Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain names have overtaken Bored & Yacht Club (BAYC) as the most traded asset on NFT marketplace OpenC in the past seven days – well ahead of the Ethereum merge.
According to data from OpenSea, at the time of writing the weekly volume of the Ethereum domain NFT eclipsed 2,249 ETH, outperforming RTFKT Clone X (1,992 ETH) and Bored Ape Yacht Club (1,777 ETH).
ENS Domains is a distributed, open and expandable naming system on the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to convert a long string of keys to a crypto address, such as “vitalik.eth”, into a single ENS domain.
This simplifies the complexity of copying and pasting a long wallet address to send and receive crypto, as users only need to share their domain name like any other normal address or identification details.
These domain names can be bought, sold and traded between users in the form of NFTs.
The recent spike in ENS trading volume has seen the average price of an ENS item increase by 167% from 0.1454 ETH to 0.3895 ETH ($641), while the daily volume has increased from 120.7 ETH to 1044.6 ETH.
There are now over 2 million ENS items on OpenSea, spread among over 508,000 owners, with a total of 2,682 ENS domains now sold.
According to OpenSea, some of the most expensive ENS domain names are 000.eth, which was bought for 300 ETH and is available for sale for 5,000 ETH along with opensea.eth, crypto.eth, google.eth and nike.eth.
The strong start in September was followed by an impressive ENS sales month in August, with over 300,000 new “.eth” registrations, and monthly revenue of 2,744 ETH, the third largest month since ENS was founded in 2018.
August 2022 statistics for ENS
– 301K new .eth registrations (2.17m names in total)
— ens.eth (@ensdomains) 1 September 2022
– $4.7m in protocol revenue (goes to all @ENS_DAO,
– 2,744 ETH in revenue (3rd biggest month)
– 34K new eth accounts w/ at least 1 ENS name (540k total)
-> 99% of OpenSea Domain Volume pic.twitter.com/utU8i4cBMT
The surge in demand for ENS domain names comes about a week ahead of the scheduled date of the Ethereum merge, which is scheduled for September 15th.
related: Ethereum name service registrations up 200% amid low gas fees
On September 4, Vitalik Buterin tweeted, asking his 4.2 million followers what a five-letter ENS domain name should be worth over a 100-year period:
What is a reasonable price one should pay to register and unconditionally guarantee ownership of a 5-character .eth domain for 100 years?
— vitalik.eth (@vitalikbuterin) 4 September 2022
The poll found that 49.8% of 91,130 voters went with “less than $100,” while 18.9% of voters thought “$10,000 or more” could be considered a fair value over a 100-year period.
According to OpenSea, the average price of an ENS domain is 0.3207 ETH.
