Today, @ensdomains is arguably the most successful non-financial application that exists on Ethereum.

And now, with their very own L2, ENS will soon scale the most popular decentralized name service to billions of people around the world.

Here's everything we know so far 🧵

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Namechain is going all in on ZK.

Although we don't yet know which tech stack, the ENS team have chosen to build on existing zkEVM infrastructure that closely embodies the values of Ethereum.

This means open-source, maximal security, and a credible decentralization roadmap.

Founder of the Layer 2 Weekly Roundup: https://www.layer2roundup.io/ (prev Scroll)

Why namechain?

As it stands, ENS is home to the most widely-adopted, non-financial use case on Ethereum.

However, due to the success of the protocol, demand from real-world people has begun to outweigh the supply of blockspace that Ethereum L1 can provide at an affordable rate.

In order to extend decentralized, human-readable, Web3 usernames to billions of people around the globe, ENS must evolve beyond the constraints of Ethereum L1.

Hence, the need for namechain, a highly scalable zkEVM that will reduce the cost of maintaining an ENS name by 100x.

Now, let's unpack the roadmap.

The rollout of namechain has been split across five phases.

Phases 1 and 2 prepares the ground for namechain's deployment, whilst phases 3, 4, and 5 focus on post-launch optimizations, and the migration of contracts from L1->L2.

Phase 1)

- Facilitate a seamless transition of the ENSv1 interface to ENSv2.

- Connect L2 reverse registrars to L1 using a new CCIP gateway.

- L2 infrastructure selection: This has already been decided on, but we will need to wait for the official reveal.

Phase 2)

Whilst it may seem smaller, this is a more complex scope:

- Write a new slate of ENS smart contracts to build upon 7 years worth of learnings and innovation, with a heavy focus on improved user-experience.

Phase 3)

- After the completion of phases 1 and 2, namechain will launch with an established sequencer and prover network.

Phase 4)

- Registries, resolvers, registrars, and migration contracts will be deployed on namechain.

- Sync data with L1 legacy contracts.

Phase 5)

- Resolver switches to new registries and begins using the new namechain infrastructure.

- Once all data has been synced, the process of new registrations and renewals will commence on namechain.

Although this roadmap contains most of the important technical details, there is one more feature that sets namechain apart.

Ethereum's core values are at the heart of the ENS protocol, and that means those values MUST extend to namechain - enter, native interoperability!

To ensure that ENS is not adding to the fractionalisation of Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem, namechain will host inbuilt, L2->L2 bridging.

This means that anyone from anywhere, can begin their ENS journey, and pay for their first ENS name from any existing L2.

To conclude, I would like to say that I am extremely impressed by namechain's ambitious roadmap, to scale ENS while preserving L2 composability.

Ethereum is moving towards an interoperable future, fuelled by collaboration, and a shared desire to bring the world onchain.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming developments of namechain as it progresses towards mainnet deployment.

Kudos to the @ensdomains team for taking on the challenge.