Recently at Devcon 5, blockchain novices and veterans took the stage to present updates on their projects. Among them was the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a long-established dApp built on Ethereum.
ENS is a decentralized, readable domain name system (DNS) Ethereum dApp. Its core feature is to map human-readable names like alice.eth to machine-readable identifiers, such as Ethereum addresses, hash values, or metadata.
Through ENS, you can easily associate an Ethereum address with an ENS domain name, so instead of asking friends to send tokens to "0x829bd824b016326a401d083b33d092293333a830" you could ask them to send to "alice.eth" and have the transfer still process correctly.
These blockchain domains, of course, are reminiscent of web domains, and there may be a similar gold rush to get hold of them. Since the late 1990s, many Internet “gold miners” have been participating in traditional domain auctions. According to GoDaddy, the world's largest domain auction site, the most expensive domain name in history is Cars.com, which sold for $872 million.
In terms of commercial value, domain names in the virtual world are much like real estate in the real world. Shorter domains with specific meanings usually have greater values, because they’re considered better “locations” due to being easy to remember.
Similarly, ENS domain names ending with .eth on the Ethereum network are particularly valuable. In September, ENS announced the opening of the 3-6-letter-in-length domain auction in cooperation with OpenSea, a well-known NFT exchange.
The 3-letter domain auction started on September 29 and will close on November 5. LongHash has crawled all domains of this length (46,656 unique three-character domains are possible) and analyzed the most popular names so far, and the most potentially-valuable ones still up for grabs.
Currently, only 65 3-letter domains have bidding prices. Of these, the highest are sex.eth and eth.eth. (It is worth noting that sex.com is also one of the most expensive domains on the Internet; it was sold out at a price of $14 million and then later $13 million in 2005 and 2010 respectively).
In the blockchain industry, Eth.eth is the most eye-catching domain name since it is named after Ether, and not surprisingly, there are also domains starting with other cryptocurrency symbols that have been called out by bidders, such as btc, bnb, cyb, eos, neo, xrp, and Marker DAO-related mkr, dai and cdp. In general, abc.eth and usa.eth have the highest prices and the same bidder, an individual or firm called AISOLUTIONS.
Among the domain names prefixed by numbers, only 000, 123, 168, 520 and 888 have a price.
There are still a lot of valuable 3-letter domain names suffixed by .com that do not have bidders for .eth. As you can see in the most expensive 250 domains chart, jet, sex, eth, vip, and btc are the only .eth equivalents that have bidding records.
This phase of auction will end on November 5th, so the number of available domains will likely shrink as bidders grow in number. Here we list the 65 .eth domains that have bidders as of this writing: 000, 123, 168, 520, 888, abc, amd, amy, ass, bmw, bnb, btc, bzx, car, cat , cdp, com, cox, cyb, dai, dao, dcj, dcl, dcw, dhl, dkp, doc, dsr, ebo, ens, eos, eth, ggc, giv, god, has, ibm, jet, kyc, lrc , luv, mcd, mew, mkr, mlb, nba, neo, nfl, nft, oro, pay, rcn, rep, sap, set, sex, snt, snx, tax, tim, usa, vfc, vip, xrp, xxx.