What’s the latest hype around the NFT market? Bored Apes? Mutant Apes? Well, not really. Now, the latest ETH craze involves four-digit numbers.
Four-digit Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains have become hot property. Domain name sales on OpenSea have increased by almost 2,300%, as investors in the highly renowned “10k club” expect.
Sending invites soon?
The ENS NFTs saw a surge in volume recently as investors dive in to purchase three- and four-digit domains. In fact, this craze caused the daily trade volume, on 28 April, to surpass that of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) on NFT marketplace OpenSea. Although, at press time, BAYC surpassed the statistics recorded, thanks to the wide-following and speculations around its Metaverse project.
Nonetheless, the last week of this month saw views skyrocket, as seen in the 30-day chart below. ENS NFT trading volume increased by 191.59% in the last 24 hours and by 2012% in the last week.
Likewise, the current floor price of three-digit domains stood at around 6.5 ETH ($18,850). While that for four-digit domains rapidly approached 0.5 ETH ($1,450).
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a domain name provider for Ethereum blockchain. The ENS controlled by a DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which used governance tokens to make collective decisions. It had strong ties to the Ethereum Foundation and has been around since 2017.
Several celebrities and public figures currently use their ENS names as their Twitter usernames, like Jimmy Fallon (fallon.eth), Paris Hilton (parishilton.eth), Trey Songz (treysongz.eth), Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong (barmstrong.eth), and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (vitalik.eth).
One of the biggest sell-offs of all time took place with the 555.eth NFT bought for $158,000 worth of ether (ETH).
Overall, such traction led to ENS domain sales hitting their highest levels on record. Per data from Scarce.guide, sales of ENS names hit 1,785 on 27 April. Funny enough, just a couple years, the scenario was completely different.
According to data from ENS lead developer nick.eththe ENS went from about $700,000 from April 14 to April 21 to $3 million from April 22 to April 27.
Making sense here?
Why some are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a name?
Maybe the realization that there are only 10,000 four-digit combinations- drove prices into the thousands of dollars. After all, owners of ENS domains containing four digits or fewer gain entry into an elusive private Discord channel. The 10k Club described itself as
“A web3 social club for holders of ENS 0-9999. No roadmap. Just the first 10,000 numbers of the Ethereum blockchain.
But not everyone rode the same bandwagon. NFT collector and content creator Jennifer Sutto opined:
