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.

Looking for reasons the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum shot up during the pandemic? Exhibit A: a county executive in Tennessee named George Thacker obtained $650,000 in covid relief funds through his local bank and the SBA and then deposited $230,000 of it into his personal Coinbase account, authorities say. He then used that money to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Using the funds for personal purposes such as that were impermissible.

Thacker pled guilty to wire fraud charges yesterday. He faces up to 20 years in prison at sentencing.