One-paragraph summary for Snapshot (per Nick’s request): Building on more than a year of progress, Namespace focuses on making ENS-based digital identity a new industry standard to enhance user experience in Web3 space. Our proposal outlines a comprehensive suite of tools and an easy-to-use platform, designed to allow ENS Name owners such as individuals, communities, wallets, games, websites, etc. to easily issue, customize, and manage ENS Subnames, regardless of technical expertise. With Namespace, every ENS name owner to become a digital identity provider with minimal effort, thereby streamlining ENS integration, and identity management and making Names and Subnames more accessible to everyone. With $200,000 our team of 3 people will transition to full-time development, and continue building our entire product suite.
Link to a full (this?) proposal: Service Provider Stream Nomination Thread - #20 by cap
Name and website of Provider
Name: Namespace
Website: https://v2.namespace.tech/
Soon-to-be retired Website: https://namespace.ninja/
Name of main point of contact
Cap – thecap.eth
What do you want to build on ENS?
Vision: Make digital (onchain) identity a new industry standard in crypto, replacing wallet addresses with ENS Names and Subnames (universal and portable wallet names, profiles, identifiers, usernames).
Mission: Make it easy for ENS name owners to become digital identity providers, make minting digital identity accessible everywhere, and get it in the hands of every crypto user.
Goal: Build and provide tools, API, custom-built solutions, and an easy-to-use platform (no coding skill required) in order to handle setting up, customizing, and issuing Subnames for existing and new crypto users.
We have been actively engaged with ENS DAO and the Protocol for over a year, and Namespace is entirely built on the ENS protocol.
Namespace is built as a simple-to-use platform that any ENS name owner can use to issue Subnames in a variety of ways and for different purposes, regardless of their technical knowledge and expertise. It allows Name owners to issue free or paid Subnames either through the Namespace platform or through their own Apps, Websites, or Blogs. This capability enables ENS name owners to offer and monetize Digital Identity registration services, turning every ENS Name owner into a Digital Identity provider.
Namespace is designed to remove complexity associated with ENS names for non-tech users, by providing a user-friendly interface that abstracts away technical details which improves the ease of utilization of ENS names and enhances digital identity for projects in Web3.
Product Suite
What have we built so far?
These are all the tools, features, and cool use cases we came up with after a year of working on Namespace. Each Use Case represents a different ENS User group that wants to issue Subnames in a different way.
Use Case #1
Unruggable Subnames for Individual ENS name holders – easily gift or sell Subnames (digital identity) to anyone.
We are someone who truly believes in the power of the ENS community as an onboarding vehicle for mass adoption. Channeling their efforts towards onboarding new users and providing them with Subnames is something we want to actively work on.
Who is it for: ENS name owners that have a neck for entrepreneurship and want to onboard users to crypto and potentially make money doing it.
Status: Already built, more improvements on the way.
Future improvements:
- ENS name and subname trading – enable simple trading experience for all Names and Subnames.
- Implement Subname renting – Enable renting with yearly renewals for Subnames.
- Implement L2 Subnames – L2 minted and settled Subnames through ENS EVM Gateway with CCIP and reduce the barrier to mass adoption by decreasing gas prices.
Use Case #2
Community Subnames – Brand awareness through collective and cohesive onchain Identity.
Collective and cohesive identity experience for PFP collections, DAOs, Web3 Communities, Private groups, etc. to increase brand awareness, unity, and status. Enabled thourgh token-gated minting so that only certain NFT holders can mint certain Subnames.
Who is it for: Communities, private groups, DAOs, clubs, etc.
Status: Fully functional on Goerli. Works well with ERC721.
Future improvements: Need to add support for ERC1155 tokens and additional features to enrich the experience such as revocability if NFT is sold, etc.
Use Case #3
Namespace Widget – Become an ENS Digital Identity Provider in less than 2 minutes. (sell subnames from your own ENS Names on your own Blog or a Website).
The idea behind Widget (and Namespace itself) is to create the ability so that anyone can become a Digital Identity Provider in less than 2 minutes with one line of code. Widget makes this easy to connect with anyone’s Blog, Website, Community page, etc. With a little additional modification, it can have a different (other than standard) design and it can be designed to reflect the brand identity of the Website or Provider who’s integrating it.
Who is it for: Blogs, Educational websites, Web3 general websites, any website that has an ENS name and wants to issue/sell/gift digital identity (subnames) from their website.
Status: Built and tested on Goerli.
Test it yourself here: Sample Page – namespace-blog
Add it to your website: you can test it by adding it to your website: <script type="module" src="https://namespace-widgets.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/namespace-vite-widget/bundle.js"></script>
Future improvements:
- Launch it on the WordPress Marketplace as a Plugin so it can be installed and set up easily with no coding required.
- Allow the owners who implement it to be able to show and sell subnames from their ENS Names only.
Use Case #4
Namespace (Wallet) API – Free (L2) Universal Profiles for Wallets
Simple API for easy integration and issuance of subnames on L2 (OP initially) with optional Account Abstraction integration to facilitate sponsored transactions so the users claiming Subnames can claim them for free (sponsored by the Wallet provider).
Who is it for: Wallets and Games primarily, but also anyone that wants an API for L2 subname management
Status: Being built with one wallet provider
Future improvements: Expand to other L2s and create White-label solution for wallets.
Past experience working on ENS
We’ve been building Namespace on ENS for the last year and a half now. Our entire platform is already fully functional on Goerli and around 80% of the product suite I mentioned above is already built and being tested on Goerli.
A demo of our dapp with allianceDAO.eth used as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnfMP0wxCak
Some stuff we built:
- Onchain Public Registry with all listed ENS names that have Subnames available for minting.
- Registration front end – easy way to find all available Subnames from listed ENS names + ability to register ENS Names
- Register ENS to someone else’s Wallet address
- Set primary name during registration
- Free or paid subnames minting
- Browsing available Subnames among listed ENS names
- Customize subname selling price based on length
- Reserve some subnames for yourself when listing ENS name
- Set a deadline when you want to start minting subnames
- Whitelist wallets you want to give the ability to mint subnames for free
- Whitelist only those wallets that you want to be able to mint subnames
- Token-gated listing and minting so that only certain NFT holders can mint subname
- Updating onchain text records
- Custom ‘Name Description’ and ‘Subname holder benefits’ text records
- Automatically burning fuses based on the use case ENS name is used for – not requiring end users to know what to do if they want to sell unruggable subnames.
- Dashboard with user stats about Subname selling
- Wrapping and bulk wrapping ENS names
We see ourselves as an extension of ENS. Namespace basically supercharges ENS utility and creates custom-built solutions for specific groups of users of ENS.
For this reason, we’ve integrated the Thorin design system as well, to capture a unified and recognizable design. This ensures a consistent user experience for everyone in the crypto dealing with ENS names and digital identities.
Some stats from the Goerli testnet with our alpha testers:
| Unique listed names | 54 |
|---|---|
| Average listing price | 0.16 ETH |
| Total minted subnames | 178 |
| Unique parent names with minted subnames | 33 |
| Total minted amount | 23.10 ETH |
| Average spent on minting per wallet | 0.075 ETH |
| Average earned on minting per wallet | 0.14 ETH |
Size of team and commitment
We are a team of 3 people.
We’ve been building Namespace despite having full-time jobs. Our aim with this proposal is to obtain funding for the first year, which will enable us to commit full-time. Despite the limited time invested, working only in our spare time, we’re happy with our progress so far but recognize there are more features to be developed.
Funding Namespace will support not just our development work, but also initiatives like user onboarding, education, marketing, more partnerships and integrations, and other activities, all of which will directly or indirectly benefit ENS.
In addition to our main activities, we also focus on enjoyable stuff like publishing articles (Mirror), and hosting popular events such as Twitter Spaces (e.g., “Digital Identity with dr3a and Evan,” which brought >500 attendees).
The potential scale for Namespace is inherently tied to the growth of the ENS. As digital identity becomes more important online, especially in a decentralized world, the need for user-friendly and secure naming systems will escalate. Therefore, one of our goals is to create railroads for easy adoption and integration of ENS naming services through Namespace (API, Widget, Platform) and help cement ENS as the de facto naming system for the Web3 world!
Links to documents with further information
Technical overview of the Dapp and Smart contracts: Namespace Technical Overview - Google Docs
Demo for Griff.eth including buying, listing, and minting subname from the Widget: Loom | Free Screen & Video Recording Software | Loom
Conflict of interest statement
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I applied to be Ecosystem Working group Steward in the past which you can see on this Snapshot here and here. I received a lot of support and got 400k and 800k ENS votes that I’m very thankful for but I didn’t become Ecosystem steward.
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Received a 10k USDC grant from the Ecosystem working group.
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Received 2 ETH in ENS Small Grants.
10k Endorsement link
Endorsement Link:
https://snapshot.org/#/nominations.ens.eth/proposal/0xfcb7571e734bdb625f3c0382438963632d815b0122a368c0c6a28c36918cd7d5
Budget Requested
$200,000 which will secure the 3 of us to start working full-time on this immediately.