Hypothetical situation. If you purchase an ENS domain through OpenSea, let’s say a month before it expires, do you then need to pay a registration fee when it expires a month later?
Would it be better, albeit more risky as you might not get it, to wait a month for it to hopefully not be re-registered and then try to register it to your wallet it once it expires?
Just curious and I was about to grab something on OS, but realized it expires in a month lol. Trying to avoid a surprise $640 fee!
Yes, the expiration date does not change. If you buy it from a secondary market, it will still expire on whatever expiration date it has, unless you extend it.
If you wait for it to expire, it goes into a 90 day grace period where the owner can still renew if they want. During the grace period, names cannot be sold or transferred at all.
If the grace period ends, the name is automatically released into a public Dutch auction with a temporary premium that starts at $100,000,000 and declines down to $0 over 21 days. So there is no sniping expired names either.
But it doesn’t matter whether you buy it from a secondary market or register it directly from the ENS contracts. Either way, you will still need to pay the $640 per year (for a 3-character name) if you want to keep it.