Correct me if I’m wrong, but the price for three and four letter names seems way off for me now. 0.138ETH/year for a three letter name and 0.001ETH/year isn’t very balanced. I can understand that shorter names might be more recognisable, but that’s not always the case.
First of all, is there any reason behind this? And is there any chance this will be changed in the future?
I believe it’s mostly due to the scarcity of names in the 3-character namespace, compared to 4 and 5+. The higher prices reflect that scarcity and is a way to generate additional revenue for ENS.
The DAO can control those parameters, so if there is a compelling reason to change them, a proposal can be submitted and voted on!
It is mainly to do with supply and demand. 3 letter names have the least supply, and typically the highest demand. The higher price is to discourage squatters holding key ens names. It will not prevent it, but it will make it less desirable if it costs significant funds.
The idea is that those who really intend to utilize those names will not balk at the price, while those speculating it will have to consider the losses since they’re considering it an investment with a speculative payoff - aka one that may or may not come.
I understand the points you made, but this makes it impossible for an average user to own any 3/4 character name. I think it would be fairer if the prices were like 0.001/0.005/0.01 or something similar. Unfortunately, I can’t open a proposal for this since I don’t have enough ENS tokens, but thanks for your input!
Yes that makes sense, but as I was saying to @serenae, this makes it impossible for the average user to own any 3/4 character name. Do you think it might be changed in the future?
I agree it is restrictive and prevents average users. I’d be open to proposals offering up alternative solutions!
Just to add, this is also the case in the DNS/ICANN world where short letter domains command the highest premium. All I mean to add by this is that the DNS market has existed for a long time already and seems to have decided that this is the fair solution.
The use case potentially is different here - in that DNS was really about an easy URL for someone to type in (harking back to the radio advertising era - “go to double u double u double u dot mikes garage dot com”), if they weren’t already browsing and/or having the “alpha” domain for your category or brand name, e.g. nike.com, cars.com (which apparently went for $872m - source: GoDaddy Top20). For web3.0 it might be more likely for people to copy/paste and/or use the wallet address, I’m not sure the alpha domain will carry as much weight - but time will tell.
If prices were that low, the names still wouldn’t be affordable - because they’d all have been brought up by squatters and for sale on the secondary market.
I agree with nick.eth. But let me add that the market should determine that the scarcity of short domain letters warrants a premium. For reasons already discussed, to prevent squatters, legitimate buyers should be willing to pay the premium, if the value they get from a particular domain name makes it a good decision over others who also desire such domain name. I don’t think there is a fairer system that could raise the cost to squatters to give legitimate buyers a chance. I am considering purchasing a three letter domain and I don’t find it offensive at the price, although gas fees is another issue.
One thing that could be considered in the future is to put lengths of names (that is, as buckets) into some type of an automatic curve that would adjust the cost according to the rate at which they are being claimed. There are obvious downsides to such an approach, but the ability to set an explicit target based on keeping names available rather than speculating on the price that accomplishes such a thing might be an acceptable tradeoff for those downsides. Much more discussion and analysis would be needed though. One cool thing about this is that it would also eliminate a need for estimating the gas impact on squatting, something which many have pointed out is especially confusing for longer names when gas prices exceed the name premium.
There’s been a lot of discussion about this kind of thing at previous ENS workshops; we really wanted to find a pricing system that used some kind of feedback mechanism rather than fixed prices in USD. Unfortunately we never came up with anything satisfactory and not easily gamed; ideas are still welcome!
“Not easily gamed” is a very high bar. “Not cheaply gamed” might be doable though.
a little expensive[quote=“luckee, post:1, topic:7656, full:true”]
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the price for three and four letter names seems way off for me now. 0.138ETH/year for a three letter name and 0.001ETH/year isn’t very balanced. I can understand that shorter names might be more recognisable, but that’s not always the case.
First of all, is there any reason behind this? And is there any chance this will be changed in the future?
[/quote]
because three letters are fewer,but a little expensive.
Early this morning, I paid ~$11-16 for multi-year domain names, but paid gas fees of ~$108-132. For a three letter domain name, I paid ~$700 for a one-year domain name, plus a gas fee ~$184. These are in addition to the ~$30 for the initial processing transaction. I’ve tried to pay cheaper gas fees, but the transactions don’t get done. I haven’t figured out the sweet spot, when looking at the gas fee tracker.