Does TTL have any effect, outside of DNS?

I see in the tests, that DNS integration seems to make use of TTLs.
Are TTLs used by the blockchains at all?

No. TTL = time to live. Blockchain requires signed txs in order to make changes, so it has no equivalent.

However, TTL can be used client-side for caching. For example, perhaps you login to a site using SIWE, and they pull your data over, such as your avatar and ens name. They may cache it on their side so that each page you visit does not incur an api call to an ethereum node provider (where they pull that data from, such as infura.io). They may include a TTL there for that cached data so that if you make a change to your ENS profile on-chain, it will be reflected when the TTL expires and their cache updates.

The registry has a β€˜ttl’ field, but I don’t think anything is using it at present. In principle, you should not cache ENS records unless the TTL is >0.

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