ENS is the Ethereum Name Service. It swaps a long wallet address like 0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045 for something you can read and say out loud, like vitalik.eth.

You register a name, point it at your wallet, and anyone who knows the name can send you crypto or look up your profile without ever handling the full address.

Replace your wallet's 0x address with yourname.eth. Your name stores an ETH Address record pointing at your wallet, and you can add address records for other chains too, such as Bitcoin and Solana. One name can cover wallets on several networks.

See Add wallet addresses for other chains (Testnet: Add wallet addresses for other chains). To make yourname.eth appear in apps instead of your 0x address, set your primary name (Testnet: Set your primary name).

Think of your name as a container. What sits inside are records: your avatar, banner, social handles, website, and any custom text you add. Wallets and apps that read ENS pick this profile up when you connect, so you don't need a separate profile per service.

What lives on your profile:

Some apps also support Sign-In with Ethereum, so you can sign in with your ENS name instead of a username and password.

See Edit your ENS profile (Testnet: Edit your ENS profile).

Point yourname.eth at a website hosted on a decentralised network, using the Content Hash record. Both the name and the hosting then sit outside any single company's servers.

Supported networks:

To set this up, set the Content Hash record on your name. See Add a decentralised website to your ENS name.

Any name you own can issue subnames, like pay.yourname.eth or alice.yourteam.eth. Each subname carries its own records and can point at a different wallet. Communities use them to give members a shared identity, and you can use them to label your own separate wallets.

See Create or delete subnames (Testnet: Create a subname).

Register a .eth name at app.ens.domains. Search for the name you want; if it's available, you can register it there and then. You pay per year of registration, in ETH on Ethereum Mainnet, plus gas. After that the name is yours to manage: edit its records, transfer it, or extend it before it expires.

On ENSv2 Testnet the apps are app.ens.dev and explorer.ens.dev, both on Sepolia. Registration is annual there too, but you pay in USD stablecoins (such as USDC) plus a small amount of ETH for gas. See What is ENS Explorer? for the companion tool.

When you register a .eth name, two things are recorded onchain. First, the ENS registry marks you as the owner. Second, the registration sets a resolver. That's a small contract holding the records attached to your name: your ETH address, avatar, social links, and anything else you add.

When someone sends crypto using your .eth name, their wallet asks ENS which address the name points to. The resolver answers, and the transaction goes to the right place. You can change your records whenever you like, and the name stays the same even when the wallet behind it changes.

Lookups run both ways. A forward lookup goes name to address: typing yourname.eth into a wallet finds your ETH address. A reverse lookup goes the other way: an app sees your address and checks which name is set as primary for it.

Two contracts with similar names do the bookkeeping behind every name.

The registry is ENS's ledger. For each name, identified internally by a hash called its namehash, it stores who owns the name and which resolver holds its records. It stores nothing else: your address, avatar and other records live in the resolver. In ENSv2 the registry is a tree of contracts (a root registry, one for .eth, and one for each name that issues subnames) rather than a single contract.

A registrar controls who may register names under a TLD. The .eth registrar decides whether yourname.eth is available, takes the registration fee, and issues the ownership NFT, then records the result in the registry. In short: the registrar decides who may own a name; the registry records who currently does.

ENS is a decentralised protocol governed by the ENS DAO. No single company owns or controls it. Names are held onchain as NFTs, and a name stays yours for as long as you keep it registered.

See Official ENS websites, apps, and tools for the DAO's forum, voting and delegation links. For how ENS began, see The story of ENS.

The job is similar (both turn names into addresses) but the machinery differs. DNS is run centrally through registries, registrars and authoritative servers. ENS is onchain: names are managed by smart contracts, ownership is an NFT, and any app can read the records straight from public contracts.

ENS also works with DNS names: a domain you already own, such as a .com or .xyz, can be used as an ENS name. In the ENS App and ENS Explorer, .eth names and their onchain subnames are what you register and manage. See What TLDs are supported?.

No. Apps that support ENS show your name once you've set one as primary. Apps that don't will keep showing the wallet address. Most major wallets support it, but not every app does.

Owning a name doesn't tell other apps to use it. You have to set it as your primary name: the reverse-lookup record that tells apps which name to show for your wallet. You can change which name is primary at any time. See set your primary name (Testnet: Set your primary name).

ENSv1 and ENSv2 are versions of the underlying contracts. You can upgrade names registered on the v1 contracts to v2 from the ENS App dashboard. The upgrade preserves the name and its records, and adds a free 62-day renewal to each upgraded name. On v2 the grace period is 28 days instead of 90. Those 62 days make up the difference, so your grace period end date doesn't move. Renewing a name further is a separate action. See Upgrade your name to ENSv2.

The records you set are public. Anyone can read them straight from the contracts, and anyone can see which address a name points at. Don't put anything on a record you wouldn't publish. See Is my ENS name private? (Testnet: What's public on my ENS profile?).

The full documentation lives at docs.ens.domains. For announcements and community chat, see the ENS blog and the ENS Discord. Protocol specs are the ENSIPs, listed in the docs. For a question about a name you own, the support team here is the fastest route to a human.