Second-Highest Price Ever Paid for an Ethereum Name Service: 300 ETH
On July 3rd, the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain 000. eth was sold for 300 ETH (approximately $315,000). This was the second-largest purchase in terms of not only Ether but also US Dollars.
Sale of the Century
On-chain data revealed that the ENS name was sold on the OpenSea marketplace by a user named EtheOS who received it in June 2020. In September 2021, the ENS name was listed for 100 ETH and was valued at around $300,000. The user re-listed the name for 500 ETH in January of this year, and again in March. The offer was on the market for three months before it was accepted. The latest sale is second only to the 420 ETH sale of another ENS name - paradigm.eth - last October. It was valued at around $1.5 million at the time.
For those who are unfamiliar, Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a protocol that connects machine-generated codes to human-friendly names. The Ethereum blockchain powers this Web3-friendly, open, decentralized, and non-profit naming system. Smart contracts protect the domain names of ENS. These are also NFTs that can be sold on popular marketplaces like OpenSea. According to statistics, ENS is one of the most widely integrated naming standards, with over 1.1 million names, 504 integrations, and over 400k owners.
The Ethereum Naming System (ENS) has recently gained popularity. Many well-known individuals, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, have added the.ETH extension to their names. Even celebrities like Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, and Snoop Dogg have Web3 identities on Ethereum.
The mystery of paradigm.eth
Last year, an unknown wallet paid 420 ETH (approximately $1.5 million) for the Ethereum domain name paradigm. eth. Many assumed that the expensive purchase was the work of crypto-focused VC firm Paradigm. It, however, denied those reports. Blockchain.com also announced that as a potential challenge to Ethereum Name Service, it would allow its users to claim free ".blockchain" domain names supported by Unstoppable Domains in June 2021. Recently, the Open Network (TON) Foundation introduced TON DNS, a new service that allows users to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, smart contracts, and websites.