Why the ENS battle Eth.Link matters

Author: Daniel Kuhn, deputy editor-in-chief of "Consensus" magazine Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance< /p>

ENS and Manifold settle the eth.link domain name dispute

ENS Labs develops key wallet link foundation The team behind the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) has finally reached a settlement with its potential competitor Manifold Finance over access to the crucial eth.link domain name.

As part of the settlement, ENS apparently agreed to a non-disparagement clause limiting what it could say publicly about its legal dispute over the eth.link domain name over the past 18 months. Take a stand. This domain served as an important gateway between Web3 and Web2. While ENS cannot comment on this, I can provide an analysis.

Manifold is a middleware blockchain company that most people have only heard of due to its lawsuit with ENS. While the project purchased eth.link for $852,000 at the 2022 Dynadot auction and has a legal claim to it, it would be better to relinquish control of it upon learning of its sale.

Manifold wrote on Twitter/X in 2022: "http://eth.link was registered by us." It is not clear which company Did they ever actually own the eth.link service, or what were they planning to do with it? ENS successfully obtained one from a federal district court judge in Phoenix, Arizona, after realizing it had lost access to that critical gateway. Preliminary injunction to stop the transfer and repossess the domain name.

ENS Labs CEO Nick Johnson wrote in a recent DAO proposal regarding the settlement that this in itself begins a period of "litigation that will slowly work its way through the courts." "period. The reason for this slow and almost unnecessary lawsuit is that Manifold never really owned the moral rights to the service.

Since 2017, ENS Lab has used eth.link as the public gateway for the Ethereum community, providing traditional network services with access to on-chain ENS and IPFS data. way, and this data is incompatible with the DNS (or Domain Name Service) architecture behind traditional websites.

ENS and Manifold’s tortuous process over the eth.link domain name dispute

ENS loses control over eth The access to .link is due to the domain name being registered by Ethereum Foundation developer and former ENS employee Virgil Griffith. Griffith was arrested for giving a speech on public blockchain in North Korea and was unable to renew his domain name registration while serving a 63-month sentence.

The complexity of this incident is that, according to ENS's lawsuit, eth.link was originally registered with the network registrar and hosting company GoDaddy, and was originally valid until 2023 July. However, GoDaddy "unilaterally" determined that the domain name had expired after it was not renewed in July 2022, and illegally sold it to Dynadot in September of that year, even though the domain name actually had 1 year left to expire.

ENS alleges in the complaint: "GoDaddy has thereby deprived plaintiff True Names Ltd. of its livelihood. The sale will render a valuable cryptocurrency network dysfunctional. operation and recklessly risked exposing it to a large number of malicious actors." Furthermore, ENS cited GoDaddy's terms of service as saying that they should have been allowed to re-register the domain name on behalf of Griffith, but GoDaddy "failed to respond to multiple requests."

Manifold was not the direct cause of the domain name being auctioned. What is commendable is that Manifold did offer to return the domain name at a certain price. This move was between domain name squatting and squatting. and asking for rent. Furthermore, it is unclear whether ENS will need to include Manifold in its lawsuit primarily targeting GoDaddy's conduct. (Neither Manifold nor ENS responded to requests for comment.)

The whole thing seems somewhat shady. Manifold appears to be mocking ENS on multiple fronts, such as posting on Twitter/ fair". Manifold also filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit and vacate a preliminary injunction returning eth.link to ENS, a risky move to continue holding the domain name.

Now, the ENS community will pay Manifold $300,000 (plus ENS Labs’ $750,000 in legal fees) to resolve the matter. While the cryptocurrency industry is long past the stage where ideological commitment and conviction alone could avoid lawsuits, the debate does raise questions about what is happening.

ENS and Manifold’s subsequent impact on the eth.link domain name dispute

Recently accepted by CoinDesk During the interview, Johnson noted that Web3 cannot naively ignore the wider web, which is why ENS is still technically in court fighting GoDaddy while also cooperating with it. This is true, and it’s why the eth.link domain name is so important – the bridge between blockchain and traditional networks is priceless.

However, this unpleasant dispute is not the last time ENS has taken legal action over the ownership of intangible assets. It’s fair to say that a project as important as ENS—which is the most commonly used way of converting alphanumeric blockchain addresses into human-readable names—should seek to protect itself. But in principle, two registered companies arguing in court is not in line with the essence of decentralization.

Happily, this dispute demonstrates the effectiveness of DAO governance. The settlement was submitted to a vote by the ENS community, with 88% of the voting power approving the settlement and 84% approving reimbursement of ENS Labs’ legal fees. In a strange way, however, this public vote also undermined ENS’s litigation strategy.

Only 11% of the DAO voting power supports continuing the lawsuit. As domain name expert Andrew Allemann writes at Domain Name Wire, since ENS still needs to finalize its settlement with Manifold before dropping its lawsuit against GoDaddy and Dynadot, "Given the DAO's public opposition to continuing the litigation, Manifold will be well-positioned to get what it wants." required conditions”.

In an ideal world, this lawsuit should have helped prove the value and necessity of decentralized digital identity, but in the end it looks like all will be lost. Controlled by a centralized entity.