ENS: Propagating Use Cases, Registrations and Exposure

DAO-Wide
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This post aims explore different ways ENS tokens could be used to grow the adoption of the Ethereum Name Service Protocol.

Since inception Ethereum has continued to drive forward towards new directions, empowering not only innovation but the willingness to self examine and re-focus. ENS has played a foundational role in Ethereum’s journey, and this proposal shares our thinking about how ENS can continue to take steps to ensure we’re best positioned to serve Ethereum and the wider ecosystem.

When thinking about successful projects & DAOs that lead the industry, ENS is the clear winner, developing natural PMF since day one. This has led to consistent .eth registrations, integrations and growth, however this doesn’t mean ENS shouldn’t think about how it can incentivise the right user behaviour.

ENS has one of the largest token treasuries of any DAO, currently holding over $1 billion USD worth of ENS tokens. Leveraging a fraction of this treasury to distribute to humans, communities, addresses and organisations, that in turn grow the adoption of ENS, registrations, and accessibility within Ethereum is a huge win.

To compare:

  • Optimism has distributed over $100m USD towards retroactive incentives after airdrop one.
  • Uniswap has committed over $100m USD towards community grants in 2025 & 2026.
  • Worldcoin has distributed over $800m USD to registered users since WLD launched in 2023.

These are just three examples of the kind of token spending that is happening across the ecosystem from similar size protocols.

Below are three sub-proposals that we’ve been thinking about in this direction - we aren’t married to any of these in their current form, but want to start this conversation as a catalyst for ideas in this direction!

1. Enscribe Contract Naming Incentives

Enscribe is an ENS-aligned org focused on getting smart contracts across the ecosystem to start using ENS names. The advantages of this are obvious;

  • Enable wallets and users to know with confidence which contract they’re interfacing with.
  • Minimize the threat of scams and confusion with similar addresses being deployed by nefarious actors with the hope of tricking users.
  • Further propagates ENS as the inbuilt identity layer for ethereum.

This kind of initiative is a clear public good which helps every onchain user, thus why this proposal seeks to explore how ENS DAO could drive this adoption.

By creating an incentive pool for smart contract naming, (both retroactive and forward-looking depending on technical restraints), ENS DAO can help to instil this as a default step in deploying any significant contract.

For example - contracts where this proposal would make significant impact to user experience include:

  • DEX pools
  • Lending markets
  • Bridges
  • Well known DAO multisigs
  • Web3 Communities (donation, DAOs, etc)
  • MANY MORE

All of these contracts could be presented onchain with a name like swap.etherex.eth contracts.fluid.eth, securitycouncil.ens.eth, etc

This proposal outlines two strategies:

  • For existing contracts: The ENS community would be tasked with creating a ‘wishlist’ of the top contracts that do and do not have ENS names. Then the Enscribe team would scope the technical capacity of each contract adopting an ENS name, and highlight those that are feasible.
  • For future contracts: ENS DAO would create a framework and tooling to encourage deployers to name their contract during the creation process, and receive some incentive for doing so.

2. ENS Community based experimentation

There are a number of small, ENS-centric, communities formed around the ownership of particular ENS names. This kind of ‘social sub-community’ is unique to ENS, and creating space within ENS DAO for these organisations to experiment with their own experiences, tooling, merch, etc is an exciting opportunity. This in turn signals to others that ENS DAO is supportive of people using ENS as a core organisational tool within their own communities.

As a first step, we propose an experiment around community decision making with the Pokemon ENS community. A small pool of ENS tokens would be made available for this community to direct towards initiatives as they see fit. Every* (Perhaps not every pokemon ENS and only certainly generations - exact structure TBD) Pokemon ENS gets some voting power in an onchain DAO. These voters can then vote on how to assign their onchain treasury with their ENS names as their vote.

This would come with strong guidance around best practices and types of experiments. (Or perhaps even better we ‘ask’ the Pokemon .eth community to formulate a plan for what these tokens could be spent on before distributing, although the vote mechanics are interesting)

Potential Experiments:

  • Event budgets (Hosting a pokemon .eth event @ Devconnect).
  • Treasury management (buying other ENS names, managing a collective treasury in a decentralised manner).
  • Buying Pokemon related content, cards, etc.
  • Producing content related to Pokemon ENS.

Discussion about the ethics of this proposal:

There is an interesting discussion about the idea of ENS DAO incentivising different digital communities to form & expand around given ENS names like Pokemon, Marvel, etc.

However, at its core, if we’re trying to think about these different communities and the impact they make, decentralisation is a key metric. Similar to the way many cryptocurrencies are judged based on their sufficient decentralisation, applying this same consideration to ENS sub-communities should be front of mind. For example; if a brand new TV show came out and one person collected all .eth names for that TV show instantly - this would likely not be a good fit for this type of program. However, our perspective is that the Pokemon ENS community has decentralised sufficiently over significant time.

Though there are market dynamics that this type of proposal could encourage, these dynamics exist regardless and we shouldn’t let them be a blocker for ENS DAO to supporting grassroots onchain communities that have been huge supporters of ENS more generally.

Disclosure: I, James.eth, have a Pokemon ENS name

3. Framework for ENS DAO to support web2 user acquisition

This proposal was inspired by a conversation with @mely.eth at Dappcon and thinking about the way that ENS can continue to drive adoption through existing web2 platforms, ie; digital banking, financial products, social media, etc. Right now many Web2 applications are leaning into Web3 and Ethereum (payments, social & infrastructure). The same utility that ENS provides within Web3 can also apply to the millions of new users being brought onchain by these organisations: wallet addresses are confusing - ENS names are not.

Thinking about how ENS can incentivise these users to interact with ENS and Ethereum while still receiving upside is the crux of this proposal.

This proposal would create a framework to enable the DAO to deploy tokens towards Web2 user acquisition initiatives. This could take a number of forms, but we imagine a solid place to start would be driving users of Web2 platforms to register ENS names for their native crypto wallets.

Historically, ENS Labs has developed Web2 partnerships through its yearly budget allocation which has led to fantastic results to date! However, thinking about how ENS DAO can provide resources to both Labs and other organisations to foster these types of partnerships is a worthwhile discussion to have. Creating precedent for this kind of funding also signals to the world that ENS DAO is willing and able to fund initiatives that sit outside of the conventional Web3 space, and will encourage organisations which are experimenting with Ethereum and crypto to work alongside ENS, ensuring its position as the default identity layer for the new internet.

This sub-proposal presents the least clear path forward, however starting to set precedent around how the DAO and/or ENS Labs enter into more commercial relationships with these types of web2 organisations is something that should be explored.

Conclusion

This post and the proposals within aim to start a discussion about how ENS can experiment with unique incentives and purposeful token distribution. We’d also like to open up this thread up to all other ideas in this same spirit: different ways ENS tokens could be strategically leveraged by the DAO/ecosystem to continue to drive registrations, adoption and exposure.

Distributing responsibility and ownership of the ENS protocol is something that should be done with extreme care as to not distribute to the wrong actors or create misaligned incentives - However, it shouldn’t be something we are scared to lean into.

As a comparison to the examples above where Optimism, Uniswap and Worldcoin have distributed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens to drive protocol growth, ENS looking to deploy a few thousand ENS tokens (tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars) towards strategic experiments is incredibly compelling.

Yesterday on the Meta-Gov delegate all hands I presented an outline of the thinking behind this post and my goal is to have discussion here on the forum for the coming weeks, then have any concrete next steps by the next delegate all hands call.

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Thanks for starting this discussion. It’s obvious that the DAO should put its treasury to productive use, and you’ve outlined some interesting approaches.

  1. ENScribe is a no brainer, although perhaps either of the Working Groups could allocate ENS they currently hold and run a pilot program instead, in order to first measure how effective this approach is. No DAO voting is required for this—it’s a small bet for a potentially big return. Since @Meta-Gov_Stewards have a mandate to further decentralize the protocol by distributing governance ($ENS), it would be reasonable to task them with leading this initiative. Though it wouldn’t hurt for other Working Groups to chip in as well.
  2. Pokémon is fun! But I wonder about the possible NIL infringement and the exposure to litigation this opens the foundation up to—especially from Nintendo, who I imagine ENS Labs would probably want to work out a deal with at some point to integrate ENS into their gaming ecosystem. Maybe @Alexu can shed some light here? Why not continue to develop the ‘FRENS’ brand through curated activations instead?
  3. I love to see Labs thinking of ways to sweeten up those Web2 deals, and this approach feels like it could be the most promising and highest-impact of all. That said, my sense is that those allocations would have to be very sizable ($1M or more, perhaps) in order to get any real bite—these are quite material distributions, after all. danch.eth has recently started a thread that provides a very rigorous assessment of the second- and third-order effects of changing protocol registration fees at different increments and scenarios. My suggestion here is to tread lightly and begin with a similar research approach. The pricing thread offers a solid precedent: we should apply that same rigor to model downstream effects and ensure $ENS distributions are not just generous, but genuinely catalytic.

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Don’t want to read the wall of text? Here are bullet points that summarize my thoughts:

  • ENScribe good. Allocation could go through through the Working Groups instead.
  • Watch out for potential exposure to litigation if you don’t secure NIL rights for Pokémon fun.
  • Highest ROI idea, if done right. Consult @kpk @danch.quixote and do a quant analysis.
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I appreciate the depth and vision in this proposal,it’s obvious that a lot of thought has gone into how ENS can leverage its treasury to actively grow adoption rather than just sitting on reserves.

I’m especially drawn to the Enscribe contract naming incentives. Clear, readable contract identifiers are a simple win for security, UX, and trust across the ecosystem. That feels like low-hanging fruit with outsized impact, and I’d support prioritizing it.

The community-based experimentation idea is also interesting, especially as a way to showcase how grassroots ENS sub-communities can create their own culture and tooling. I do think it’ll be important to have strong guardrails to avoid misaligned incentives, but the Pokémon example seems like a solid starting point.

The Web2 user acquisition framework is the most ambitious, and while it’s less defined, I agree it’s worth exploring, especially if ENS wants to be the go-to identity layer for the next wave of users entering through more familiar platforms.

Overall, I think starting with one or two smaller, measurable pilots from this list could build confidence and set precedent for more creative treasury deployments down the line. Happy to be part of the discussion on shaping those first steps.

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Obviously the Enscribe team would love to find ways to create better incentives for naming smart contracts and is very supportive of the first sub-proposal (I’m less well positioned to talk on the other two).

Given the tiny proportion of smart contracts that have ENS names, this does present a huge opportunity for growth of the ENS protocol.

I have always believed that if we can get a few high profile projects naming their contracts they’d suddenly be a lot more awareness of it - having ENS community input on this would be really valuable to accelerate this.

We’re about to start work on ways in which we could gamify Enscribe more, which could line up nicely.

Another area that may be worth exploring is gas sponsorship - there are two angles that come to mind:

  1. When contracts have a primary name set - users could get a certain number of credits to do this for free
  2. Sponsoring the fees to set up the L2 reverse resolution for names (this would apply to contracts and accounts).

On the second point we’re about to release support for setting the L2 reverse resolver for contracts named in Enscribe so have some foundations for this.

Anyway, super excited to see this post and would love to find ways to create momentum around this.

If there is support we’d be happy to drive some of the discussions on this be that via regular calls / TG etc.

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Love this type of discussion. Highlighting the key point from our perspective.

This post and the proposals within aim to start a discussion about how ENS can experiment with unique incentives and purposeful token distribution.

I’ll follow up more as the discussion unfolds, but wanted to quickly share how we think when it comes to this. Our ideas OFC have a bias towards Governance/DAO operations :sweat_smile:

[Idea] Incentivizing Re-delegation Towards Active Participants

We’ve done some delegation mechanics analysis over in the Uniswap forum that also applies here in ENS:

Uniswap RFC: Governance Logistics Improvements

A light-touch, incentive-aligned re-delegation program could help refresh delegated voting power across dormant wallets and improve governance responsiveness, something ENS could lead on.

[Idea] Micro-Incentives for Good Protocol Hygiene

Things like:

  • Keeping your organization’s ENS records and metadata up to date
  • Maintaining clean, human-readable names for smart contracts (as you suggest with Enscribe)
  • Submitting verified ownership for DAOs or public goods infrastructure

These are low-cost, high-signal actions that reinforce ENS as a credible identity layer.

[Impact] Framework for pricing incentives

We believe incentives should map directly to the impact of the action while ensuring long-term program sustainability:

  • Revenue, Does it generate income for ENS? (e.g. registrations, referrals)
  • Security, Does it strengthen governance operations? (e.g. re-delegations)
  • Legitimacy, Does it improve data quality or trust signals? (e.g. verified metadata)

Example: If registrations are $10 and an incentive costs $50, we’d need 4 new registrations to break even. That’s likely unsustainable. But a $5 subsidy or a distributing tokens based on 5-year registrations could be interesting, especially when informed by historical registration and renewal data.

Excited to expand on this in the coming weeks!

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Would love to see this happen. In past terms, we’ve discussed that one of Meta-Governance’s core mandates should be to continue advancing decentralization of the ENS protocol.

Rule IV of the ENS DAO Constitution states, “ENS Integrates with the global namespace"—progressive decentralization to other developer teams and/or registrars should be seen as part of this mandate.

Delegates have a responsibility to consider this, and Meta-Governance should communicate it clearly and promptly, while providing resources for further inquiry if needed.

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Love your idea for protocol hygiene. It’s technically virtuous. Am I going too far to invoke James 4:8 here? Housecleaning goes a long way, and it pays. Refactoring codebases should definitely be incentivized.

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Say more. Creating incentives guided by data from historical registration and renewal data sounds like a smart play.

Have you tied this back to any of @danch.quixote’s thread on the new pricing policy research?

My POV: Incentivizing long-term registrations (e.g., 8L+ domains) could accelerate adoption.

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For example, through $ENS or modest subsidies, bringing costs down for users while sustaining ENS’s long-term income.

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In a similar vein to contract naming, it could make sense to have similar incentives for hosting websites using ENS.

Websites on ENS domains using the contenthash field offers unmatched security. This is something that the DAO should promote way more IMO.

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This is great - thank you @James for launching the convo and some of the ideas to make this happen. I definitely think they can be categorized into short/medium/long term projects based on investment and feasibility. This would also enable moving the initiative forward in stages with low lift (like the Enscribe idea) and heavier plays like the web2 partnerships.

I also like @Arnold 's suggestion re incetivized redelegation. I remember when Tally did a free re-delegation event, I think incentivizing it would be a next step in that since voting power stagnation can be detrimental to diversity and plurality of perspective in decision making.

A few other potential ideas: partner with verification services to make ENS a core part of the verification flow as standard (Gitcoin Passport for instance could provide a higher score for ENS if not required etc.)

Content creator/artist collaboration - artists are a great intersection point for newcomers (in the same vein as the web2 org partnerships) so incentivizing them to use ENS names (and subdomains) for their online identity, linking them to their NFTs, merch, existing web3 communities might be another interesting angle.

Partner with EAS to suggest ENS verification (Coinbase Verifications uses EAS with ENS domain verifications (e.g., coinbase.eth) to issue attestations, associating verified identities with ENS names)

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I want to echo @estmcmxci’s thoughts here, and also to add that while I very much like the idea of incentivizing projects to name their contracts, I’m concerned that the sort of incentivization we’re talking about would not be enough to motivate a DAO or large organisation. While a user may happily set their primary name when nudged with the offer of a few ENS tokens, even a few hundred isn’t likely to stir a company like Uniswap, much less its DAO, into action. This seems a problem more broadly with attempts to incentivize organisations to set or maintain their ENS records.

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Great discussion here; summarising feedback and open questions here!

ENScribe:
Seems like strong support for at least exploring the ENScribe idea, CC the comments from @estmcmxci @GozmanGonzalez @conor @simona_pop.

Re @nick.eth’s comment on incentivising these groups, +1 to the idea that how these these incentives are structured/positioned/sized matters a lot for the way these will be adopted, but worth exploring how these could work.

A proposed next step here is setting up an ‘ENScribe incentive working group’ where we can discuss possibilities on how these incentives could be structured without any commitment, to be brought back to the forum to be presented. I’ve setup a telegram group which i’ll add everyone to then lets find time for a call after one of the wider working group calls?

ENS Sub-Community Experiment (Pokemon ENS):

I think this thread is softly supportive of this idea while being conscious of the way this experiment would actually take place. I do think the point @estmcmxci raises about legals is interesting, creating conflict between NIL and ENS isn’t something that i want - but the existence of ENS names like Pikachu.eth seems to me to be the intimidating part, not leveraging these names to conduct an experiment around community governance, but interested in @Alexu take or any other legal perspectives.

Next step here is to continue to shop out how this experiment would work in practice and understand any legal considerations.

Incentivizing Re-delegation Towards Active Participants

+100 to this idea @Arnold, I think this is something @netto.eth is actively working on atm as a part of Blockful’s work. But the idea of incentivising active delegates and delegators is an idea i fully support. Understanding the logistics of a proposal like this and the exact mechanism of incentivisation is super important here but keen to keep exploring these ideas!

[Idea] Micro-Incentives for Good Protocol Hygiene

I really like the idea of tying the ENS records and metadata to the first ENScribe incentive idea, where not only do organisations have to name their smart contracts but they’re also incentivised to correctly update ENS records and metadata as part of this program.

Partner with EAS to suggest ENS verification

Super interested in this idea @simona_pop but trying to understand what the practical next step in this is? Talking to EAS about integrations? Keen to explore more - Also love the idea of the content/artist collaboration incentives, its interesting to think about what a broad incentive program like this would look like.

Overall think this thread has started an excellent line of thinking for the DAO and would continue to encourage all other ideas to be posted! Please join the above telegram group about ENScribe incentives if interested and keep up the discussion!

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Yes, I would chat to EAS about a partnership there EAS x ENS has a great ring and potential to it. Re creators - again a partnership with an established creator platform would be a one to many approach or a partnership with a well established content creator/ artist to create a proof of concept others could emulate (a launch of something to feature ENS profiles for access would provide a simple yet powerful branding and onboarding double pronged approach)

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Related to this — in Enscribe we integrate with OLI for labelling contracts which uses EAS behind the scenes. The team there is also adding an Enscribe integration currently.

Although this is different to account verification services as @simona_pop highlights, it could be useful as part of a wider EAS discussion.

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Great initiative. I love the overarching idea of purposefully distributing ENS tokens to drive growth, impact, and user adoption.

General comment: I see 3 themes here:

  1. Distribution mechanism:
    • Automated (e.g., register a name → get $ENS tokens, name a contract → get $ENS tokens, etc.)
    • Social vote (for communities, Pokémon community is a good example),
    • Retroactive airdrop (one-time reward for specific contributions and actions).
  2. Purpose of distribution
    • Using $ENS tokens as rewards/airdrop.
    • Funding specific work via RFP.
    • Strategic incentive programs to hit growth/revenue goals.
  3. Use case targeting
    • By industry (wallets, L2s, CEXes, FinTech crypto apps, etc.).
    • By user type (devs, traders, communities, collectors, etc.).
    • By ENS usage (identity, onchain profiles, domains, contract names, etc.).

There should be a clear distinction between retroactively supporting something and token distribution as an incentive for certain actions/behavirous and who it is designed for, and what the goal of the distribution is.

Idea 1)

Increase ENS domain usage

Targeted campaign to increase usage of ENS for its two primary value propositions.

  1. Domains/Websites
  2. Identity/Usernames

While ENS supports decentralized websites, adoption is heavily skewed toward identity use. Out of 1.6M ENS names, only ~30k have a contenthash record pointing to a website. Meanwhile, subnames and identity-based usage have proven highly effective for growth and are estimated to be around 25M (before Gemini integration, and 3 service providers offering subname as a service).

To elaborate for the domains case:

Pinit.eth alone has 80k subdomains linked to a decentralized website solving a real-world problem – permissionless, censorship-resistant access to websites for communities actively fighting censorship.
Simplepage.eth.limo recently went live to doing the same thing with a more consumer-oriented focus.
And we have OGs like Webhash that have created, I believe >8,000 websites on ENS.

Examples like this show that it’s worth exploring targeted campaigns to boost ENS usage for websites and scale adoption for this specific use case.

Alternatively, we could double down on what works best, identity via subnames, and run a more aggressive GTM campaign around that, which leads to Idea 2.

Idea 2)

Integrations fund

This idea is closely related to James’s suggestions and I want to echo everything said in here. I also believe this last suggestion should be decoupled from the previous ones. It can’t be programmatically implemented and doesn’t make sense for a community vote like Pokémon-style incentives. Instead, it should be handled by a dedicated group focused on this specifically. For its rollout, I suggest a 6-12 months trial period with Labs’ BD/Growth team only, and track the results.

Yup, fully agree on this whole point. What I’ll say is that the only way to reach those users is through deals with the platforms where they already spend time. And for those platforms, since they have the most users, they hold the leverage to dictate terms. And since they are profit-driven businesses (usually), unless an integration brings them 1) direct financial upside, 2) more users, or 3) solves a real problem, it’s usually a low priority and can be continuously pushed back for years (speaking from experience).

Hence my integrations fund proposition, where Labs (and SPs in the future, with proper oversight and prior approval) can tap into to improve the odds of reaching these goals. Other naming services, despite being technically inferior, have moved fast here and gained ground simply because they were willing to do this.

I’m not suggesting we directly pay companies to integrate ENS (though that’s pretty much a standard practice in Web3, locked/vested tokens), but we could allocate some tokens to make these deals more attractive to them. This could cover activation campaigns, user acquisition efforts, reward their end users directly, and even tie integrations to delegation, creating mutual benefits for both sides.

I guess this is just a long-winded way of me saying I’m very interested in this. This is a big thing to talk about, and needs more work and thinking. A dedicated fund could simply help us accelerate what I see as an inevitable outcome: a complete paradigm shift from hexadecimal addresses to human-readable usernames. With or without it, we’ll get there. It’s just a matter of time and how much market share ENS keeps along the way.

Idea 3)

GitHub Contribution Rewards

Introduce a bounty-based reward system for ENS-related open-source contributions, where developers are compensated in $ENS for merged pull requests. This could speed up issue resolution, feature requests development, and it’s a great way to discover new talented devs.

This can be done with as few as 200-300 $ENS tokens, run it for 3-6 months, and track sentiment, engagement, and results. I think a lot of this can be done via Drips, Dework, or similar platforms. Needs more exploration. Operational overhead might be a small concern.

Brantly’s post as an example. But also ENS canny board and ENS roadmap from the website.

Idea 4)

Communities + ENS names as votes

Possibly a little controversial, but an interesting thought experiment I’ve had for a while. I was always curious to figure out if there was a way to make ENS names work similarly to tokens, at least in governance and voting.

What if owning ENS names (and paying their yearly renewal fees) translated to an equal $$ amount of voting power in the DAO? It seems odd to exclude these NFTs (names), yet core assets from governance. Just wondering.

Generally supportive of more community efforts as the one suggested by @James.

Idea 5)

Reward long-term registrations

One-off incentive campaign. Part airdrop, part retention and user stickiness push, aimed to combat declining ENS registrations and renewals. Extend your name for 5+ or 10+ years, signal long-term ENS + Ethereum alignment, and receive X many $ENS tokens (possibly with vesting). The claim process could include a mandatory Delegation step to increase decentralization and boost governance participation. 30-second idea, not sure if good or bad.

ENScribe

Contract naming with ENScribe – excellent idea.

Currently, on DEXes you cannot search for a token by its .eth name/subname. One idea that can be coupled with that is if all token contracts are named, it would be great if DEXes resolved .eth names/subnames for them inside their Swap box.

We started working on this, but put things on hold to coordinate better. We have a PR ready for Uniswap to add resolving names/subnames in the swap box, which would allow search for tokens with whichever .eth name/subname they had assigned to them (or use tkn.eth or similar services).

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@James Love the thinking here! It’s contributed some inspiration to a proposal our team is drafting for issuing awards in $ENS for referred .eth name registrations and renewals. More on that coming in a separate post soon :zap:

“Enscribe Contract Naming Incentives”

An observation on conceptual relations into web2. In web2, basically everyone has an email address, but few individuals own their own domain. Domains are generally purchased by businesses / entrepreneurs. On the other hand, in a web3 context, thus far the situation is flipped. ENS names are generally purchased by individuals (to be used a bit like a web3 email address), while smart contracts that might be more associated with businesses / entrepreneurs generally don’t have an ENS name yet.

There’s network effects / distribution opportunities here that are high value for ENS to crack. I think the key will be persuading wallets to start performing ENS primary name lookups in their UI whenever interacting with a contract.

In other words, translating back into a web2 context again, it’s as if the “address bar” in web browsers would only display the IP address of the website your interacting with, never its DNS name.

For this “chicken and egg” problem, there’s a lot more concentration in web browsers (wallets) then websites (smart contracts). Therefore (@conor) I think it might be fruitful to prioritize persuading wallets to update their UIs to lookup the primary name of any contract you interact with and display that primary name if it is set. Maybe some financial incentive from the DAO might help motivate prioritizing that work. If so, the ROI could make sense.

As that starts to happen I expect it will create all the incentive that’s needed for smart contract devs to start setting primary names on their contracts. Of course, tooling that makes this as easy as possible (Enscribe!) will also be key.

Currently I assume most smart contract devs don’t even know they have an ENS primary name problem to solve. If wallets start to update their UIs then awareness of the problem can grow and smart contract devs will naturally start looking for a solution (Enscribe!).

“ENS Community based experimentation”

If the DAO has any involvement then I think best to not anchor around branded terminology ex: Pokemon.

Here’s a quick related idea that is more about adding some fun at ENS events (@Limes) than making a big impact on ENS growth. Ex: for Devconnect happening in Buenos Aires, Argentina this November, a theme could be “Argentina”. When you show up to the ENS party at Devconnect, maybe there’s a special incentive for owning a .eth name that’s conceptually related to Argentina. Ex: capybara.eth, juanperon.eth, riodellaplata.eth, yerbamate.eth, lionelmessi.eth, etc… There’s endless possibilities.

Part of the fun can be the subjectivity of what it means to be conceptually related to Argentina. Ex: “What Argentina-related .eth name do you have? Why did you pick it? What does it mean to you?” Etc. Perhaps a silly prize for whoever owns the Argentina-related names that get the most votes at the event.

This game could be repeatable for any theme.

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Say ENS DAO commits a portion of its $ENS budget to aligned builders across other DAOs, protocols, organizations, wallets, etc., rewarding them through tiered milestones (we can define those together).

In return, those DAOs agree to incentivize ENS builders and adopt ENS standards (such as ENSIP-19) via a governance token swap—we can figure out the details later.

This model of mutual coordination enables stronger integration with strategic partners, thereby reinforcing the existing network effect.

Moreover, dedicating a line item for delegation incentives strengthens decentralization by ensuring governance tokens are placed in the hands of trusted strategic partners with skin in the game, who will reliably participate in voting and maximize participation.

Happy to run through a scenario if there’s enough interest.

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