ways how people can flex, use, integrate ENS to their everyday lives. Digital identity means different for each one of us.