Ethereum Name Service (ENS) – a popular decentralized naming system – just dumped its new governance token on existing name holders. Twitter is bustling with excitement as some name holders rake in incredible gains from its fast appreciating value.
The purpose of the ENS token
On November 1, Brantley.Eth – director of operations at ENS – announced and explained the recent airdrop. In the name of decentralization, he said the team would be “passing ENS governance over to the community” through their new governance token, ENS. Starting then, community members could start applying to be ENS delegates.
“More specifically, we want the root multisig of the ENS to pass control of the existing cash flow of the ENS, its future funds and control of the . ETH registrar contract that is in charge of the pricing and registration mechanism for .ETH names,” reads the post.
However, people did not need to apply to receive their ENS airdrop. The governance tokens were airdropped to those who had purchased at least one ENS domain. Brantley encouraged holders who did not intend to vote independently to offer their tokens to these delegates. Over Twitter, he confirmed later that over 137k accounts were eligible for the airdrop, with no “investors” to take any cut of them.
ENS at launch
The token was then launched a week later on Monday from a valuation of $ 18 according to CoinGecko. It then began a steady climb throughout the day, peaking at $54. It has since drifted back to $47, which is still 160% up from where it started.
So far, the token has a market cap of $ 627 million, which means more than half a billion dollars has been awarded to qualifying accounts. Users all over Twitter have been celebrating the value of the tokens they’ve received. For example, Tonyherrera.eth noted he was eligible for over 1,500 tokens at launch, now over $ 60,000.
Ethereum Name Service is designed to attach human-readable names to cryptocurrency addresses and other machine-readable identifiers. ENS is supposed to be the DNS (Domain Name Service) equivalent to Web 3.0, but with different capabilities.
