Ethereum’s ENS Identity System Set to Launch Own Layer-2 Blockchain

ENS Labs, the company behind the Ethereum Name Service, is moving ahead with a plan to launch its own layer-2 network.

Namechain, as the new network is called, should go live around the end of next year, ENS Labs’ chief operating officer, Katherine Wu, told CoinDesk. It will use zero-knowledge rollups, a scaling technology that speeds blockchain transactions and reduces the cost of executing them by compressing the amount of data published on-chain.

“This technology allows Namechain to process and execute transactions off of the main Ethereum network while still inheriting the full security of Ethereum, but at a fraction of the cost,” ENS Labs said in a press release Monday.

The new network will leverage the infrastructure of an existing zero-knowledge chain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, Wu said. The team is in the final stages of choosing which zkEVM it will use, she told CoinDesk by Telegram.

ENS is blockchain’s answer to the web’s domain name service. Just as domain names (Amazon.com, WhiteHouse.gov) are human-readable and easier to remember than numerical IP addresses, ENS names are more relatable than crypto wallet addresses. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s ENS handle, for example, is Vitalik.eth, which rolls off the tongue better than his address (0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045, should you be wondering.)

In May, ENS Labs proposed overhauling the project’s registry system by transforming it into an L2. At the time, it had not yet committed to the ZK rollup model.

The overhaul, ENSv2, will see a complete re-architecture of the ENS protocol, as well as its extension onto a layer-2, Wu said.

“The heavy technical lift here will be in making sure that Namechain is backward compatible with ENSv1 (the current set up on Ethereum mainnet) from day one of launch,” Wu wrote. “[To] a user, there should be no difference on the front end/user experience as we launch Namechain, except for lower gas fees.”

ENS’ decision to go ahead with ENSv2 follows a series of other announcements of major crypto firms coming out with their own layer-2 projects. Recently, teams behind decentralized finance project Uniswap, crypto exchange Kraken and Sony’s Blockchain Labs unveiled plans to launch their own rollup networks. Instead of ZK rollups, however, those projects use layer-2 Optimism’s technology, known as the OP Stack, which allows developers to clone its code to create their own blockchains.

“Namechain represents ENS’ next evolution, and I’m excited for the huge improvements it will bring in scalability and cost, and the new applications it will enable,” said ENS Labs’ co-founder and lead developer, Nick Johnson, in the press release.

Read more: Ethereum-Based Domain Protocol ENS Seeks Own L2, Possibly With ZK Rollups