nick.eth
@nicksdjohnson
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Lead developer of ENS & Ethereum Foundation alum. Certified rat tickler. he/him. bsky: https://t.co/RdZTUkWNq2 wc: https://t.co/nvP0lHPJqz
Isle of Wight, United Kingdom
Joined April 2009
I'm a "senior developer". I helped launch Google App Engine and spent 4 years teaching others to use it. I wrote parts of the SDK that are still in use today. I just googled "App Engine Python getting started". In case anyone's wondering when you stop Googling basic stuff.
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When I started ENS as a side-project at the Ethereum Foundation back in 2016, I never imagined it would be as successful and widely used as it is today - and we're only just getting started. None of it would have been possible without the help of some incredible people.
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True Names Limited (TNL), the nonprofit that funds and organises development on @ensdomains, has terminated the contract of Brantly Millegan effective today.
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An Open Letter RE: Blockchain Domain Name Patents. Since its founding in 2017, ENS has been a consistent and outspoken advocate of open source, open standards, and the importance of governing the global namespace as a public good.
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Frances tried to block me again, but I was offline so it didn't work.
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I've spent the past ~5 years building ENS, and it feels like it's all been leading up to today. I couldn't be happier that ENS is taking its next big step towards decentralisation: giving control over the protocol and its collected fees to the people who made it a success.
ENS is decentralizing governance & is now accepting applications for DAO delegates. $ENS governance tokens will be opened for claiming by ENS users (snapshot made yesterday) a week from today, with more details about it then. Blog post or 🧵 for more.1/.
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Let's try this again: I've generated a random 12-word seedphrase, and sent 0.5 ETH to it. Then, I used it to generate these images with Midjourney v4. If you can guess the seedphrase, you can have the ETH. If nobody does in a week, I'll claim it back and reveal the phrase.
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Recently we were made aware of a cluster of accounts that appeared to be designed to farm the @ensdomains $ENS token airdrop. We've taken a close look at the accounts, and considered several options. I'll outline what we've described and our reasoning.
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The one millionth live ENS name just got registered!. Congratulations to winnersclub.eth.
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Waking up to discover that VCs value a for-profit competitor to ENS with a fraction of the reach and no real utility at a billion dollars and feeling pretty good, really.
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Apparently all it takes for people to vote for a seditionist and traitor is a little pandering on the campaign trail.
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Brantly's statements on gender, sexuality, cis/trans status, etc don’t reflect my views, or True Names Limited’s.
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It's done! Control over the ENS root has now officially been transferred to the DAO. I'm so proud to be able to claim that ENS is, in its entirety, effectively decentralized.
Truly the end of an era. Here's the message I just sent to the ENS root keyholders, requesting the transfer of the last of their powers to the DAO. Thank you so much @jasoncarver @danfinlay @mathsguy @mhswende @SergeyNazarov @tayvano_ for your service to ENS over the years.
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A historic moment; the ENS DAO's first proposal, to request transfer of funds and crucial admin controls from the multisig to the DAO, has just passed. All four measures were approved. Here's a copy of the email I just sent the keyholders:
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Okay, so it's clear @Ledger has learned nothing about opsec from multiple breaches. At this point I don't think anyone should in good conscience recommend their hardware or use their libraries.
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I've published the repo with the @ensdomains governance contracts and the (final) airdrop merkle tree. If you're curious what your total is, you can search for your address in the repo!.
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So excited that this is now public: box will be the first Blockchain native DNS-routable TLD, and it's enabled via ENS! All registrations and transfers will be onchain, and the owner of the NFT will own both the DNS and ENS names.
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Snapshot have given me a final count: 84,350 ethereum accounts signed the ENS constitution!.
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Truly the end of an era. Here's the message I just sent to the ENS root keyholders, requesting the transfer of the last of their powers to the DAO. Thank you so much @jasoncarver @danfinlay @mathsguy @mhswende @SergeyNazarov @tayvano_ for your service to ENS over the years.
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Ever wonder why Ethereum folks seem so positively disposed towards Polygon?. Also, holy crap. I'm not for sale, but if I was it'd be for a lot more than a one-time payment of $500.
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Unpopular opinion: truly decentralised, trustless Sybil resistance or proof of humanity is impossible. We should stop trying to make it work, and instead focus on building systems that don't assume individuals are unique humans.
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Incredible to think @ensdomains is 6 years old today. Going from a personal project to one of the largest projects and DAOs in the space, and one of the only that's self-sustaining. ENS has grown far beyond anything I could have forseen, and that's all down to its community.
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A primer on .eth and the DNS root. We're frequently asked about the possibility of getting .eth added to the DNS root, so it would resolve in all browsers natively. Many will be aware of some of the variables that complicate that, but the whole story is fairly complex.
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May is now an All Time High for every single ENS metric we track - registrations, renewals, revenue (ETH & USD) and income (ETH & USD). And there's still a week of May left. 🤯
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I feel like we take @etherscan for granted so much of the time. The level of detail it grants to transaction data is invaluable; I don't know what I'd do without it.
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EIP 3668, AKA CCIP Read, the core component of ENS's L2 support and a vital primitive for fetching offchain data, is now Final! 🎉🎉🎉.
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I have generated a random 12-word seedphrase, and sent 0.5 ETH to it. Then, I used the seedphrase to generate these images with Midjourney v4. If you can guess the seedphrase, you can have the ETH. If nobody does in a week, I'll claim it back and reveal the phrase.
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Gasless DNSSEC is now live on Ethereum mainnet!. Now that the code is deployed, it needs to be enabled on a per-TLD basis. I'm running the script to do this now, but with nearly 1500 TLDs, it will take a while. You can track the progress here:
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I mean, I know you've been giving it away for free, but now you're selling it too?.
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I think that projects that are VC funded should not qualify for RPGF funding. Once you accept VC dollars, with their implicit expectation of a financial return, you're not a public good.
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Did I miss something? Why is everyone suddenly 100% convinced we're in a bear market?.
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Looks like May 2 was another crazy day for ENS. Breaking records again: Highest revenue ($1.95M), most registrations (63k), most registration years (100k).
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I've found that a useful metric in life is to assume that when someone is deeply, obviously wrong about something you know well, it's safest to assume they're similarly wrong about things you don't know well.
@itsALLrisky Ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X & drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down.
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Did miss the 2x multiplier in the ENS airdrop because the account with a primary name was not the account that owned the name?. The DAO is considering whether to send additional tokens to these users; check the list here to see if your account is included:
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So we've decided to go with option 4. The 784 accounts we've identified from that cluster have been added to a blacklist, and the airdrop totals will be recalculated without those accounts.
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One big issue with ENS's DNS integration right now is that it requires a *lot* of gas to claim your ENS name. RSA signatures cost ~90k - 160k gas to verify, while ECDSA sigs cost ~1.7M gas, and each name requires several proofs!. Reducing these gas costs would be great, right?.
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Applying a code of conduct retroactively to someone's past statements that were unrelated to the organisation - and in fact were made before the organisation even existed - seems like a fairly radical position to me.
On January 11th, 2022, FWB and the Code of Conduct Committee were notified of a violation of the Code of Conduct through the surfacing of past remarks made on Twitter by a member and leader of the FWB community. Link to Code of Conduct: .
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Many of you were hurt by Brantly's comments over the past 24 hours, and we strongly believe that ENS should be an inclusive community. Going forward we'll continue to do everything we can to ensure that remains the case.
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I’ve been working with Brantly for a number of years now, and I’ve never seen Brantly treat anyone as different or lesser because of who they are.
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I quite like Bitcoin Cash: It's given Bitcoiners something to irrationally hate instead of Ethereum.
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If you tag me in a "retweet and tag x friends" post, I *will* block you, no ifs buts or maybes.
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If you feel entitled to tell me I should avoid speaking my mind because you're worried it will hurt your bags, I kindly invite you to fuck off into the sun.
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I couldn't be happier to announce that we're now expecting our first child, a girl, due late April 2020.
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In January of this year, Unstoppable Domains was granted its first patent, number US11558344, Resolving Blockchain Domains. This patent is based entirely on innovations that ENS developed and contains no novel innovations of its own.
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Unpopular take: I regret not getting a fidenza much more than a punk because many of the fidenzas are legitimately really pretty artwork. The 8 bit aesthetic is fun, but I wouldn't hang it on my wall.
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Neil Gaiman just announced he was raffling off an NFT to benefit a humanitarian charity, and the pushback from fans was so loud he deleted the tweet. People would literally rather see children starve than their favourite creator have even the slightest involvement with NFTs.
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The ENS team has such cool stuff planned for DevCon this year. Just wait 'til you see it.
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Today I accidentally burned the first ENS name ever registered. A short 🧵.
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Today I learned that I'm now popular enough that I'm not allowed to have opinions about stuff.
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I've mostly been staying out of this fight, but "I'm not an insider, I only bought tokens at an 80% discount" is a pretty ridiculous take.
Agreed. Samani pitched sol to me around the same time he pitched sbf, I 100iqed it as I thought Ethereum would actually scale, later bought Solana in saft otc. Mkt was trading $1.1, saft otc was $0.2. I later 100iqed again and sold some sol/eth at 20x, prob worst decision of 2021.
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Failing that, ENS Labs stands ready to challenge this patent, which we believe is entirely derivative of our own inventions; a position we are able and willing to demonstrate.
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As of now, ENS now uses an exponential curve for premium pricing for recently expired names. Anyone want to spend $97.2M on structures.eth?
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I want to give an ENS constitution 📘 token to @VitalikButerin, but he's not answering my DMs. Vitalik, do you want a beautiful numbered copy of the most important constitution in Ethereum?.
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Being into crypto and not liking speculation is like being into gardening and not liking weeds.
Being into crypto and not liking speculation is like being into gardening and not liking plants.
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For transparency, we're also publishing our communications with UD on this matter, attached here.
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Now that claims are open for $ENS at everyone claiming will need to choose a delegate, who will vote on their behalf on DAO decisions. There's a dizzying array of candidates - over 300 - which makes for a difficult choice. Here are a few I endorse.
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Brantly has been a valued team member of TNL for the past three years. However, as a team we felt that his position with TNL is no longer tenable.
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Devastated to hear about Virgil pleading guilty. The title of this talk at that conference was "blockchain and peace". His ambition was to use ethereum to make peace between North and South Korea. Naive and impractical, sure, but not worthy of imprisonment.
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What's the wrongest you've been about something in crypto? I thought punks were kind of fun, but not really worth the gas and time to claim them, because people would have forgotten about them in a month.
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Don't forget, every 3 letter ENS name is also a Maker variable name.
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I'm delighted to announce the release of the first version of @ensdomains' toolkit for supporting offchain resolution of ENS names.
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Today was just me and my daughter for most of the day. We:. - Went through a car wash - a first for her. - Went to a toy museum. - Went to a playground. - Tried to feed ducks. - Visited grandparents. Nothing big, yet one of the most fulfilling days I've had in a long time.
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The NameWrapper, and new versions of the PublicResolver, ETHRegistrarController, and ReverseRegistrar have all been deployed to mainnet. Addresses of these new contracts can be found here:
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You didn't *really* think I'd forget to renew it, did you?.
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I've put together an ENS dashboard, which tracks a number of interesting metrics for ENS adoption:. - Registrations and renewals. - Active .eth names. - Revenue and income from name registrations. - Monthly accounts for the current and previous years.
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Delegates! A new vote is now live on Snapshot for the @ensdomains DAO; this one is a proposal to send an additional ~213k $ENS from the DAO treasury to users who missed out on the 2x multiplier in the airdrop due to an edge case. Go vote!.
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So here's the deal: If this tweet is retweeted 500 times, @jeffehh will buy my @CryptoKitties and I'll donate 100% of the proceeds to @Worldbuilders_. That's anywhere up to $92k. Help us do this? Please?
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Got the proof of the "unlimited edition" for the ENS constitution book and it is 🔥. Reply with your page number and I'll send you a pic!
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I'm pleased to release the first draft of the governance documentation for the ENS DAO! If you want to participate in the DAO, you'll want to read this, and use the request form linked there to apply for write access to the forum.
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I’m an Atheist, a Humanist, and politically liberal. My views are about as opposite Brantly’s as you could imagine, on just about any issue you’d care to name.
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I often want to tease something, but always get paranoid that when it's revealed people will think it doesn't live up to the hype and be disappointed. (I guess you can consider this tweet a meta-teaser. But don't get too excited.).
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Happy merge everyone! Congratulations to everyone who made it possible.
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Any delegates or stewards with concerns or questions should feel free to reach out to me via ENS forum DM. Anyone wanting to speak to Brantly should note that his Twitter account is currently suspended for an unknown period, and so he cannot receive DMs there.
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The right in the US has gone from basically fiscally conservative to attempting to throw elections, endorsing insurrection, banning books, and passing laws to make it illegal to let your kids dress how they want. But sure, it's the left moving the overton window.
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Thank you to the @EFDevcon team - you did an outstanding job. Many are calling this the best DevCon yet, and I'm inclined to agree.
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I'm increasingly moving away from configurable contracts, and towards contracts with immutable values, and redeploying them if they change - especially for contracts primarily used by other contracts. It saves gas on every call and makes audit/review easier. Anyone else?.
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Our ENS community manager, @futurealisha, has written up a post kickstarting the formation of DAO workstreams. If you're interested in improving the ENS ecosystem, community, public goods, or governance of the DAO itself, this is your call to action!
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Hey guys, are we sure this is a good idea? Maybe we should reconsider.
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@matthewegould We are asking you to license your patent openly. Not just to ENS - to anyone, unless they violate the agreement. That's exactly taking into account the fact that there are multiple naming systems. Patent non-aggression pacts like this are already in use by IBM and others.
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I've just posted a draft proposal to the ENS DAO forums for the upgrade of ENS's DNSSEC functionality to support new 'gasless' DNSSEC! We're hoping to get this in the voting window on January 10.
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I don’t expect anyone at TNL to share my views, but I do expect them to treat others with equality and respect, regardless of their gender, cis/trans status, sexual orientation, or religion (or lack thereof).
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Since it's out anyway, let me show off a side project I've been working on with @DeanEigenmann and @matthewdif. We're calling it Weiroll, and it's a tool for chaining smart contract operations together into larger transactions.
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