If you want the 411.eth on what’s happening with three-digit ENS domains, you’ll have to try to buy it on a marketplace like OpenSea. Over the weekend, speculators bought up all the unclaimed 3-digit Ethereum Name Service domain names between 000.eth – 999.eth. At the same time, dozens of twitter accounts named for their newly minted prizes were out in force and a twitter spaces voice chat called the “999 club” kicked off to talk about what’s next for the people lucky enough to hold one of the limited thousand domains.
Three-character domains are expensive, coming in at roughly $670/YEAR, payable only with eth. That price alone was enough to dissuade amateur domain hunters with limited disposable crypto funds. Tackling all three-character domains is not as simple as adding letters because ENS has compatibility with other languages and thus other alphabets. LongHash claims that there are 46,656 unique three-character domains possible. eth.eth may be taken for example, but êth.eth (with a circumflex-accented e) was still available as of this writing.
A contract deployed on the ethereum blockchain this week is going to have a major impact on the ENS ecosystem, according to CroissantEth on twitter. Contract 0x0465719485dB64e24d73d1619E03950830E4A5b3, purportedly created by Coinbase Devs, will allow dApps to issue ENS subdomains off-chain but still have them be accessible through L1.
Croissant writes that this is different than just setting up an ENS subdomain because the entire process can be done without L1 transaction fees but still be recognized on the L1 network. This opens up the possibility of setting up unlimited subdomains on L2.
“A gateway can call to a resolver on an L2 network, & get the address corresponding to the ENS domain,” he wrote.
Such a feature will be further enhanced by a new subdomain registrar contract where owners of ENS domains will be able to delegate out subdomains they can’t control while at the same time retaining control of the top line ENS domain. Though he did not state a specific example, one could imagine that readers of our site could own bob.decashed.eth and sally.decashed.eth with no L1 transaction costs while at the same time we, as decashed.eth proper, could not control those subdomains nor would we lose control of our own top level domain.
A major implication of this is onboarding. With no L1 costs, it would make ENS subdomains, recognized at the L1 level, available to everyone that couldn’t previously afford an L1 ENS domain. And since it would actually sit at the L2 level, developers could then customize users “wallets” to be more user-friendly.
It remains to be seen if the speculation behind CoinbaseResolver actually comes to fruition.
A bored Abe, a portrait autographed by Abraham Lincoln in 1861 en route to his inauguration, currently sits on the market for 45 eth. It’s one of only three known to exist. A Bored Ape, by comparison, goes for more than 3x that despite there being 10,000 of them in circulation. The latter is an NFT and that makes all the difference.
But anything can become an NFT, including the signature of honest Abe.
“Six proofs of this image were sent to Lincoln in Springfield shortly before he left for Washington to attend the Inauguration,” according to the item’s listing. “On February 16, 1861, the inaugural train stopped in Buffalo, where Lincoln was claimed to have presented one copy to William M. Kasson, the man who designed the special railroad car in which the President-elect was traveling. A second copy [this one] was presented to J.R. Drake.”
This little slice of history cost slightly more than a jpeg of a pixelated bird that someone drew on their computer last week (Looking at you Moonbirds). Abraham Lincoln is pretty cool too, with having kept the United States together and ending slavery and all that. This signed Abe can also easily be tokenized, turned into 10 NFTs or 10,000, creating the opportunity for a large number of people to share in the memory.
If you’re interested in a web3 community dedicated to acquiring real life historical artifacts, like me, follow peoples_NFT and join The People’s NFT Discord.
One of the most common criticisms of the NFT scene is the underlying technology that powers them. New users are pitched on the premise that pictures and artwork are permanently embedded into the blockchain, creating an immutable asset that can be held, traded, and publicly examined for authenticity. But that’s not entirely true. The pictures changing hands ($3.5B worth in a single month just on OpenSea alone) are not actually on the blockchains, nor are the images they represent all particularly permanent, which means you could wake up tomorrow to find that your NFTs aren’t loading, the names of them have changed, or worse yet, they’re suddenly all pictures of something else.
Everything seems to be working as it should, except both references for that NFT live on our servers, not any blockchain’s. So if I sell that one to you, control over the content of that NFT remains with ME. Having run several tests, I’ve since turned that NFT into an animated gif of Theodore Roosevelt, a video about two people discussing regulation, a random logo file, and then back to a stick figure. I then changed the name and the description. Throughout this experiment, there would be nothing that the owner of the token, assuming it wasn’t me, could do about it.
Hopefully you were already aware about these limitations if you’ve made NFT trading a hobby or business. If not, now you know.
Turning a weakness into a strength
While any seasoned crypto enthusiast will simply point out that the metadata file and image file could’ve been uploaded to a decentralized server instead of ours to limit the vulnerability stated above, millions of NFTs on the open market are set up just like mine. And if I can change what’s in your wallet whenever I want, perhaps that’s not so bad, because the ability to amend the content over time could unlock untapped potential. Candy Digital, for example, is now offering Baseball card-style NFTs of players where the stats are updated in real time. Maybe a living NFT such as that, could be more valuable than a static collectible.
Below are a few ideas:
Fixes to defects in NFT artwork could be applied
Artists could update attributes of artwork over time to give them a modern, relevant, or trendy polish, or even supply a new piece of art to the same NFT
An NFT holder could be alerted to the fact that they’ve won a prize or raffle by modifying it to something designed to get their attention
An NFT could be updated frequently with news updates, i.e. a news NFT where it switches between images and video clips with whatever the latest news is
While it’s become trendy to market NFTs as a virtual membership card that can unlock access to Discords, events, and clubs, one should consider that the NFT itself could be the club. Like the Amazon Echo, the NFT could be the conduit for content that can be updated and upgraded on the back-end without having to buy another NFT. MetaMask or OpenSea or perhaps another platform altogether could provide an enhanced interface to consume it all.
Marketers could even find a whole new market for airdrops if they can turn the mass deployed NFTs into active pieces of content that at times convert into ads or commercials throughout the day. That Bored Ape could turn into an ad for Geico for 30 seconds every hour or something. Maybe that’s not what you want to hear, but given how much NFT content already lives on centralized servers, it is only a matter of time before creators start to consider the opportunity that perceived weakness affords.
If you want the 411.eth on what’s happening with three-digit ENS domains, you’ll have to try to buy it on a marketplace like OpenSea. Over the weekend, speculators bought up all the unclaimed 3-digit Ethereum Name Service domain names between 000.eth – 999.eth. At the same time, dozens of twitter accounts named for their newly minted prizes were out in force and a twitter spaces voice chat called the “999 club” kicked off to talk about what’s next for the people lucky enough to hold one of the limited thousand domains. 
