globalregistrar

This contract is a deployment of the GlobalRegistrar, an early Ethereum name registry system that allowed users to claim human-readable names and associate them with Ethereum addresses. It was deployed at block 63,331 on August 10, 2015 by address 0xdd38c62d238be6bb72162afec32ddccedd3a0a51.

The GlobalRegistrar implements three interfaces: NameRegister (basic name-to-address resolution), Registrar (with owner, address, subRegistrar, and content fields per name), and GlobalRegistrar (the full implementation). Names are reserved via the reserve(bytes32 _name) function on a first-come, first-served basis — the contract explicitly notes a TODO for a proper bidding mechanism.

The source code contains several unfinished TODO comments, including a planned auction for short names (12 characters or fewer) and a hall-of-fame in the constructor. This reflects the iterative, draft nature of early Ethereum infrastructure development.

The Linagee Name Registrar at 0x5564886ca2c518d1964e5fcea4f423b41db9f561 (deployed August 8, 2015) is an earlier deployment of equivalent functionality. Both contracts represent the proto-ENS era of Ethereum naming — before the Ethereum Name Service launched in May 2017.