Friendly UX and Roadmap Vision of ENS

Transcript

[Music] what is going on y'all welcome to the rollup very special guest today we have sadoff the director of marketing at ens Labs s sadf am I am I pronouncing that that s s okay very cool and and yeah this is this is like a special episode I think for for us at the rollup because uh we are we are very aligned with the public good space um we are a public good for educational content and oftentimes I I like to say that when I'm learning it provides the the most thoughtful and valuable content for our audience that's that's learning um on

the other side of the screen so uh very thankful to to have you on the channel today um and and also been tracking ens for uh for quite a long time I think probably since the origin um so yeah I'm excited to kind of dig into ens um um talk a little bit more about what what your day-to-day looks like and and how you contribute to the collective um and then also like like kind of like the the future and like where you guys are at now and where where you're going um so again thanks for coming on and um yeah let's uh let's dive in so um maybe for anyone who is a little bit new I think I think our audience in our community is quite familiar with ens um but e

ethereum name could you kind of like talk about like what is ens at a at a high level yeah absolutely so ens uh well first of all thank you for having me on I really appreciate it um so ens I'm I'm really excited to be here because we are working on kind of improving the space from the ground up so ens in its simplest form is a way to change your um your hash your 42 character long wallet address to a human readable name so for instance mine as you can see on my hat is sf. eth uh that is the name that I registered from the ens registar and we operate in multiple different levels so I work for ens Labs

we kind of handle all of the tech side of things but we also our permission list we are completely decentralized which means that we run and operate things through Dow so decentralized autonomous Organization for those that might not know so the way that our registar kind of works is that we uh allow all of the registration money that comes through to go directly to the Dow 100% of it and then that funds things like other public goods projects um anything that we might be doing within the ecosystem ens Labs expenses and things of that sort but yeah in in its like simplest form it is a it's a web three identity it's completely decentralized it's permissionless you own it you can build on top of it um you

can also create decentralized websites Etc I love it I love it and it it's it's part of like meeting users where they are like we talk a lot about onboarding like just the normies not in a derogative term but like just trying to bring blockchain to a level where it's easily consumable and understood by just normal everyday users um and part of that means abstracting away this long hexad decimal type string of characters into something that's not only like readable but also like friendly like I it it I think it's almost akin to like an email address um and it's really cool to start seeing like applications of blockchain go beyond the financial so I

you know it started out like maybe if it was just a financial use case it would be like a venmo or a cash app username but I think it really goes into like the idea of cross chain messaging and an email address because we're starting to see some applications go beyond the financial use cases so I'm curious like what your experiences it it has been at em if you oh I'm sorry you froze for a minute there oh no I apologize I was kind of getting into the into the question about like um any kind of communities that you've seen start to uh like appear um that are non-financial and utilize ens usernames oh yeah I mean plenty of them

okay so this is a really fun topic and I and I kind of want to like touch on some of the other stuff that you talked about as well so the non-finance poal use case of things is really extraordinary in this space because you know ens specifically allows people to continue building on top of it it's it's all open source which means that people can you know take it and utilize it however they want they can twist it they can turn it they can kind of create their own um their own genre of of building on top of this really incredible Pro protocol so I mean as far as like what have we seen come from the ecosystem or the community as as far as development with the ens protocol goes there's a plethora of them uh one thing that I really like that you

mentioned just recently kind of alluding to uh the concept of like messaging with ens um or kind of uh comparing it to like an email address is that you do get that personalized feeling of of being able to communicate with other people through web 3 which can oftentimes be really difficult um so right now we're working for instance with a company called xmt so xmt was recently integrated into coinbase wallet um and you can actually use your ens name to message anyone so anyone with ANS name can receive it and not only through coinbase wallet but because ens is interoperable you can actually receive it on any other platform that has xmt as well so Converse app for instance um you

know and so many others so it's kind of bridging this idea of you know a very large community together and being able to create your own kind of inner communities and inner pockets in between so I think that's one of the really incredible things that we've been focused on probably in the past like two quarters or so is how do we bring a little more exposure and a little bit more uh utility to our users you know so I think um we're we're going to be diving into that a lot more in the coming year and I think you guys are going to see some pretty pretty cool developments That's so exciting I like I want to keep asking um about like what

those developments are so I mean I I realized maybe you can't share everything but like what are some of like the tidbits that that uh you can share okay so I think um I I will kind of like start from the beginning here so our goal for the next year we've we've gone through a lot of of changes in this year kind of figuring out where do we want to be in the next 5 to 10 years from now you know everything has gotten so much larger the space has grown so quickly and exponentially that now it's time for us to really take by the horns and uh make make some moves right so we've typically worked really well within our own ecosystem within web 3 and we've got really incredible

ecosystem Partners um many of them I'm sure a lot of your listeners probably already know about but this next year we're going to be focusing on bringing that like you said like web 2 almost like Norm kind of aspect into things so Bridging the Gap between web 2 and web 3 has often been notably difficult for a lot of companies and web 3 in general so our goal or mission is to kind of reduce simplify as much as possible and then find those use cases for web 2 users to come to web 3 and really kind of draw draw them in through uh through their own interests tapping into what they already know so emails are really really

good example of that or messaging is a really good example of that so identity so Shane Mack actually says this really well the founder of xntp but I'm I'm until comes with an element of communication you know you look at um your phone you text with your phone email you email people right on social media you message people you DM them and I think that was one of the missing elements for us is that um you know we didn't really have that perfect one-size it's all kind of solution so focusing on that is is going to kind of help and there are so many other companies doing it as well chain link does it really really well um um mail chain I'm sorry mail chain does it really well which is

another company that builds off of ens in our ecosystem so you know they're actually focused on that side of um of email skiff also does it really well so kind of making it seem as well well equipped for web 2 users as possible so it doesn't feel like that big of a leap that is going to be one of our bigger focuses in in the next couple of quarters as well as kind of expanding Beyond just our our like you know ecosystem and our community through different initiatives like um you know going to the conferences that I think a lot of our community would appreciate us being at so kind of going to things like namescon you know where typically you might not see so much exposure for web 3

uh companies but we would perfectly kind fit into that world if they could understand you know all of the de developments that we've made particularly in the last year or so with things like name rapper and things that we're working on like uh gasless DNS SEC and things like that and with this swag that that you have like look at the hat that would be a total winner at these conferences definitely yeah we love doing swag at different conferences um Luke who is one of our Dev rals he does the ens cards that I'm sure some of your your viewers have seen before maybe you've actually seen at conferences so we love doing like little cute things that people can almost see as like Collectibles and take with them it's always exciting to see uh

people at different conferences wearing their like bogat lanyard with their bogat card or you know like things like that um this is actually a community funded project that I'm wearing right now which has the the ens logo and stuff on it so this is funded by the Dow um one of the the working groups uh funds this company so they they make like all sorts a really cool em merch nice and and like as a contributor to a a dow a little bit of background is like a lot of our community is Builders and I think that's probably true for for most of the web through Community as at at large is like if you're still here you have persevered through years of almost like turmoil and like just gotten beaten down

so if you're here you have Diamond hands you're most likely like a contributor or a builder in some regards to a protocol or a doubt and our community very much aligns with that so a lot a lot of them are a lot of us are contributors to General Dows maybe one as like maybe a full-time contributor or part-time contributors to several Dows so you know what what is your experience working with the ens da um kind of like collaborating with like this group of anonymous characters maybe um and then and then like kind of collaborating across these more like cross functional working groups yeah honestly um it's funny that you like would refer to it as

Anonymous I think particularly for me because I came from the community and I tend to know a lot of the participants um whether you know they're like fully doxed or not you kind of get to know these people throughout the years um so we've seen each other go through our ups and downs they've seen the the work that I've had to put in to get to the point that I'm at and so it really feels more like a community than it does like a network of Anam and I think that is one of the the bigger goals for ens is to to bring that kind of um facet of identity to people whether they want to still remain undocked or not right they can still have their their en ens name on

their Twitter account or as their uh telegram name or whatever other you know socials they might use and you know that you're talking to the same person so that's kind of one of one of the bigger just to touch on on that like you know mention um of of working with these these different like groups of people but particularly with the Dow the Dow is incredible um I'm I'm really appreciative of the work that's gone into how the Dow was constructed to begin with and then just speaking to the stewards and everybody that participates in the working groups and on the Forum and is building is receiving grants from

the Dow like they put in an extraordinary amount of work you think it would be easy it's it's so far from easy they have to be completely dedicated to this there is a certain type of ethos and certain values that you need to really uphold when you're in a power position like that and there are you know a lot of different factors that are coming at you at once and kind of make making that Collective group decision for what is what is best for ens in the long run is a really hard thing to kind of navigate right but my experience with working with the Dow has been extraordinary so far it's been it's been really incredible they are incredibly open-minded they have been

working with us really well all of the stewards and everything um and I think it's important also to note that like the Dow is the Dow is like this huge overarching term um there are tens of thousands of participants in the ens Dow it really is just someone that holds an ens token that has delegated it either to themselves or to someone else and participates in voting right so it's it isn't um it's not just like the the stewards it's also the delegates the delegates make a massive impact without the delegates there would be no doubt um those are people that really kind of

Drive everything and and have to make those decisions and they're not they're not always easy decisions to make um so I have I have a ton of appreciation for them I think they do an excellent job of really Shining Light on incredible projects that might otherwise not get the attention that they deserve and may not get the funding so having that that uh kind of tool within our own ecosystem knowing that our community can really be a a driving force towards the progress and the development long term of ens is really impactful amazing yeah the the the mission that you talk about to like

encourage this this like collaborative nature amongst the Dow I think it's I think it's something that only a few projects have been able to accomplish um there there's you know kind of like those blue chip Dows if you will that have reached that Point like that inflection point where decentralization becomes their Edge I think only a few Dows have have been able to get there and it's an uphill battle for a lot of these protocols and communities that are trying to keep decentralization in mind and haven't quite hit that inflection point where they get like this inbound uh contribution from their community so I I think it's really cool to see like a

doubt in action that that has this framework in place where where it's able to make sense of all these contributions and it's not you know a disorganized mess um because you have kind of gone through the iterations to develop these working groups these Shepherds the the stewards of the community if you will that that you know push these working groups and and kind of combine everything in a in a neat um and and organized way that is able to make make sense of it all I think it's it's something that yeah you should be really proud of because it's only it's something that only a few doubts have been able to accomplish so it it's really cool to serve as like a model for some other protocols yeah honestly that's it's it is like rewarding in it

of itself um that's I think you know I've spoken to a lot of different companies that are in the process of decentralizing it's a really hard thing to do there's a lot of work that needs to go into it and one like once it's done you know there isn't there isn't a whole lot you can go back on so I think um knowing thats serves ens Dow serves as kind of that um that like guide for a lot of other companies is really is really neat um and I I wanted to touch on like something else that you just mentioned the involvement getting getting you know having the Dow is one thing having the treasury and the stewards elections and all of these things are that's like one whole facet of it but having the actual engagement

from people is so it's so difficult it's really something that you have to strive for and you have to keep up with so you know keeping people as educ ated as informed keeping things as transparent as possible um knowing that it's all going to be open on the blockchain for everybody to see regardless is is really where you start to build that trust and you start to build that engagement with people yeah and and speaking about transparency like I'm I'm already thinking about like how the rollup as an organization can like contribute to the Dow and I was gonna say this actually for like a like afterwards but I think you know like like let's build in public um there's something that we've been talking about internally which is which

is this rollup stack idea and it's it's to meet users where they are um like we don't have any like smart contracts really in our in our organization but we're starting to make these Integrations where users can kind of like come watch this educational content and then they can make sense of it like in that same place um so integrating ens with some of this educational content native I think would be would be really really cool um like I'm picturing you know someone could like watch this video and then right underneath they can like mint their own ens name and I don't know like where that you know what they do with it but but trying to like just make it a a a slippery and easy funnel for

someone to get involved I think is uh it is something that can help ease the transition from like the web 2 Normie type of user into kind of like help Shepherd them into their on changer definitely and you guys already have the the roll up. eth which I see so you're halfway there I love when I hear you know other companies and other projects kind of talking about how they can utilize ens for their community and how they can kind of build on top of it my mind starts raising and I I like I love the idea of being um being able to gift your community something to acknowledge their participation you know so like with uh the name wrapper for instance

you can give independent ens names to all of your users through the roll up. so it could be you know robbie. tholl up. or sf. tholl up. and that can be a way of token gating certain things so I know that you know we were just talking before the the recording started about how you guys are going to be um interacting at Devcon and what you guys plan are devc connect and and what you guys plan on participating in and having that even is is kind of a cool way or maybe even the the people that you interview you know you give them an ens name and it becomes this one large community where you know people could even like hyperlink it and and have their interview right on that name

they're like there's so there's like a plethora of of things that you can you can kind of do with ens which is why it genuinely excites me so much you know yeah so cool like it it just helps it like helps realize the vision that ethereum has of like this this like World supercomputer and I think like ens is helping to develop the internet on top of that super computer yeah absolutely well said really cool yeah um yeah I mean I I I could talk at length about like some more of these applications and then and then some other initiatives but I think this has been a really really fun and healthy conversation so thanks for coming on is there is there anything else you'd like to share about about ens or about

yourself and um you know especially like where people can find you but any aside from that any closing thoughts yeah actually um I would love for our listeners and the community and everybody that that watches the roll up um to know that en has some really neat things in store for 2024 so please do check it out um keep tuned you can you can follow us on uh ens domains on Twitter and you can keep up with what's going on on the marketing side as well um and yeah we've got some some pretty cool things in store for um for the next couple of quarters we have a lot of different product releases coming up so um it should be really exciting

and yeah please uh please watch the roll up you're doing a great job thanks for thanks for being a community Builder and and doing your you know public good stuff cheers thanks for coming on and and yeah everyone check out ens and go buy your friends and family in ens for Christmas they'll they'll definitely it it's the best way to show your love y