GoDaddy says that Web3 Web Service ran out of time on July 26 and will be up for grabs on September 5.
When members of the ENS DAO community go to the Web3 Web Service website, they will see a blank page with a green banner at the top saying that the domain has expired.
That’s because the only person who could renew the domain, Virgil Griffith, is in prison for helping North Koreans use cryptocurrencies to get around sanctions. From prison, he hasn’t been able to renew the domain. According to a notice that domain registrar GoDaddy posted on its website late Friday, eth.link’s registration ran out on July 26. On September 5, it will be returned to a domain registry, where anyone can take it.
ENS DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that runs the Ethereum Name Service protocol, which is a Web3 version of a Domain Name Service provider. ENS is the protocol that makes all of the.eth names that have sprung up in the Ethereum community possible. People have bought.eth names so they can have their own domains. ENS names can then be linked to your wallet address, making it easier for users to send and receive cryptocurrency (instead of having to type out a long, complex Ethereum address).
Khori Whittaker, the Executive Director of ENS, says that Virgil Griffith, who was working at the Ethereum Foundation when ENS started, was one of the first people to help build the ENS protocol. Because ENS is an open protocol, anyone can build decentralized applications on top of it. This is how Virgil got involved with eth.link. He bought the domain and made a program that works with ENS domains.
The DAO used the eth.link site to get information about all ENS names. Already, ENS DAO is telling its users to switch to eth.limo, which is another domain run by the community.
According to a tweet from the ENS DAO Twitter account, EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic had made a deal to renew the domain address for another year. However, the domain provider allegedly stopped honoring the deal “suddenly” and “without notice.”
Whittaker reported that events like this show how important decentralized naming systems are. “After eth.link was renewed, GoDaddy decided to let the domain “re-expire,” which shows how powerful and in control this old naming system is. On the other hand, anyone can help an ENS domain by paying to renew it or make it longer.
Over the past year, ENS has grown quickly, and on August 17, it reached 2 million domain name registrations. It took ENS 5 years to get the first million names on its list, but only 3.5 months to get to the second million.
