I’m new to the forums but I have a lot of experience with the history of this technology;
I understand the need:
Decentralization (Legality, DRM, DMCA, GDPR)
Secondary Sales (Investment Opportunity)
Injection of liquidity into Primary Market.
I was looking at the DUNE Image Matoken shared - based on the information from that graph - any future listings, acquisitions and/or mergers might not be as easy to forecast. 3 & 4 Digit purchases are based on a previous TLD model of 3 or 4 letter domains that are being purchased by regions in China, South-East Asia, and Africa.
The markets are ripe and ready for adoption of all Ethereum (Multichained) dApp based technology known as Web 3, however, as previously stated, it is a nascent market and unpredictability in orbiting markets can artificially inflate or deflate total market valuation of ENS and ENS_DAO tokens.
What does that mean?
That OpenSea can acquire additional “Open Sourced Markets” with enough density, liquidity, and movement thru their network that assimilating it into its platform could destabilize all secondary sales, as such, having an ENS only market that is not polluted by “scam markets” and not brand aligned with OpenSea would only be a detriment to the total trust that the public places in the ENS technology. I believe @alisha.eth discussed during the Twitter Space event that the ENS community has a good relationship with OpenSea.
We should cultivate that opportunity for continued growth together borrowing knowledge from each other’s experience.
I think we should take a unix application development philosophy on adding feature sets. I mean to say, that each application has a single purpose and does that purpose well. A decentralized marketplace is fantastic, and i will support development. However, i don’t think this should fall directly under ENS itself, and rather be it’s own standing service separate from ENS.
Would this mean that any sort of bidding would also be on chain (and hence require a tx)? If yes, I would say that isnt really a favorable setup nowadays, I would try to avoid that.
Thanks for the proposal! Throwing in my thoughts here, I don’t think the DAO should create/fund an official marketplace. ENS names are not just any other NFTs to be traded, they are a foundational layer for decentralized, censorship-resistant, universal, human-readable data storage and referencing on the new internet.
We should be funding initiatives that make it easier for people to deploy .eth decentralized websites, for new apps to easily integrate snappy ENS resolution all over their interfaces, etc. Funding a set of components that makes it easier for others to build niche ENS marketplaces is something I’d be behind too.
We also need to start changing UX to treat subdomains as first class citizens, as that is likely the real way people will get their desired name, not shelling out ETH on secondary marketplaces for the “.eth” name.
I wouldn’t Metaphor’s votes on an official marketplace created/run by the DAO. We need to get web3 off this constant speculation-as-product train, not exacerbate it.
Greetings friends!
A great topic for discussion, I’ve also been thinking about a second market for ENS for a very long time.
After reading the discussion, I came across the following idea.
Does ICANN sell domains? Pays for advertising to sell them?
No.
Licensed retailers such as godaddy, a huge number of registrars from the smallest to the giants are engaged in this.
Why don’t we do the same trick here?
The DAO should create a company to attract developers and businesses to the role of ENS domain registrars. Registrars are required to undergo verification and receive the rights to use a second-level smart contract (gives the right to register through a third-party platform).
At the same time, the registrar receives a percentage of the sale of the ens domain - this is his motivation.
Thus, we will have a beneficial effect on the development of the ENS eco-structure, because registrars will advertise their service and try in every possible way to earn more. This advertisement will allow a huge number of people to find out about us.
Returning to the topic of the post, the organization of the secondary name market will fall on the shoulders of registrars, because this is a profitable segment that they will not want to lose.
As a result , we will get:
A new audience attracted by registrars
Extension of the ENS eco structure (The Registrar must have name.eth)
The second market, auctions, ratings, evaluation and much more. Just take everything from Sedo
I think the DAO should absolutely stay away from building a secondary sales market place. In my opinion, the further away from secondary sales ENS is from sales the better. Take a look at what happened with the OpenSea employee. I would not be surprised if the same enforcing authorities are watching people here.
Hypothetically, if ENS DAO created a marketplace and launched it today, I would give it less than a week before someone publicly accuses members or any affiliates with insider trading, collusion, synthetic secondary sale prices etc.
Although I have not observed any one person(s) or read conversations of such events happening, a separation between the root and the branch need be as far away as possible to prevent such erroneous accusations.
ENS is open-source and operates to facilitate a digital good for individuals and other entities to establish a form of identity on web 3 decentralized platforms. ENS DAO does not aim to facilitate profits from secondary sales of identity assets and only receives income from the registering of names that do not have a registrant address set. The cost of registering is fair and the tiers of price for registering applies to anyone attempting to register and the name being registered is available for anyone if there is not a registrant address in the meta.
However, an individual may trade their ability to access and utilize a registered ENS name privately utilizing a third party service that provides the agreeing parties; the maker and taker a fair way to exchange a digital good safely. It is the responsibility of each party to understand what they are receiving in return for their offer and vice versa.
I agree. After reading the discussion in this topic, I looked at the secondary official market from ens from a different angle, there are really a lot of potential problems and pitfalls.
What I propose will not affect the reputation of ENS in any way. But at the same time it will benefit from the points described above. Later I will describe my proposed mechanism in more detail in a separate topic.
I do-NOT think the ENS DAO should create its own ENS-specific marketplace.
I do-think the ENS DAO should consider adding ENS-specific Metadate/Properties,
…to specific lists of ENS-names, which would get used in NFT-marketplaces, like OpenSea & LooksRare. IE: The list of animal ENS names could get an “Animal” tag on them.
This is fun, and encourages visibility & idea generation by users searching for their new project name. It encourages discoverability & findability, which helps everyone, including the end-users.
Note: It is the job of the ENS DAO to
secure/protect the ENS network,
keep ENS decentralized & censorship-resistant,
foster community-constituents, and to prevent fragmentation of the community.
…which includes growth of the industry, the ecosystem, &
any/all the users who are buying-or-selling ENS names.
PS: There is a lot of talk about discouraging ENS sales, and the love/hate toward the industry of buyers/sellers. I think it is not wise to fight against the free market. Based on my experience & background, I encourage ENS DAO to include all ENS constituents into the fold. The more we are together, the stronger we’ll be. We do not need to encourage squatters (although they are inevitable), but we should encourage healthy communities (that center around ENS, directly & indirectly), & marketplaces (that I recommend the DAO do-not create, directly).
The bottom line is, 1. just because our actions help resellers, does not mean that the actions are bad, and 2. resellers are a happy & healthy part of a balance ecosystem, and the DAO should be helping all constituents (including resellers) in order to help ENS end-users, directly and indirectly.
Lastly, by hurting resellers the DAO is hurting itself and our users; there is balance to the force.
Don’t let the hate flow through you. The business-marketing would not have worked without the technology; and now the technology will not work without the business-marketing.
United in balance we are strong.
[You just described Bitcoin, and every economy.*]
“Everything is a ponzi until it is big enough to become an economy.”
Anyway, you didn’t even read what I said.
I am not suggesting that the ENS DAO support any or all of those clubs.
I am recommending we foster “an ecosystem that includes all constituents”, including resellers;
(This is not to say to cater to resellers, but that resellers are a significant & critical component of a domain name protocol industry).
We can be creative without being Ponzi, but what is alarming is that they are not creating anything for the community they have created. That’s why I think the DAO should be far from this type of resellers.
If a decision is to be made to proceed with this, the marketplace would have to be completely decentralised or at least decentarlised on a contract level where no single entity can create monopoly out of and other front-end platforms can subscribe to, to perform transactions on behalf of their users. Making sure that the profits made from commission is distributed to the DAO instead of a select few is critical.
…in addition to decentralization, it is important to avoid or not allow any type of manipulation in any of its forms.
I’ll give you an example: Assuming that each domain is unique and unrepeatable, which makes it an asset of great value, it makes no sense to compare the sales floor, for me, this is a practice of psychological manipulation to create a non-existent value that only benefits those at the top of the pyramid.
ENS is totally different from the other NFT projects, and I think We can group the domains in terms of the types of use they can offer.
You’re right. I’m actually going to consider this for my own implementation (ENSCanvas Marketplace). How do we establish price discovery in this case? Should we leave it up to the community, individually to decide what the best price is for a domain?
Without reinventing the wheel, there is a precedent that helps us to establish prices:
The traditional domain market.
From it we can add the added value offered by the natural characteristics of ENS:
decentralization, identity, wallet…
This will allow the fair value of each domain to be appraised.
Flexibility is important.
Leaving the value of each asset at the disposal of a mostly ignorant community of the domain market is a significant risk because the community will repeat what its leaders say, think, or have an opinion.
And this is not healthy for any business.
Prices must be established exclusively by who buys and who sells, this relationship is what matters.
