Name and website of Provider: blockful.eth | blockful.io
Name of the main point of contact: alextnetto.eth | telegram
What do you want to build on ENS?
Our vision is to improve ENS in 4 ways
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User experience [UX]: Lower the barrier and complexity for users.
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Developer experience [DX]: Make onboarding for developers easier and reduce costs/time to build on ENS.
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Platform sustainability [PS]: Create a positive-sum situation by having more incentives for platforms so they can grow together with ENS.
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Governance [Gov]: Improve transparency and security on governance.
[UX + PS] 1-step registration for .eth domains
This feature was done in past experimentation from Blockful in the ENS core contract. This feature is mentioned in our article as “commit with payment”.
Today, when a user wants to register a name, he does 2 transactions (commit and register). The idea here is the user does only the commit transaction, and the Dapp does the register transaction. With that flow, it’s not just improving the UX (no need to keep staring at your screen for 60 seconds for the commit to be valid) but also creating a revenue opportunity for Dapps (as shown in the following diagram).
Our goal here would be to push forward this feature to ENS core contracts, being the first contribution outside ENS Labs to the core protocol and contributing to the narrative of decentralizing the development. If that’s not feasible, we’ll do this feature in an external contract, the cons for that is the user paying a little more gas for a much better experience.
This feature unlocks high value, not just for the user but also for the platform implementing it, creating a revenue opportunity by providing a better UX and then increasing the registrations. The evolution of this is creating a backend that all platforms can use to batch, optimize gas costs, and reduce implementation costs.
There is also the opportunity to improve gas costs by adding batching features on commit, register, renew, and fuse operations. The deliverable is the whole system working, from frontend to backend and smart contracts.
[UX + DX] Improving ENS off-chain features
The CCIP-read (EIP3368) is a great standard created by Nick, unlocking huge potential for adoption. It enables creating subdomains and records (like setting your avatar) for free.
As mentioned on ENSIP-16 by Makoto and Jeff Lau: “With EIP-3668 subdomains already starting to see wide adoption, it is important that there is a way for frontend interfaces to get important metadata to allow a smooth user experience.”
We are talking with a big fintech (+50M users) to integrate ENS into their crypto wallet and create off-chain subdomains and forward resolution. This made us realize some improvement points.
Today, we have the standards for reading the data but not for writing. The R&D in this idea is around creating a standard for “minting”, transferring off-chain subdomains, and updating off-chain records. That means being able to change your avatar on cb.id through another ENS dapp, for example, creating a unified experience across platforms and also reducing development complexity.
Note: The scope here is specific to off-chain domains using centralized databases, not L2. The deliverable is the whole system working, from frontend to backend and smart contracts.
[DX] ensdk: a lightweight library to integrate the Ethereum Name Service and features that will be developed here in the proposal.
The value of all the proposed features gets unlocked when there is an easy way to use it. ENS is growing, and for the next level, we also need a variety of ENS SDKs.
The idea for this started at the beginning of October (repo, npm).
[Gov] Security review for executable proposals
As discussed in multiple working group meetings, it would be great to have a third party verifying executable proposals. At Blockful, we also do security reviews (audits).
In the last executable proposals, we have been checking and going after decoding and understanding the code to be executed by the DAO (e.g. keeping in touch with Karpatkey for related proposals). This was an informal way to have a third party help because we used the free hours we had, so there is no deep dive or formal report.
We would like to do it in a proper way and help secure the DAO. More eyes on executable proposals are never bad.
Note: We’re building some DAO tooling to benefit the whole ecosystem. It’s out of the scope of this proposal, but I’m sure ENS DAO will benefit from it.
Past experience working on ENS:
In mid-2022, I was still a golang backend engineer on a fintech. When I got the opportunity to work on my first experimentation around ENS, I quit my job, dropped out of computer science (CS), and started Blockful.
Today, we are a team of 10 (8 engineers from fintech, web3 communities, CS. 1 PMM and 1 operations/BD). We never raised capital. We slowly and organically grew through the bear market, providing services for founders and DAOs across the space.
I’m grateful for how ENS kickstarted all of this and changed not only my life but also the lives of our brilliant team.
Today, Blockful has become one of the to-go service providers for projects to integrate and use ENS because of our expertise in ENS architecture, product, and smart contract experience.
Our first contribution towards ENS was exploring innovative features (that came from Avsa’s ideas) on the old ETHRegistrarController. Here is a detailed article about it. Since then, we have started working with different teams to build and understand ENS.
When the new ETHRegistrarController (with support to NameWrapper) was launched, we adapted these features to the update. Here is a detailed article about it.
Size of team and commitment
Being passionate builders, our team has won 6 hackathons (from ETH Global, Chainlink, and ETH events) until now.
The feedback we got in past client deliveries and the goals we engage with demonstrate our work principles:
Avsa’s post about past experimentations in ENS contracts tweet: “My experience with Blockful has been incredible. They underpromised and over-delivered at every step”
Zen Dragon, grants manager at Balancer tweet: “The team is highly motivated and innovative, making them the exact type of group we get joy from funding.”
For the scope we proposed here to be production-ready, we’ll need 3 full-time devs
1 Fullstack
2 Backend / Smart Contract (including myself)
Links to documents with further information
The contribution that got Blockful started (github)
Small grant for this contribution
Small grant for updating the new ETHRegistrarController with these features:
Balancer article and tweet about our contribution.
Conflict of interest statement
Since we created Blockful (a year and a half ago), we worked with several teams and founders across the space, from the ENS ecosystem to top DeFi protocols (like Balancer).
One of the teams we worked with was NameHash, which will also apply for this program and is one of the most brilliant and serious teams we worked with. We are happy to help teams build on top of ENS and use our technical expertise to advance.
10k Endorsement link: (Snapshot)
Budget Requested
$300,000/year
This represents a 40% discount over the rate we charge our usual clients. Our goal here is not to profit. It’s to dedicate to bigger achievements for ENS in a sustainable way.
We provide world-class engineers to provide services. Blockful’s purpose is to reinvest the profit from our operations into building open-source and contributing to protocols and ideas we identify with. ENS and governance are one of those.
Independent of the result here, we’ll continue to contribute and develop some of the ideas proposed here because we think it’s worth it for our efficiency to help people integrate on ENS and improve DAOs decision-making and governance.