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Registrar

0x6090a6e47849...d94cd15878ef
Spurious DragonSource VerifiedEdit this contract
Deployed April 26, 2017 (9 years ago)Block 3,605,331

The original .eth registrar, which sold names by sealed bid auction from May 2017 and locked the winner's ETH for as long as they held the name.

Spurious Dragon EraVerified Source

Historical Significance

This was the first serious attempt to distribute a namespace on Ethereum, and the design was deliberately awkward in order to be fair. Sealed bids stopped the last minute sniping that an open auction invites, second price bidding removed the incentive to shade a bid, and locking rather than spending the ETH meant the project took no revenue from the names at all.

It also produced the first large scale demonstration of a problem that has shaped every naming system since. Because holding a name cost nothing beyond a deposit that was returned in full, valuable names were claimed and sat on indefinitely. The move to annual rent under the permanent registrar in 2019 was a direct answer to what this contract taught.

Context

Auctions opened on 4 May 2017, seven weeks after the ENS registry itself went live in March. Names of fewer than seven characters were withheld at first, and the auction process took a week from opening bid to settlement, so the early namespace filled in slowly and in public.

It was retired exactly two years later. The permanent registrar launched at midnight UTC on 4 May 2019, replacing auctions with instant registration and annual rent, and holders were given until 4 May 2020 to migrate their names and recover their locked deposits. Names never migrated were released.

Key Facts
Deployment Block
3,605,331
Deployment Date
Apr 26, 2017, 07:14 PM
Code Size
9.8 KB
Transactions by YearPartial (capped)
201750,000

Description

HashRegistrarSimplified was the first contract to hand out .eth names. It ran a Vickrey style sealed bid auction: a bidder submitted a hash committing to a name and an amount, waited out a bidding period, then revealed the bid, and the highest bidder won while paying only the second highest price. Losing bids were refunded.

The unusual part was what happened to the winner's ETH. It was not spent. Each name's funds were moved into a dedicated Deed contract and held there for as long as the name was owned, and releasing the name returned the ETH to the holder. A .eth name under this registrar was therefore not bought but collateralised, and the cost of holding one was the opportunity cost of the locked deposit rather than a fee.

Verified on chain: ens() returns 0x314159265dD8dbb310642f98f50C066173C1259b, the original registry, and rootNode() returns namehash('eth'). registryStarted() returns 1493895600, which is 4 May 2017 at 11:00 UTC, the moment the first auctions could open. The contract itself was deployed on 26 April 2017, a week ahead of that.

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes9,991
Unique Opcodes249
Jump Instructions580
Storage Operations166

External Links