How 20 million GoDaddy users can finally add Ethereum to their websites

A GoDaddy representative told DL News that DNS is a great piece of technology, but falls a bit short at “holding data.”
The domain registry giant selected Ethereum Name Service among a host of competitors in the industry.
A key component of integrating ENS includes offering gasless transactions.

After several years examining blockchain technology, GoDaddy is finally taking the plunge.

“It’s been a few years. I’ve been talking at various conferences and formally to all different companies in the space,” Paul Nicks, the firm’s domains president, told DL News.

“ENS is the first company that shared a vision, bridging the gap between the known, good, scalable, secure DNS infrastructure, with some of the cool emerging things happening in the blockchain space.”

The tie-up now means that from today, more than 20 million GoDaddy users will see a new button in their accounts, letting them link their web2 domains to the Ethereum Name Service.

After that, it’s a matter of adding their crypto addresses.

The two firms are in the same business.

While domain registrars like GoDaddy help turn clunky IP addresses into human-readable names, Ethereum Name Service does the same for the string of letters and numbers used for crypto addresses.

“DNS is great as the phonebook, showing that this points here. Where I think it falls a bit short in creating some of the interesting technologies, is holding data,” said Nicks, explaining the firm’s move into blockchain technology.

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Ethereum Name Service goes gasless

Executing the new integration will be without gas fees, too, a key sticking point for Nicks’ move into the space.

“That was what allowed us to really take this and say, ‘it’s good for our customers,’” he told DL News. “We pushed as hard as we could to make this super simple, and remove all the friction possible.”

The integration goes live today, but for ENS founder Nick Johnson, it’s just the beginning of the firm’s deeper integration with the Internet’s original phonebook — Domain Name Service.

“We’re immediately working on improving the fields that are accessible to include all the ones that DNS supports, which means you’ll be able to basically use the domain as your crypto profile,” he told DL News.

“If you then sign up with something like Farcaster, for instance, you would potentially be able to import all of your profile details simply by signing up and authenticating with your ENS name, which could also be your domain name.”

As for any other firms Johnson is looking to do business with, he told DL News that there was “nothing we can announce right now.”

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin correspondent. Contact him at liam@dlnews.com.