Web3 DNS Could Lose Web Address – Person Who Can Renew It Is In Jail

Web3 DNS could lose its web address because the only person who can renew it is currently sitting in jail.

All that the ENS DAO community can currently access on its eth.link website is an empty page with a green domain expiration notification banner at the top.

This is because Virgil Griffith, the only person with the power to renew the name, is serving a 63-month jail term for assisting North Koreans in using bitcoins to bypass sanctions and has been unable to renew the domain from prison.  Now, because of this, the Web3 DNS could lose its web address.

According to a notification released late Friday on the website of domain registrar GoDaddy, eth.link expired on July 26 and will be returned to a domain registry on September 5, where it will be available for anybody who is able to take it.

The ENS DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). It governs the Ethereum Name Service Protocol which is a Web3 version of a Domain Name Service provider. The protocol underpinning the numerous.eth names that have appeared in the Ethereum community is ENS. Users have purchased.eth domain names in order to own their own domains.

ENS identities may then be linked to wallet addresses, making it easier for users to transfer and receive cryptocurrency (instead of having to type out a long, complex Ethereum address).

According to Khori Whittaker, the Executive Director of ENS, “Virgil Griffith, who was working at the Ethereum Foundation when ENS launched, was an early contributor to the ENS protocol. Because ENS is a permissionless protocol, anyone can build dApps on top of it, which is the case for Virgil’s involvement with eth.link. He purchased the domain and built an application that resolves ENS domains.”

The DAO relied on the eth.link website to obtain information about all ENS names. ENS DAO has previously advised its users to go to eth.limo, another community-run domain.

EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic had already reached an agreement to extend the domain address for another year, according to a tweet from the ENS DAO Twitter account, before the domain provider reportedly opted to discontinue honoring the arrangement “suddenly” and “without warning.”

When it previously expired, some quick action by @stuntpope resulted in GoDaddy renewing it for a year – but suddenly and without notice they seem to have changed their mind and are now claiming it’s expired in a statement they published today: https://t.co/qV0iM52E1N

— ensdao.eth (@ENS_DAO) August 26, 2022

“Events like this ultimately show the importance of decentralized naming systems,” Whittaker told CoinDesk. “After eth.link was renewed, GoDaddy decided to ‘re-expire’ the domain, revealing the power and control that this legacy naming system has. In contrast, anyone can support an ENS domain by paying for renewal or extending it.”

ENS has had rapid growth in the previous year, surpassing 2 million domain name registrations on August 17. It took ENS 5 years to register its first million names, but just 3.5 months to reach 2 million.

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