The corporate behind the ENS blockchain area service has cinched a plan to construct its personal layer-2 blockchain, dubbed “Namechain.”
Namechain will probably be a zero-knowledge rollup, and can probably go dwell across the finish of 2025.
ENS Labs, the corporate behind the Ethereum Identify Service, is shifting forward with a plan to launch its personal layer-2 community.
Namechain, as the brand new community known as, ought to go dwell across the finish of subsequent yr, ENS Labs’ chief working officer, Katherine Wu, informed CoinDesk. It should use zero-knowledge rollups, a scaling expertise that speeds blockchain transactions and reduces the price of executing them by compressing the quantity of knowledge printed on-chain.
“This expertise permits Namechain to course of and execute transactions off of the primary Ethereum community whereas nonetheless inheriting the total safety of Ethereum, however at a fraction of the fee,” ENS Labs mentioned in a press launch Monday.
The brand new community will leverage the infrastructure of an present zero-knowledge chain appropriate with the Ethereum Digital Machine, Wu mentioned. The workforce is within the remaining levels of selecting which zkEVM it should use, she informed CoinDesk by Telegram.
ENS is blockchain’s reply to the online’s area title service. Simply as domains (Amazon.com, WhiteHouse.gov) are human-readable and simpler to recollect than numerical IP addresses, ENS names are extra relatable than crypto pockets addresses. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s ENS deal with, for instance, is Vitalik.eth, which rolls off the tongue higher than his deal with (0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045, do you have to be questioning.)
In Might, ENS Labs proposed overhauling the mission’s registry system by reworking it into an L2. On the time, it had not but dedicated to the ZK rollup mannequin.
The overhaul, ENSv2, will see a whole re-architecture of the ENS protocol, in addition to its extension onto a layer-2, Wu mentioned.
“The heavy technical carry right here will probably be in ensuring that Namechain is backward appropriate with ENSv1 (the present arrange on Ethereum mainnet) from day one in all launch,” Wu wrote. “[To] a person, there needs to be no distinction on the entrance finish/person expertise as we launch Namechain, apart from decrease fuel charges.”
ENS’ choice to go forward with ENSv2 follows a sequence of different bulletins of main crypto companies popping out with their very own layer-2 tasks. Just lately, groups behind decentralized finance mission Uniswap, crypto alternate Kraken and Sony’s Blockchain Labs unveiled plans to launch their very own rollup networks. As a substitute of ZK rollups, nonetheless, these tasks use layer-2 Optimism’s expertise, often called the OP Stack, which permits builders to clone its code to create their very own blockchains.
“Namechain represents ENS’ subsequent evolution, and I am excited for the large enhancements it should usher in scalability and value, and the brand new functions it should allow,” mentioned ENS Labs’ co-founder and lead developer, Nick Johnson, within the press launch.

