If you are on Twitter, you must have seen usernames with the .eth suffix. If you have wondered what it means, this guide will help you understand as well as own a .eth domain for yourself.

Very simply put, an ENS domain is intended to be like a global identity mechanism for the web3 world. One of the basic problems it tries to solve is that you can have a human-readable name via the domain to the cryptic blockchain addresses. It makes it easier to share and transact compared to seeing a random sequence of digits and alphabets.

Although ENS domains are based on the Ethereum blockchain, they are not restricted to that. You can add your wallet addresses for other Blockchains as well. Along with that you can also include details about your social media handles as well as create an avatar for yourself.

There are over 259,000 ENS domain owners for over 562,000 ENS domains that have been registered

How is it different from other domains like .com, .org, etc.?

One of the key differences is that .eth domains are not managed by ICANN which is the body responsible for managing the registration of a number of high-level TLDs like .com, .org, .net, etc. [Pretty much all the domains that you interact with are controlled by ICANN].

Although you can host a website and point it to your ENS domain, all browsers do not support automatic resolution for ENS domains. Brave is one browser that supports the resolution of ENS domains. For other popular browsers like Chrome, you may need additional plugins and extensions to resolve the ENS domains. Another difference for these domains is that they can only point to decentralized websites that are hosted and set up on IPFS (Interplanetary File System). It does not support pointing to a standard website hosted on a standard web server.

How much does it cost?

ENS domains have a straightforward registration cost structure that is based on the number of characters and the number of years you want the subscription for.\n\nHere are the registration costs for the domains –

5+ character .eth names: $5 in ETH per year

4 character .eth names: $160 in ETH per year

3 character .eth names $640 in ETH per year

On top of this, since it is based on the Ethereum mainnet, you would have to shell the gas fees for the domain registration transactions (which in most cases will be the majority of the costs that you would incur). Do keep a lookout on the gas fees and pick a time when they are at the lowest. Weekends typically work better from that perspective.

How to set up an ENS domain

To register and set up your domain, you will need a few things – An Ethereum wallet with some $ETH loaded up for the registration charges. Also, you need to decide on the ETH domain that you would like to register.

The first step would be to go visit -

[The first step would be to go to the ENS dapp – https://app.ens.domains

](The first step would be to go to the ENS dapp – https://app.ens.domains

)

Then connect with the wallet of your choice with the app. The next step would be to search for your favorite domain to see if they are available. If your domain is already registered and not available, you can check out OpenSea to purchase it on the secondary market. The collection link for ENS domains on OpenSea is –

https://opensea.io/collection/ens

In case you are wondering how OpenSea, ENS domains are compliant with the ERC-721 token standard hence they can function and operate as NFTs.

If it is available, you can click on the domain listed and select the Register option. After that, you will see a screen like this

You can select the number of years for which you would want to register the domain. It is recommended to register for a higher number of years since you won’t incur gas fees every year and the incremental cost is nominal compared to the gas fees you would pay. The workflow does a good job of giving you an estimated cost for the domain registration split by the actual cost and the gas fees.

The domain registration happens in a 2-step process. First, you would need to submit a request for registration. A prompt would appear on your wallet to complete this step.

After you have confirmed the registration request transaction, there is a waiting period of roughly a minute after which you would be able to complete the registration.

This will prompt another transaction on your wallet with the registration cost and gas fees included. Once this is completed, you can confirm the transaction independently on Etherscan.

https://etherscan.io/

Congratulations! 🎉🚀 You are now a proud owner of an ENS domain. Feel free to flaunt your .eth username on Twitter or anywhere else!

The final step in this journey is to set up your reverse ENS record that would point to your Ethereum wallet address. You can do the same from the ENS app itself by selecting the ENS Domain record and updating the address as the reverse ENS lookup record. This would result in another transaction and would cost transaction gas fees.

ETH Leaderboard

There is also a global .eth leaderboard that goes through all the Twitter users with .eth suffix and ranks them based on their follower count. You can look at the leaderboard here at –

https://ethleaderboard.xyz/

Hope you liked this article and would be glad to learn if you were able to register your ENS domains. We will do a deep-dive later on the ENS domain resolution mechanism as well as the ENS token and the governance process.