ENS Holiday Awards Referral Program

lightwalker.eth · November 30, 2025, 10:59pm

ENS Holiday Awards Referral Program

The ENS Holiday Awards Referral Program is live as of Dec 1!

Introduction

ENS Holiday Awards is a trial incentive framework designed to issue awards in $ENS for referred .eth name registrations and renewals.

This trial is proposed to run for the duration of December 1-31, 2025 with a fixed award pool of $ENS equivalent to $10,000 USD for Qualifying Referrers.

This trial is planned and organized by NameHash Labs as part of our efforts to advance a broader ENS Referral Program. These efforts are part of our SPP2 deliverables to the ENS DAO, which include our commitment to ultimately fund $50,000 USD in ENS Referral Program awards throughout the duration of SPP2.

The ENS Holiday Awards are designed as a time and budget constrained trial. This gives an opportunity to test execution and identify opportunities for improvement before follow-up ENS Referral Award Programs are introduced.

Overview

Program Period: The duration of December 2025.
Budget: $10,000 USD (funded by NameHash Labs).
Awards: Distributed in $ENS (converted from USDC at program conclusion).
Participation: Permissionless (anyone can participate as a referrer).
Implementation: Led by NameHash Labs.

Referral Awards

$10,000 USD in $ENS distributed proportionally to each Qualified Referrer based on their Referrer Award Pool Share.

Program Rules

We’ve enhanced the program rules for ENS Holiday Awards since the original RFC such that the higher your rank on the leaderboard, the more your score will be multiplied to gain an even greater final share of the award pool. So each rank you gain on the leaderboard will really matter for maximizing your awards.

Read full program 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 ENS Holiday Awards 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.

Referral Leaderboards

After referrals begin to flow through we’ll be launching live ENS Holiday Awards leaderboards on the ENS Awards site during the first week of December.

What’s Next?

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

Special Acknowledgements

In addition to all the Acknowledgements shared on the ENS Holiday Awards RFC, a very special thank you to the ENS Labs team, including David and Leon for their special efforts to add support for ENS Referral Program links into the official ENS Manager App before the Dec 1 kickoff date

Have Questions?

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

slobo.eth · December 1, 2025, 2:32am

Thanks for posting. Can you see if I’m understanding this correctly?

The $10k is split among the top 10 referrals via an algo.

The algo is:

Rank order all who referred by how many years of registrations they delivered¹
Select the top 10, ignore the rest for payments
For each of the top 10 referrers, multiply their total referral years by a bonus that starts at 2x for 1st place and decreases in equal steps down to 1x for 10th (handy chart here)
Sum the adjusted referral years
Payout the $10k (in ENS) in proportion to each referrer’s adjusted years

Came up with a toy example as well, in case it is useful for others.

Rank	Referral Years	Multiplier	Adjusted Years	Payout ($)	Cost ($5/yr)	ROI
1	500	2.00	1,000	4,295	2,500	72%
2	200	1.89	378	1,623	1,000	62%
3	150	1.78	267	1,146	750	53%
4	100	1.67	167	717	500	43%
5	90	1.56	140	601	450	34%
6	80	1.44	115	494	400	24%
7	70	1.33	93	399	350	14%
8	60	1.22	73	313	300	4%
9	50	1.11	56	240	250	-4%
10	40	1.00	40	172	200	-14%
	Total		2,329	10,000	6,700

The math behind the $4,295 payout is: 1,000 adjusted years divided by 2,329 total years → 42.95%.

It’s possible I misunderstood parts of the program or the math, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

–
¹No distinction is made between 3, 4, and 5+ character names.

lightwalker.eth · December 1, 2025, 1:18pm

@slobo.eth Nice table. Confirmed that you have the mechanics here correct

The ROI column you added is interesting. I note how it’s ROI from the perspective of the referrer and assumes all referrals are self-referrals.

Of course we hope that the majority of referrals will be 3rd party referrals, where through the efforts of entity A, entity B makes registrations or renewals that otherwise might not have happened, such that the ROI for ENS overall is positive.

I believe the key opportunity here is to incentivize apps with large existing userbases to invest more into building ENS features directly into their app. Incentivizing deeper integrations like these can drive sustained large-scale value for ENS.

Such development work takes time though. The market will need time to adjust. Until then, a variety of curious outcomes for how award distributions occur may be possible. For now we’re happy to achieve the milestone of making an ENS Referral Program and the infrastructure to operate it exist. A good first step.

Hope to see you high on the leaderboards

slobo.eth · December 1, 2025, 4:43pm

Glad to hear it that I summarized it correctly. Thank you for the quick confirmation.

Such development work takes time though. The market will need time to adjust.

Agree. Thank you for driving this forward.

lightwalker.eth · December 7, 2025, 10:56pm

Status update:

The ENS Holiday Awards Leaderboard is live.

slobo.eth · December 8, 2025, 7:10pm

Would be cool if the leaderboard had a countdown to the end date to encourage more urgency.

lightwalker.eth · December 8, 2025, 7:26pm

Agreed We have a design prepared for this in Figma that will ship soon. Thanks for the suggestion

lightwalker.eth · December 9, 2025, 7:36pm

Status update:

A new ENS Referral Live Feed has been launched where you can watch the latest ENS referrals as they stream in.

lightwalker.eth · December 23, 2025, 1:05pm

Status update:

We’ve launched the initial release of “ENS Advocate” detail pages. Initial functionality here provides a detailed history of all referrals made by an ENS Advocate.

As of this moment when this status update is being posted, here’s links to the current top-3 on the ENS Holiday Awards leaderboard:

Referrals are continually streaming in and there’s a lot of activity on the leaderboard. Results are updating fast!

For the latest results be sure to check the full ENS Referral Leaderboard or learn more about ENS Holiday Awards. There’s still time to participate!

And even if you miss the ENS Holiday Awards referral incentive program that concludes at the end of December, all referrals made will continue to be tracked. Our team will announce new cycles of ENS Referral Incentive Programs in the new year, including a number of key enhancements to the rules for those new cycles.

This also begins a much broader vision we have for the ENS Advocate program which will provide awards that recognize many ways that contributions are made to ENS to help it grow. More details to come on this later

lightwalker.eth · January 1, 2026, 11:53pm

Status update:

ENS Holiday Awards has successfully closed as of the end of December 31, 2025 UTC. A full log of all referrals made during the program as captured by ENSNode can be found here.

Key metrics from this initial pilot of an ENS Referral Program include:

34 distinct referrers.
10,189 referred registrations and renewals.
4,199 total years of incremental duration of referred registrations and renewals.
$82,386.71 total revenue generated for the ENS DAO through referred registrations and renewals.
- $64,706.40 “base cost” revenue, including additional fees for short 3 and 4 character names.
- $17,680.31 “premium” revenue from recently released names.

Notes on these revenue metrics:

Technically, all revenue is captured in ETH, not USD.
The above revenue metrics are calculated using the “current” rate of $2,985.57 USD per ETH.
ENS DAO accounting practices are understood to not recognize revenue until it is “earned” across the lifecycle of a registration, whereas above we simplify to immediately recognize all revenue captured through referrals across the month of Dec 2025 according to the referenced exchange rate.

The key highlight of this pilot was all the infrastructure being shipped to support future ENS Referral Program cycles, including:

Indexing support in ENSNode for all ENS referral transactions.
APIs and UIs to build and display ENS referral leaderboards out of a complex rule set.
APIs and UIs to build and display ENS referral live feeds.
APIs and UIs to display detailed referral logs for each referrer.
Support for a “referrer” param to be passed to the official ENS Manager App (thanks ENS Labs team!) to broaden access to participating in the referral program.
An ENS Referral Link generator.
Packages (#1 and #2) containing utilities for the ENS Ecosystem to build on the ENS Referral Program.
A new smart contract to ensure all renewal referrals are correctly applied.
A number of apps that are actively investing in growing the ENS ecosystem have integrated with the ENS Referral Program, including Grails, Snipe Zone, ENS Tools, ENS Vision, DefiLlama, ENS Book, ENS Fairy, and ENS Watch. We hope to see these apps and many new apps receive significant funding through future iterations of the ENS Referral Program

What’s next? Our team will be working to:

Distribute awards to all the referrers who qualified. Congratulations to all!
Display a log of “Awards” for each ENS Advocate on the ENSAwards site. This will give full visibility on each of the award distributions.
Refine rules to enhance the outcomes of the next ENS Referral Program incentive cycle.
Launch the next ENS Referral Program incentive cycle as soon as possible!

How can you get involved?

We’re especially interested in community feedback! What did you like about the rules for the initial pilot? What didn’t you like? What are your suggestions for improvement for the next incentive cycle?

We already see a number of opportunities for refinement. Ideas we’ll be exploring in future incentive program cycles may include:

Mitigating incentives for “self-referrals”.
Constraining allowed referrer marketing strategies to prohibit direct or indirect discounts for .eth name registrations or renewals. This would aim to encourage referrers to focus on “growing the pie” rather than competing in a potential “race to the bottom”. We aim to see referrers build sustainable and profitable businesses through verifiable metrics of how they are helping ENS grow.
Providing funding mechanisms for builders in the ENS Ecosystem who create important value for ENS but at layers outside of referrals.

What else would you like to see changed? Contact us and share your thoughts!

nick.eth · January 7, 2026, 3:23pm

I think the ability to interpret data from this pilot is severely limited by the way it was structured. With a fixed size pool that was divided up based on years registered, the RoI for participants was very uncertain, which will lead to very different behaviour from participants. Early in the program with high RoI, rational participants may have registered and renewed names in the expectation of a high discount (even potentially >100%), meaning we can’t extrapolate from their behaviour here to how people would behave with an actual referral program.

I think any subsequent pilot needs to operate on a more realistic basis: x% (say, 10%) of revenue from a referrer returned to that referrer, with the pilot terminated when the funding is exhausted or the program expires.

lightwalker.eth · January 15, 2026, 7:26pm

Good feedback. Thanks Nick. We agree, and the next referral program cycle will have a number of rule refinements. For ENS Holiday Awards the goals were scope-constrained to focus on advancing a lot of the overall infrastructure for operating ENS Referral Programs. A lot more will be advanced here in the next cycle. More to come on that soon.

lightwalker.eth · January 15, 2026, 8:15pm

Status update:

Award distributions to all qualified referrers in the ENS Holiday Awards program have been sent.

Details of all award distributions can be found here.

Congratulations to all the winners, and to all who participated in making this initial ENS Referral Program cycle a success! Thanks for helping ENS grow!

And referrals continue to stream in (check the live feed), even though the next incentive program cycle hasn’t started yet.

What’s next? We’ll be posting a RFC with our proposed rule refinements to the next ENS Referral Program cycle. Stay tuned!