The Ecosystem Working Group is launching a $50,000 Hackathon Expansion Pilot starting November 1, 2025 to broaden ENS participation at in-person hackathons and strengthen relationships with builders worldwide.
The goal is to scale involvement beyond the current level.
The difficulty of objectively measuring metrics related to hackathons.
Discussion around builder retentions and metrics for success.
A large portion (85%) of hackathon spending goes to ETH Global.
The key thing about this pilot is the ability to have hackathons without Greg and Simon being present.
The pilot program is scaling through community involvement, using technical experts to guide participants.
Consumer App: Abstracts complexity and provides a simplified interface for everyday users.
Developer App: A specialized tool for developers and power users with access to detailed data (resolvers, records, fuses, permissions, etc.).
Rationale: The current Manager App tries to serve both user types and ends up too complex for most while too limited for developers. ENS Labs aims to clearly separate the two experiences.
DOMA x ENS Partnership
Partnership has been well-received at the ICANN event in Dublin.
Used by devs to host e-commerce, e-books, and censorship-resistant sites.
Future initiative: Launching Octant V2 Vaults with ENS Foundation and others (each party depositing 1,000 ETH) to incentivize decentralized web hosting and immutable forever frontends.
Potential collaborators: Filecoin, Aptos Liquid, and others.
The ENS team is speaking through the events during the week.
Events and announcements
There will be an ENS app town hall hosted by the Ethereum Foundation, with only eight teams invited to discuss challenges like user onboarding and payment transactions.