1. Applicant Information
- Team Name: 3DNS
- Website: 3dns.box
- Primary Contact/entity ENS Name.eth: paulio.eth
- Primary Contact(s): Paul Gauvreau - X - Twitter
2. Company Overview
3DNS is an ICANN Accredited Registrar that pioneered the tokenization of traditional domain names. We’ve expanded ENS capabilities to create domain names that work both onchain as ENS names and offchain in your browser.
We made history by tokenizing the first ICANN-issued gTLD (.BOX), helping ENS gain recognition and adoption from major companies worldwide. Our team has scaled ENS to meet the performance standards of traditional web applications, blurring the lines between onchain and offchain experiences.
With our extensive background in building production-grade applications and breakthrough R&D initiatives, we’re now proposing to extend the ENS protocol through new resolver standards. These standards will allow ENS names to work beyond basic identities and social profiles into powerful digital service platforms for:
- Digital nomads
- Consultants
- AI agents
- Online businesses
This proposal seeks essential funding to expand what’s possible with ENS names and ensure they remain the industry standard for onchain naming.
Over the past year, we’ve developed innovative applications for onchain names, including fully tradable digital businesses and revenue-generating AI agents. We believe our unique experience positions us perfectly to help shape how ENS names will be used in real world applications going forward.
3. Requested Amount
- Base Scope: $500,000
- Extended Scope: $700,000
- Second Year Stream: No, this is our first stream proposal.
4. Size of Team and Commitment
Base Scope Engineering Commitment:
- 1 dedicated smart contract / protocol engineer
- 1 part-time backend engineer
- 1 part-time frontend engineer
- 1 part-time project manager
Extended Scope Engineering Commitment:
- 3 dedicated engineers (smart contract, backend, and frontend)
- 1 part-time project manager
- 1 content and ui team
5. Eligibility Confirmation
Company Age & Reputation:
3DNS has been established since 2023. We’ve registered 85,000+ ICANN accredited domains on Base and Optimism.
Team Experience:
- Built the first ICANN accredited onchain domain registrar with domains that also work as ENS names.
- Tokenized and launched the first ICANN gTLD .box, with the Box Domains team.
- Co-authored EIP-5559 with Nick Johnson (resolver gateways for L1-L2 data flow).
- Built cb.id while at Coinbase (largest ENS namespace to date with over 12M registrations).
- 3DNS Protocol with full ENS integration (85,000+ domains on Base and Optimism that resolve natively in the ENS app).
- Implemented gasless DNSSEC with CCIP-Read (EIP-3668).
- Developed custom L2 resolver on Optimism and Base that allow all 3DNS L2 issued domain names to be accessible on ETH L1 - over 85,000 ICANN accredited domains.
ENS Token Endorsement Requirement:
We have not secured official endorsements yet, but intend to seek public endorsement via snapshot on April 1, 2025.
OFAC Sanctions Compliance:
We, 3DNS Inc, confirm that neither our organization nor any of our employees, contractors, or executive leadership is located in, or a resident of, an OFAC-sanctioned country.
6. Open Source Commitment
All standards, POC management apps, example resolver implementations, and gateways will be made available under MIT license for anyone to use.
7. Scope of Work & Budget
Why Expand ENS Utility?
ENS names have established themselves as the fundamental building blocks of identity in the Web3 ecosystem. However, their current utility is largely limited to basic wallet address resolution and simple profile information. Our proposal aims to significantly expand what ENS can do. With our proposed enhancements, service providers, businesses, and professionals would be able to use ENS profiles to solicit services, build social credit, and create a complete digital footprint. Your ENS name could become the center of your professional life online. This includes:
Service Offerings: Currently, ENS profiles contain limited information. Our proposal would transform them into complete professional hubs onchain.
We would enhance Profile Resolvers to track services tied directly to your domain. By adding capabilities for professional offerings, job listings, and collaboration requests to ENS profiles, we would create significantly more value. These changes would enable specialized marketplaces to emerge naturally from the ENS ecosystem. With these enhancements, your professional identity on your ENS profile would allow potential clients to discover you, verify your background, and engage your services through one consistent identity.
This would position ENS as a foundation for the emerging agent economy, where trusted professional identity becomes essential for both human and AI service providers.
Credit Score Building: Our proposal would enable businesses to use ENS profiles to document their transaction histories and build reputation over time, creating the groundwork for decentralized social credit systems based on actual performance.
The improved ENS system would allow tracking of business interactions, client relationships, and project completions within profiles, establishing verifiable records accessible to anyone. This would transform ENS into a transparent data source for assessing trustworthiness throughout Web3.
Digital Footprint Management: The professional world is currently fragmented. Your reputation is trapped in silos across platforms. Clients can’t easily find your complete story in one place. Our proposed ENS improvements would connect your work history, client feedback, and service offerings directly to your ENS name, creating a professional identity that travels with you. These expanded capabilities would make your achievements, skills, and services portable, verifiable, and permanent.
We believe that making ENS profiles more useful will bring more people into the Web3 ecosystem. By expanding what ENS can do beyond its current limitations, we open up new possibilities for everyone. This proposal focuses on creating new standards and building the infrastructure needed to make these ideas real. Our work is supported by rigorous R&D into use cases and technical feasibility, to develop solutions that address real needs and is easy to use/works well for users.
Basic Scope of Work
Requested Amount: $500,000
Description:
Develop foundational standards that enable service providers, businesses, and agents to solicit services and requests through their ENS profiles.
This includes:
- Standards Definition: Propose an EIP for service provider record types (e.g.,
service-id,offering-type) to extend ENS records beyond current capabilities. - New Resolvers: Design and deploy a resolver supporting these standards, and maintaining L1-L2 interoperability.
- Basic Contracts: Create minimal smart contracts for record management and validation, deployable on Base and Optimism.
- Research: Analyze 10+ service provider use cases (e.g., Agent to Agent services, business subscriptions, digital service offerings, physical service offerings) to inform standard design.
KPIs / Success Metrics:
- Complete the draft and submission of an EIP for new ENS standards within 6 months.
- Deploy a functional resolver on mainnet supporting all 3DNS domains & opt-in ENS names.
- Finalize a use case research report with at least 3 actionable standards by Q4 2025.
Budget Breakdown:
- $400K: Engineering salaries
- $75K: Part time project management
- $25K: Infrastructure and testing
Extended Scope of Work
Requested Amount: $700,000
Description: Build on the basic scope by developing example applications and varied implementations of the new standards, demonstrating real-world utility.
This includes:
- 3 Proof-of-Concept Example Applications
- A service provider dashboard for managing ENS-based subscriptions.
- A business identity verification tool using ENS records.
- An agent automation platform for task delegation via ENS names.
- Implementations
- Deploy resolver enhancements and contracts on mainnet, supporting multiple use cases (e.g., gasless DNSSEC, subdomain delegation) across Base, Optimism, and Ethereum L1.
- Research Expansion:
- Conduct field tests with 5+ partners to validate standards and refine based on feedback.
KPIs / Success Metrics:
- Develop and launch 3 POC apps on mainnet by Q1 2026, each supporting 10,000+ domains.
- Complete deployment of resolver enhancements and contracts on mainnet by Q2 2026.
- Conduct field tests with at least 5 partners and incorporate feedback into final report.
Budget Breakdown:
- $500K: Engineering salaries
- $125K: Project management & content
- $50K: Infrastructure and testing
- $25K: Partner testing and outreach
8. Past Achievements & Additional Information
ENS and Domain-Related Projects:
- Created 3DNS: 85,000+ ICANN domains on Base and Optimism that function as ENS names.
- Co-authored EIP-5559 with Nick Johnson.
- Built cb.id at Coinbase, giving free ENS names to millions of wallet users.
- Implemented gasless DNSSEC using CCIP-Read (EIP-3668).
- Built custom L2 resolver on Optimism, manageable from L1.
- Developed namespaces for multiple projects, extending ENS reach such as chain.box, Optimism’s official namespace.
- Built identity access management on 3DNS allowing domain owners to delegate record management permissions to others.
AI and Domain Projects:
- Developed several consumer-facing AI websites using domains including:
- wow.ai: Consumer-friendly AI art generation
- trump.ai, shib.ai, pepe.ai: AI-powered merch stores with subdomain functionality
GitHub and Website:
- GitHub: 3dns-xyz · GitHub
- Websites built: 3dns.box, wow.ai, trump.ai, shib.ai, pepe.ai, wars.ai
Metrics and Deployments:
- Launched .box TLD
- 85,000+ domains registered through 3DNS
- L2 resolver managing records for all domains
- Successfully integrated identity features (profiles, avatars, wallet linking)
- Launched fully onchain, permissionless subdomain registries and dns zone partitioning
Collaborations:
- Worked directly with Nick Johnson on EIP-5559
9. Video Introduction
10. Conflict Of Interest Statement
List any potential conflicts of interest or participation in any project that is currently receiving from the DAO or is a candidate for it:
- None