In October 2019, OpenSea partnered with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) team to sell exclusive ENS .eth names on our marketplace. For those who aren’t familiar with ENS, it turns human-readable names like “alice.eth” into identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, content hashes, and metadata.

The OpenSea auction, which featured the sale of 3 – 6 character ENS names, was a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. In total, there were 50,355 bids made for 7,670 names, with a total worth of the winning bids at 5,698.97 ETH. We witnessed some exciting large auctions: amazon.eth sold for 100 ETH, wallet.eth sold for 75 ETH, and google.eth sold for 52.9 ETH).

On March 20, 2020, we’re starting another ENS auction: the Kred Top Level Domain. The Kred premium auction list will be released on Thursday, February 20, 2020.

Excitingly, Kred Domains are both ENS and DNS registered and are controlled by a Kred Domain Token. This means they can be used as regular websites in addition to ENS names. Any changes to the ENS DNS information stored against the Kred Domain Token are represented in both systems.

Some nifty features of Kred domains

1. Kred domains support both wallet and web addresses. So not only can you map your Kred domain to your personal wallet, you can actually host a website that will be viewable from any browser (it’s fully DNS compatible!)
2. Kred provides wallet developers with a Safe Send Lookup API. The API returns identity information including an avatar and username for any Kred domain addressed wallet.
3. The Kred marketplace on OpenSea includes royalties for early adopters. The first time user of a Kred Domain will receive an ongoing 3% royalty whenever the Kred Domain Token is resold (after March 20th).
4. Fully ERC721 compliant! Kred domains can be transferred to any wallet address, or sold on OpenSea You can dive into their documentation here.
5. Kred is ICANN accredited, searchable on Whois and Google
6. It comes with all the ENS features!

How ENS and DNS are synchronized under the hood

The Kred Top Level Domain Registry maintains a daemon that monitors the Ethereum blockchain and looks for updates to the DNS information stored against .Kred ENS Domain Tokens. These changes are validated, and then automatically propagated through to the .Kred DNS server infrastructure with no further input needed from the token holder, within a minute of the transaction being written to the blockchain. The .Kred DNS servers act as a cache of the EthDNS information.

Timeline

• January 20, 2020: The Kred team will release a guide to the DNS ENS Kred TLD.

• February 20, 2020: Kred TLD premium auction list will be published at NFT.NYC. Brand and Early Bird Pre-Registration begins.

• March 20, 2020: OpenSea Kred premium Auction commences 

• April 20, 2020: General Availability of Kred names.

About Kred

Kred has been an identity solution since October 2011, getting its start as a Score for Social Influencers, and signed an agreement with ICANN to delegate the .Kred top-level domain. Kred also released a platform for creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) at NFT.NYC on 20 February 2019. The Kred Ecosystem includes a developer API, a system for tokenizing digital assets (www.NFT.Kred) and now a DNS ENS compatible domain Registry.