Ethereum Name ServiceENS Labs takes over maintainership of Durin L2 subname toolkit
ENS Labs has completed the transfer of Durin.dev and all its associated assets, announced by Slobo and amplified by ens.eth. The transfer happened because Durin was left without an active maintainer after NameStone shut down earlier this year.
Durin is an open-source, opinionated approach to issuing ENS L2 subnames — with L1 resolvers, L2 registries storing subnames as ERC-721 NFTs, and registrars controlling minting — originally built by NameStone under an ENS DAO grant. Since launching in 2024, it has been used at every major ENS hackathon.
- Handed over with help from @gregskril and @Jefflau: the Durin.dev domain, the GitHub repo (now under the ensdomains org), associated infrastructure and smart contract ownership.
- The tool remains open source, and ENS Labs will continue maintaining it for L2 subname issuance.
Ethereum Name Service
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain.
ENS’s job is to map human-readable names like ‘alice.eth’ to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata. ENS also supports ‘reverse resolution’, making it possible to associate metadata such as canonical names or interface descriptions with Ethereum addresses.
ENS has similar goals to DNS, the Internet’s Domain Name Service, but has significantly different architecture due to the capabilities and constraints provided by the Ethereum blockchain. Like DNS, ENS operates on a system of dot-separated hierarchical names called domains, with the owner of a domain having full control over subdomains.
Top-level domains, like ‘.eth’ and ‘.test’, are owned by smart contracts called registrars, which specify rules governing the allocation of their subdomains. Anyone may, by following the rules imposed by these registrar contracts, obtain ownership of a domain for their own use. ENS also supports importing in DNS names already owned by the user for use on ENS.
