Include the original (first) registration date and time in the ENS metadata

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#1

Hey all,
This is my first topic here, I hope I’m following the intended process.

There is a growing interest in ENS names registered in the past as a subset of the community considers them as historic assets.

Currently its very difficult to filter and find names that were registered before a certain date, as the Registration Date field on Opensea shows the most recent registration (which for names that were once expired and then registered again is different from their original registration date).

How would the community feel about either replacing the Registration Date with the original one instead of the most recent one, or include an additional field for the original one in the metadata?

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#2

I support this, however it might be technically complex as the on chain data is not there: for some reason when a name is re-registered, the contract makes it seem like one was burned and then re-emitted.

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#3

I’m sure there’s a good reason for the burn and re-mint behavior, maybe it’s so that in the history it doesn’t look like the new owner just stole/scammed the previous owner or something? I’ve had plenty of support tickets where people are confused about what they see in the history for re-registered names.

It also makes the code cleaner too I think, because there doesn’t need to be special logic when a token already exists, you just call burn on the NFT contract and move on.

This might be more important with the NameWrapper and subdomains in the future too, because I think the re-registration resets all the fuses for the new owner. But that’s separate from the ENS NFT contract, not sure why that one still needs to be burned and re-minted.

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#4

Actually currently even though a token was burnt at the time of expiration and minted again when it was re-registered, on Opensea you can still see the complete history of these events in the “Item Activity” section - so at the end its still the same token from the perspective of OpenSea.

On the other hand I would say this is a different concern/problem, as even if the activity feed would be always complete, the pre-erc721 actions would not show up there, so this data would not be sufficient to determine the original registration date.

I do think the best place for this information could be a field in the meta-data, but im not sure if there is a clean simple dataset to populate it.

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#5

Could ENS DAO ever land in a situation where it is asked by a regulator to provide the historical records of a name? While I can easily imagine that it makes the code a whole lot cleaner, I am now wondering if there are any extrinsic issues with this approach.

#6

OpenSea is pulling the data from its own records I suppose. I wonder if their database will be exhaustive enough to populate the metadata but I guess it will be close enough

#7

Well regardless of whether the burn/remint happens or not, all historical records are going to be right there in public view on the blockchain anyway

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#8

And I want to mention that app.ens.domains is showing the correct original registration date for all these names under the “Details” tab.

Here is an example:
https://app.ens.domains/name/0000011.eth/details

But on OpenSea the registration date is the most recent one:
https://opensea.io/assets/0x57f1887a8bf19b14fc0df6fd9b2acc9af147ea85/26458156898877206253007968176455098591878054445914935376874290655869645830006

(on OpenSea down at the bottom you can actually observe the activity history i was talking about earlier)

#9

I think we could add support for this to our subgraph fairly easily. I’m not sure that the ‘original’ registration date is not misleading, for names that have not existed continually since that date. Thoughts?

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#10

I think if there’s both registrationDate and originalRegistrationDate, that’s clear enough to me.

firstRegistrationDate?

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#11

It doesn’t sound like a good idea that replacing the Registration Date with the original one instead of the most recent one. The recent one is most important and useful for common use cases.

Actually, we can see the history activities of a name on OPENSEA in its “Item Activity” area.

Nonetheless, a special tool or library or online app is needly to provide the history of given ENS names, I think.

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#12

Yes, this naming I think would prevent any sort of confusion.

And just on the confusion topic in general: I would expect people to be aware of the general idea of ENS names expiring, just because the way they register requires them to think about for how long they want to register them.

Yes, I tend to agree! Leaving the current Registration Date field as it is is probably a good idea.

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#13

Are NFT’s at that place already?

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