Members of the ENS DAO community will now see a blank page with a green domain expiration notice banner at the top when they visit the eth.link website.
This is because Virgil Griffith, the only person with the authority to renew the domain, is serving a 63-month prison sentence for assisting North Koreans in using Cryptocurrencies to avoid sanctions and has been not been able to renew the domain from prison.
According to a notice published late Friday on the website of domain registrar GoDaddy, the eth.link expired on July 26 and will be returned to a domain registry on September 5, where it will be available for anyone who can take it.
ENS DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governing the Ethereum Name Service protocol, a Domain Name Service provider’s Web3 version. The protocol behind the numerous.eth names that have appeared throughout the Ethereum community are ENS.
Users bought .eth domain names in order to have their own domains. ENS names can then be linked to wallet addresses, making it easier for users to send and receive Cryptocurrency (instead of having to type out a long, complex Ethereum address).
Virgil Griffith, who was working at the Ethereum Foundation when ENS was introduced, was an early contributor to the ENS protocol, says Khori Whittaker, the Executive Director of ENS. Since ENS is a permissionless protocol, anyone can build dApps on top of it, as Virgil has done with the eth.link. He bought the domain and developed an application that resolves ENS domains.
The DAO relied on the eth.link website to cater access to information regarding all ENS names. ENS DAO has already advised its users to migrate to eth.limo, another community-run domain.
EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic had earlier made a deal to renew the domain address for one more year, according to a tweet from the ENS DAO Twitter account, before the domain provider reportedly decided to stop honoring the deal “suddenly” and “without notice.”
Events like this demonstrate the value of decentralized naming systems, Whittaker told CoinDesk. After renewing eth.link, GoDaddy decided to ‘re-expire’ the domain, demonstrating the power and control that this legacy naming system possesses. In contrast, anyone can help support an ENS domain by renewing through payment or extending it.
ENS has experienced rapid growth in the last year, reaching 2 million domain name registrations on August 17. It took ENS 5 years to register its first million names, however only 3.5 months to reach 2 million.
