Gifting ENS to family and friends

💬 General Discussion
1

Hey All,

I’m trying to gift ENS domain names to my friends to get everyone more involved in web3. What’s the best way to do this? I want this to be a great learning experience and to show them everything I’ve seen so far. I also don’t want to overwhelm them with everything too fast. Any ideas onboarding your friends and family?

Thanks,
Andy

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In my opinion, the best way would be:

  1. Make them create a Metamask account (be sure that they back up the seed phrase)
  2. Buy the domains from your address
  3. Transfer ownership of those domains to their addreses
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Thanks! Yeah I couldn’t decide between sending them ETH and letting them register it or I register it and transfer it to them.

4

If you’re gifting an ENS domain to someone else and just want everything set to their address so they have to do the fewest number of transactions possible, then:

  1. Update the ETH address record to their address, and also the avatar and anything else you want to set for them (all in one transaction if possible to save on gas)
  2. Set the Controller to their address
  3. Transfer the Registrant to their address. Now they own the NFT.

The receiver will still need to be the one to set the primary name on their address though, so that’s one transaction they will need to do, if they want a Primary Name set.

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Trying to onboard friends/family that have no experience with anything crypto is a nightmare right now. I personally think it might be best to just buy the .eth domain for them and hold it in your own wallet until there is a better way to transfer it, preferably in one fell swoop.

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If your friend / family member trusts you as a reliable crypto custodian, then maybe yeah, you can just keep custody of that ENS name for them, and update records for them when they want!

Or maybe you keep the registrant ownership so that you are the trusted custodian, but you give them Controller access. That way they can play around with updating records all they want, and there’s no chance of them accidentally transferring/losing/burning the ENS name. Even if their wallet gets compromised, the ENS name would not be lost because you are the registrant, not them.

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I did this with my family and they all got access to the airdrop. They were stoked. I dont think there is any shortcuts here, I sat down with them and we started from square one. Downloading metamask, big lecture on seed phrase / key safety. I made them right it down, baited them to send me seed phrases as a test etc. It was a long process but I think they got something out of it. Especially with using and interacting with metamask. Once we set the reverse registrar we visited a few sites and they could see their ens there. This is the way I did it. The ‘easiest’ way to gift would probably be require them to download metamask and then get them to send you an address, but they need to be educated on wallet safety.

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This is so wholesome. I’ve seen it posted around twitter that people are onboarding their friends and family with a crypto wallet and .eth domain for Christmas. I love this idea. The coolest part to me is you can continue to send gifts to it in the future, or even something like an allowance. Not many other gifts can have that kind of lasting utility. It feels like back when I set up email addresses for my family. This is how I’ve been trying to explain .eth names in layman’s terms - it’s like an email address for assets.

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