ENS Holiday Awards Referral Program

[lightwalker.eth]

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]

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:

1. Rank order all who referred by how many years of registrations they delivered¹

2. Select the top 10, ignore the rest for payments

3. 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)

4. Sum the adjusted referral years

5. 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]

@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]

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]

Status update:

The ENS Holiday Awards Leaderboard is live.

[slobo.eth]

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

[lightwalker.eth]

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

[lightwalker.eth]

Status update:

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