ENS Labs Quarterly Progress Reports

[katherine.eth]

ENS Labs Quarterly Report - Q4 2025

Abstract

Q4 closed out 2025 as a delivery-focused quarter for ENS Labs. Across the organization, work converged around a single objective: moving ENSv2 from architectural vision into working systems that developers, partners, and users can interact with seamlessly. By year end, ENSv2 core contracts reached engineering completion, a full testnet implementation was live, and the next-generation of ENS interfaces entered private alpha.

Alongside technical delivery, we focused on strengthening our ecosystem foundations. Developer readiness accelerated through documentation, workshops, and real-world deployments. While on the DNS front, we focused on deepening ENS Labs’ engagement in the DNS ecosystem in preparation for ICANN’s upcoming 2026 gTLD round.

Across all of ENS Labs, these efforts closed out a strong year in 2025 with exciting momentum into 2026.

Team Updates

2025 was an exceptional year of growth as we scaled our talented team to support our delivery goals. We started the year with 16 employees and finished by doubling our company size to a powerful team of 33! We had new teammates join us across every team at Labs and are so excited to have the density of talent here going into 2026.

Looking ahead, we plan to round out the team with +7 more key hires in the first half of 2026 and will cap total headcount at 40 employees with several key hires across Engineering, DevRel, Growth, and Design.

Expanding the team’s resourcing and capacity across key roles remains a priority to set us up for success into 2026. If you are passionate about ENS, check our open roles!

ENSv2: Architecture to Alpha Release

We were excited to share our vision for the next iteration of the ENS protocol, ENSv2. The goal of introducing ENSv2 was to make ENS more flexible, scalable, and easier to adopt for ecosystem developers, power users, and newcomers alike.

Q4 represented a major milestone for ENSv2. With the bulk of contract engineering completed, the focus shifted to refinement and validation in preparation for ENSv2 public alpha readiness (coming early 2026!). Core ENSv2 contracts are now 100% complete with 97% test coverage, and a full testnet implementation released.

Key improvements included revisions to the Enhanced Access Control system to support a cleaner permission model, refinements to bridging and migration workflows to reduce user and implementation overhead, and finally the development of metadata and introspection standards to enable discovery of cross-chain ENSv2 names. These changes reflect lessons learned from assembling the full system and stress-testing assumptions made earlier in the design process.

On the growth side, Q4 2025 stayed focused on the “building awareness” phase of ENSv2 and answering the key questions of our end users. Why should users want to upgrade? How can users find out answers to their questions about how ENSv2 is different?

We have also emphasized ENSv2 readiness with integration partners. As we look ahead in the new year, we will soon roll out campaigns around testing the ENS App and ENS Explorer alphas, as well as fun activations to get people aware and excited about upgrading to ENSv2.

Introducing Private Alpha: ENS App & ENS Explorer

In October 2025, we announced the decision to split the ENS app into two products:

• ENS App: Consumer-focused for seamless name registration and identity management.
• ENS Explorer: Developer-centric featuring advanced ownership capabilities, custom resolvers, and detailed record management.

A priority goal for ENS Labs in Q4 was to complete and ship private alphas for reach, ahead of gathering feedback for our public release coming early 2026.

The focus was to get the apps to a place where we could enable end-to-end flows such as registering ENS names on the Sepolia testnet using ENSv2 contracts, then inspecting those names in depth through the Explorer. These apps serve not only as user-facing products, but also as reference implementations for ENSv2 preparation itself.

The private alpha release was a huge milestone for us and something that consumed most of our efforts in Q4. This initial version was shared mainly with ENS ecosystem developers. We had been working hard on many of the elements that we needed to make ENSv2 a reality, and in Q4 we were finally able to pull many of these pieces together.

Based on the initial feedback, we are looking forward to improving and releasing the public Alpha versions of these apps with the broader community very soon!

For the upcoming public alpha releases, we are currently focused on testing:

• Notification Service: Our new notification service that will power things like renewal reminders and the new dashboard, as well as user accounts.
• New Contract Data Indexing:
  • Indexing of data from the new contracts. This is more tricky now due to the more flexible nature of ENS v2.
  • Certain functionality, such as listing all the names a user owns or what text records they’ve set, requires an indexer to work as that information isn’t readily available on-chain.
  • It’s more complicated for v2 because of the complex architecture, for example we’ve moved from having one registry to having a hierarchical system of multiple registries.
• Account Abstraction Infrastructure: Featuring smart sessions and our unique and patented Hidden Contract Accounts (HCAs). These together allow the user to interact with ENSv2 with smoother UX and less clicks.
• Deeper Para Integration: Allowing users who sign in with socials to also take advantage of account abstraction, all without needing a wallet.

ENS App

The (new) ENS App will emphasize simplicity and onboarding, showcase streamlined registration flows, stablecoin payments, dashboards for managing names and primary names, role-based permissions, and configurable notifications.

Features will include:

• 1-Click Registration Flow: Single-click name registration using Smart Sessions with support for stablecoin payments, while still allowing optional manual wallet approvals for users who prefer direct transaction signing.

• Dashboard: Unified dashboard that displays a user’s primary name, lists and organizes all owned names with search and filtering (search by .eth name or EOA address), shows accurate name metadata such as expiry and primary status, and surfaces dynamic “Did you know?” insights based on on-chain activity.

• Name Profile: Detailed name profile view showing up-to-date information with Smart Session support for seamless interactions, allowing record edits for owners or accounts with the appropriate role permissions.

• Notifications: Notifications system that lets users add and manage notification channels, verify email addresses, and configurable notification preferences.

ENS Explorer

The ENS Explorer is like the Etherscan of ENS. It’s a comprehensive developer tool for ecosystem builders, featuring advanced ownership capabilities, custom resolvers, and detailed historical records that offers complete visibility with precise controls.

Features include:

• Overview
  • Role count (V2)
  • Fuse count (V1)
  • Record counter and resolver detection
• Records
  • Records fetched via Universal Resolver
  • Resolves both V1 and V2 names
  • Per‑record history for V1 names
• Resolver
  • L1 & L2 resolution (V1 and V2)
  • Supported interfaces displayed with links to source code
  • Resolver contract addresses shown
• Ownership
  • Registration and expiry dates (V1 & V2)
  • Ownership history (V1)
• Roles (V2, 2LD .eth only for now)
  • View role assignments
  • If connected account has admin rights: Grant manager roles for SET_RESOLVER and SET_SUBREGISTRY
• Registry
  • Displays V1 & V2 registry information
  • Parent registry info from 1LD to 3LD
  • Registry contract address shown per label
  • If account has SET_SUBREGISTRY permission: Deploy a new sub-registry
  • Subname creation coming soon
• History
  • V1 only for now
  • V2 history support coming soon

ENS Manager App

In parallel, improvements continued to the current ENS Manager app, including long-awaited support for gasless header images and integration support for partner initiatives such as Namehash’s referral program. The designs at this stage are still considered to be “wireframes” which will be refined over the course of 2026.

Developer Enablement & Ecosystem Readiness

ENSv2 readiness extended well beyond contracts and interfaces. Throughout Q4, ENS Labs accelerated work to prepare the broader ecosystem for ENSv2 adoption. Documentation was expanded to cover ENSv2 concepts, migration considerations, and new capabilities. Reproducible testing efforts began to ensure consistent behavior across tooling stacks and integrations.

For most applications, preparing for ENSv2 is as simple as updating to the latest version of a supported library. At the time of writing, not all libraries have added ENSv2 support yet, but ethers.js is currently a work in progress on v6.16.0. Additionally, we are meeting and discussing with most apps and companies that have integrated ENS to make sure they are ready to support ENSv2.

Incoming Q1 2026: ENSv2 Public Alpha

As we closed out 2025, ENSv2 has moved from protocol completion into real-world testing and adoption. With core contracts finalized, testnet live, and private alphas of the ENS App and ENS Explorer already in use by ecosystem developers, we are preparing to launch the ENSv2 Public Alpha in Q1 2026.

The Public Alpha will introduce the larger ENS community to the new ENS App and ENS Explorer, offering hands-on access to streamlined user flows and powerful developer tooling that reflect the flexibility and scalability of ENSv2.

For developers, we’re planning to also release an updated version of ensjs and a new self-contained test environment to make developing against ENS locally easy.

These applications also serve as reference implementations, showcasing how ENSv2 can be integrated and extended across the ENS ecosystem.

More details on the Public Alpha will be shared soon as we open the next chapter of ENSv2 in Q1 2026!

Designing for our Users

In 2025, we stayed focused on ensuring design and UX work translated our technical progress into coherent, usable experiences. Our Design, Product and Engineering teams came together to ensure rapid iteration for real-life user flows.

Beyond the apps themselves, Q4 addressed broader brand evolution. We expanded our visual language, refining colors, imagery, textures, and design norms to better support new app surfaces, migration tooling, and decentralized websites.

ENS Labs IRL

DevConnect Argentina 2025

ENS infrastructure and tooling were showcased in real-world environments throughout the quarter. As Ethereum has grown from a small, open-source software community to a sprawling global industry, ENS continues to be a leader.

At Devconnect Buenos Aires, our goal was to put an ENS name in the hands of every attendee and showcase ENS as both a convenience and durable standard for wallet creation. We worked closely with the Ethereum Foundation to build out a “perk” directly in the EF wallet used by 14,000+ attendees, used for purchasing meals, collecting POAPs, and catching talks at Devconnect.

We also hosted several workshops and talks covering ENSv2 readiness, decentralized websites, Hidden Contract Accounts, stablecoin payment UX, and emerging standards such as agent-focused identity primitives.

The ENS booth was at an ideal location within the Social District of Devconnect, where we tested out a new format of “office hours” to showcase apps, service providers, and working groups. Sentiment was very well received and exhibited a great way to onboard, troubleshoot and support our users and the ecosystem IRL.

For example, if someone had a question about subnames, we could direct them to come by to meet the Namespace or JustaName teams during their designated office hours.

We are grateful to experience incredible turnout from the ecosystem from the ENS DAO working groups, ZKemail, Unruggable, Namespace, Namehash Labs, and many more!

Despite this year’s theme of the “Ethereum World Fair,” it showed us that stable internet access may still be a weakness in global adoption. The internet at the venue was nearly unusable, both from networks being overloaded, causing the Devconnect App was buggy and slow to load, which definitely hindered the worldfair.eth subname claim and made it hard to communicate with other ENS Labs team members on the ground.

Moreover, the significance of the massive Cloudflare outage on Day 2 of DevConnect in 2025 could not be understated. Fortunately, Simon Schmid (ENS Labs, Head of DevRel) was ready with a live demo on how ENS, Filecoin’s Onchain Cloud, and Safe could be leveraged to create a simple yet secure deployment pipeline for website and app publication (the decentralized way). We’ve since published a practical guide on building a decentralized website using ENS, Filecoin, Omnipin, IPFS, and Safe.

Simon also moderated a panel on “The Trust Layer in the Agentic Stack: ERC-8004” discussing the emerging agentic economy, infrastructure for coordination, identity, and payments, the role of TEEs, growing adoption of standards like MCP, A2A, and ERC-8004, and early use cases focused on API tooling ahead of full automation.

Tate (ENS Labs, Protocol Lead) hosted an in-depth workshop on how ENS’ architecture introduced the Hidden Contract Account (HCA) model to improve interoperability, usability, and governance across wallets and networks.

Importantly, we began unveiling our two new apps, sharing the user philosophies and design decisions behind them. These efforts were validated through live user testing, where community members interacted with the alpha apps and provided immediate feedback.

ETHGlobal Buenos Aires

Post-DevConnect, our DevRel and Protocol teams were excited to spend the next three days connecting in=person with ENS builders and developers in the ecosystem. We kicked off the hackathons events with an in person presentation of “ENS - Identity in Your Apps” for crypto-newcomers and veteran ENS users alike.

Thousands of hackers participated at the Buenos Aires hackathon with 475 projects being built on ENS!

Hackathon teams built on ENS across a wide range of use cases, including decentralized infrastructure and identity, privacy-preserving payments and social apps, AI agents and automation, developer tooling, gaming and consumer experiences, compliance and reputation layers, and cross-chain wallets and DeFi.

We awarded $10,000+ in prizes to five winning teams including:

• Filify winning 1st place building Vercel for the decentralized web by deploying to Filecoin for storage + ENS for addressing, all with no single point of failure.
• iWitness came close in 2nd for their solution to combat AI fakes with hardware-attested stereo depth, leveraging ENS as the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).
• Finally a tie between Nydus a privacy payment network, dmail a decentralized end-to-end encrypted email using ENS identities + Filecoin storage, and Split to seamlessly split receipts with friends and settle payments instantly.

ETHRome 2025

In October, we sponsored ETHRome’s 250+ hacker attendees, of which 53 builders selected ENS to build across 28 projects.

Key highlights for ENS hackathons projects included:

• AUTARK, a crypto-anarchic DevSecOps framework for more secure, self-sovereign frontend deployments, enforcing immutable, decentralized, and multi-party-verified frontend governance through the combined power of SAFE, ENS, and IPFS.
• MyDocs, a decentralized, self-sovereign platform for collaborative document editing.
• Attenzione!, a decentralized crime reporting system for the Rome Metro, utilizing Ethereum, ENS, and IPFS for transparency.

Our ICANN Strategy: .ens as a .brand

Q4 also deepened ENS Labs’ engagement with the traditional DNS ecosystem. Work accelerated around ICANN participation and preparation for the upcoming 2026 gTLD round, including the strategic decision to pursue an ENS gTLD as a “.brand”.

This effort is driven by brand protection and ecosystem integrity, positioning ENS as a long-term leader and participant in DNS governance.

At the ICANN84 Annual General Meeting in Dublin, we unveiled a new partnership with D3 to add a second path for registries and communities to more seamlessly add ENS features to their domains. We spoke to numerous registries and TLD operators interested in offering ENS functionality to their domains.

ENS Labs increased its visibility through panels, workshops, and technical presentations at ICANN and DNS-focused forums. These efforts reinforce ENS’ credibility within global internet governance discussions and help mitigate risks associated with name collisions and malicious domains.

Read about How ENS Is Approaching ICANN’s gTLD Expansion Program.

Growth Indicators

The overarching Growth focus of 2025 was to show everything ENS can do. ENS is beyond a simple identity layer, supporting multi-chain addresses, being an open protocol for apps to seamlessly integrate, and works with DNS enabling teams to create their own namespace.

We have a creative vision for getting users to upgrade to ENSv2, and are bringing in the talent to help execute it. With this foundation, we can continue pursuing unique integrations, whether apps need universal identity, fintech companies that are bringing RWAs and banks onchain or the burgeoning AI agent space.

Importantly, this foundation gives us the space to stay relentlessly focused on our primary goal in the first half of this year: bring ENSv2 to market.

Source: ENS Dashboard

Q4 saw a drop in net-new registrations from Q3, with 32K, while renewals remained consistent with the 2025 monthly averages. The broader ENS subname ecosystem hit new milestones this year:

• World App - world.id - 17,571,156 names
• Caldera - calderans.eth - 9,602,057 names
• Uniswap - uni.eth - 2,000,000 names
• Base - base.eth - 917,000 names
• Linea - linea.eth - 530,000 names

Integrations

During Q4, we remained focused on new integration opportunities while also tackling the challenges of ensuring all types of ENS names resolve.

We’ve prioritized partnering with FinTech apps that are leading the charge on bringing the larger consumer market of users onchain. Building partnerships in new verticals requires longer sales cycles than we might like sometimes, we now have the supporting case studies, contacts, and attention to help push along some exciting new ENS integrations in 2026.

We are optimistic that in 2026 we will see pilots using ENS subdomains for administering government services, opportunities to name real world assets moving, and explore partnerships with banking messaging networks to coordinate naming standards between financial institutions.

Check out how we partnered with Doma Protocol / D3 on tokenizing DNS domains. Also how ENS helped power Celonames.

Press

The crypto media landscape saw major changes in 2025. Notably Axios shuttered their crypto newsletter after 3 years. Blockworks shuttered their newsroom, a pillar of crypto news since 2017. Crypto media isn’t dead, but the delineation of where crypto begins and ends is blurring. Crypto coverage is now an umbrella term falling into a variety of industries: finance, AI, privacy, identity.

This year, ENS entered many more of these spheres of influence. We were covered by DNS focused publications, policy reporters, financial reporters and crypto publications.

Q4 highlights include:

• Nick Johnson’s commentary on the impacts Fusaka upgrade was featured in DL News and Decrypt (which was later syndicated by Yahoo Finance)
• Alex Urbelis was quoted in a CoinDesk article around Roman Storms impact this year
• CCN EOY/2026 outlook piece on how ENS is evolving from naming into a broader onchain identity layer, including ENSv2, Namechain, cross-chain interoperability, and what this means for UX and Ethereum’s roadmap heading into 2026

Combating the ENS NPM Supply Chain Attack

On November 24, 2025, ENS Labs identified that certain NPM packages containing ENS packages were targeted by a Sh1-Hulud supply-chain attack compromising 400+ NPM libraries.

With urgency, the entire team across Engineering leadership, Security, Operations, Growth, and Legal jumped into action for threat and impact assessment of our 44 ENS Domains packages. Based on our investigation, we removed all affected NPM packages and we confirmed there were zero downloads of the compromised package versions.

The malicious script originated from an external project unrelated to ENS Labs’ core code. It was introduced via a PostHog dependency that executed a postinstall script containing the Shai Hulud malware. The affected development environment was isolated, and all publishing credentials were rotated.

To proactively combat future cases of similar supply chain attacks, we have strengthened our repository and deployment procedures, as well as:

• Using latest tags and will continue proceeding with key rotations.
• Requiring 2FA and disallowing tokens on NPM, using only trusted publishers.
• Ensuring all code repositories are on the latest version of pnpm.

Financial Reporting

Income

As of FY2025 close on December 31, 2025, we have received $9,697,500.00 USDC from the ENS DAO.

Expenses

Our expenses for Q4 2025 totaled $1,265,638.30 USD (~40% decrease from Q3) with total FY expenses totalling $6,150,727.97 USD.

For Q4, the top three expense categories were:

• Employee Compensation & Benefits (51.5%) for payroll, benefits, and employer contributions for our 31 full-time employees and two contractors.
• Professional Services (24.6%) included ENSv2 infrastructure and audit teams, as well as regular expenses to our operational external agencies and firms (e.g. Legal, Recruiting, PR).
• IT & Software Hosting (6.0%) regular hosting, infrastructure, and organizational tooling software providers (e.g. Google Suite, Cloudflare).

2026: The year of ENSv2

Q4 2025 brought ENS Labs to a new stage of readiness. ENSv2 is now code complete, early interfaces live in private alpha, and ecosystem readiness efforts are underway across tooling, documentation, and partnerships.

As ENS Labs enters 2026, priorities are aligned across the organization:

• Complete ENSv2 launch readiness and coordinated ecosystem adoption
• Expand the ENS Manager and ENS Explorer apps from private alpha to public testing
• Deliver a clear, well-supported migration experience for ENS users
• Continue strengthening ENS’s role within DNS governance and security ecosystems

We are grateful to the ENS DAO for its continued trust and support. The progress made in Q4 reflects years of groundwork and growing organizational alignment, and we look forward to sharing further launch milestones in the months ahead.