State of the ENS: Week 2, with charts

Things have changed a lot since last week. Let’s check in with some basic stats.

Names and bids

25% of names are now available, with approximately 70,000 auctions started, and 31,500 bids from 3051 bidders. 19100 bids have been revealed, and 6,453 names have been registered.

At this point it’s instructive to start looking at activity over time; here we can see the total ether deposited in bids each day over the last 2 weeks:

This shows a fairly slow start for the first couple of days, then an uptick for the next few days, then another jump, where it stays fairly stable in the region of 25k — 50k ether deposited per day until yesterday. Yesterday’s spike is mostly due to one enormous bid of over 180k ether, that was revealed earlier today to be on sportsbet.eth.

If we look instead at numbers of bids placed and revealed, we get a slightly different picture:

Here we can see a fairly steady upwards march of the number of bids per day, with the number of reveals lagging 3 days behind, as you might expect. The number of daily bids seems to have stabilised in the past few days in the region of 3500–4000 bids.

Finally, here we can see how much Ether is being held by ENS at any one time over the past 2 weeks:

Again ignoring yesterday’s enormous bid, the outstanding bid total appearss to be levelling off, around the 150k mark, with the total locked in finished auctions low, but gradually climbing. Over the whole period, an average of 14 ether are bid for every ether that ends up locked in a name.

Prices

How about the price of a name? Let’s look at how that’s shaping up over time. First of all, how are your chances of getting a name uncontested?

Here we can see that despite the increasing bidding activity, the odds have held pretty steady: about 90% if your name isn’t in the list, and roughly 40% if it is.

If there are other bids, what’s it going to cost you? Here’s the median sale prices, with uncontested auctions omitted:

This seems fairly unstable, particularly for bids in the list, but it’s clear that even most contested auctions end for fairly low prices, with a typical median of less than 1 ether for names in the list, and 0.1–0.2 ether for names not in the list.

Have more metrics you’d like to see about ENS bidding activity? Let us know.

Adoption & ecosystem

registrar.ens.domains, MEW, and ethtools continue to improve their integration and iron out bugs. MEW announced that they would no longer offer free support to users registering large numbers of domains (hundreds or more).

A secondary marketplace, ens.trade, launched, and zk-labs posted a tool to determine ENS name release times.

Etherchain announced ENS integration for looking up accounts and getting basic whois information, and meanwhile, Etherscan continue to improve their integration, now offering detailed information via their Ewhois service.

I announced one-step subdomains via the gimmethe.eth name, allowing anyone to register yourname.gimmethe.eth with a single transaction and 0.01 ether. More domains, and better integration can be expected soon.

Work started on an ENS management Dapp, that will provide easier management of ENS domains, including creating subdomains, changing resolvers, and setting up records. Meanwhile, ethers released a sophisticated command line tool that automates most ENS management operations.

Did I miss a development? Let me know and I’ll add it.