Huge shoutout to all Service Providers of 2024 for answering these questions and participating in highlighting their achievements. My intention was to write and publish this article months ago (prior to frENSday in Bangkok) but alas, a founder’s journey is a wild and bumpy one with little free time.

The Unsung Heroes

The first time the Service Provider program was announced I felt inspired and wanted to write about the ENS ecosystem, its builders and contributions, and how big of a role they play in the ecosystem. You can read more about that here:

Now, a year and a half later, I still find it funny that people are not bullish enough on Service Providers and the ENS ecosystem. ENS has organically attracted some of the best builders in Web3 without needing to spray millions in $ENS incentives. When you compare our ecosystem or even our weekly calls, we rival (in numbers and quality) those building on L2 chains. And that’s wild when you think about it because L2s are full-fledged economies where you can build anything. ENS, by contrast, operates within a much more constrained scope—domains, identity, naming services, etc. Yet despite these limitations, we’ve built one of the most vibrant, high-quality developer ecosystems in Web3. That should tell you something…

ENS is open-source

We all know what being open source means but do we really know what it implies and enables? Let me try to capture the value and importance of being open-source.

Open-source projects have a fundamental edge over private companies. When anyone, anywhere in the world can contribute, innovation and scaling aren’t bottlenecked by a single entity’s vision or resources. It becomes a global movement of builders collaborating to create something bigger than themselves, something that benefits everyone, equally.

People spend way too much time fixating on ENS Labs, with both praise and criticism, while overlooking the work Service Providers are doing. More importantly, there’s this expectation that Labs should build everything—the protocol, the tools, the apps, and not just one, but multiple apps tailored to different users and use cases. That’s neither realistic nor how ecosystems thrive. The real strength of ENS comes from the broader community of builders pushing it forward.

To clarify, ENS Labs is in charge of developing and improving the protocol, enhancing performance, features, scalability, etc., while ensuring it remains decentralized, neutral, and censorship-resistant for everyone. Tailoring the protocol to fit the specific needs of one user group wouldn’t just complicate things, it would fundamentally shift how the protocol is perceived and used by the broader ecosystem.

That’s exactly why the Service Provider program exists. To fill market needs, build apps, drive developer adoption, increase dev integrations, forge partnerships, focus on industries, and push innovation forward. It’s about installing ENS into every corner of Web3, verticle by verticle.

The Role of Service Providers

There’s an ongoing discussion about the role of Service Providers—what they should focus on and how to best leverage their time and skills to maximize ENS’s impact and growth.

Coming from the startup world, I always approach things by identifying real problems and finding practical solutions that actually help people. All Service Providers should be asking themselves this question: What needs to be done to cement ENS as the de facto naming service of Web3, forever? And figure out how to best utilize their unique skills and make meaningful contributions.

When deciding how to best contribute my time and effort to ENS, I kept asking myself that question over and over again. That question shaped my focus, and I’ve shared my thoughts on what needs to be addressed in my case, how I’m defining the problem that exists in the market, and what I’m doing to solve it.

I outlined my thoughts in this article:

Our approach to contributing to ENS is not one-dimensional because we embody our work (ENS) as a lifestyle. That means building, collaborating, advocating, hosting spaces, doing podcasts, appearing at events, giving talks about ENS, and representing ENS across different channels. It’s about making ENS an integral part of our daily lives, not just through writing code, but through community and culture.

And we are not the only ones! A few months ago, I reached out to my fellow Service Providers to check in on what they’re building. My goal was simple: highlight their work and make sure more people, or at least my subscribers and followers, know about their contributions to ENS. Too much great work flies under the radar, and that needs to change!

Service Providers Showcase

A couple of months ago, I asked every Service Provider to give me updates on what they were building. Even though I knew what everyone was working on, I was still blown away by their impact. Hopefully, this gives the next generation of Service Providers a clear picture of what the first batch focused on and serves as a foundation for what’s next.

Eth.limo

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We've been focused on introducing more resilient systems and processes to ensure that performance and availability are top-notch. In addition, we also spent a significant amount of time this year preparing for the eth.link migration to the eth.limo service. In terms of new features, we are in the process of building and testing a more "trustless" implementation of the eth.limo service that pushes the resolution logic down the client.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the ENS?

Public goods are hard, but a rising tide lifts all ships. The eth.limo/eth.link services play a pivotal role in expanding the reach of decentralized websites built with ENS by providing valid URLs, accessible to anyone. This means that there is a lower barrier to entry for developers and users alike when it comes to either publishing or accessing decentralized content. Additionally, we also provide resolution capabilities via DNS over HTTPS (DoH) which allow users to wire up various clients (Kubo, native DNS, etc...) with CCIP-read enabled ENS name resolution.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

• We launched *.gno.limo, using the Genome Domains ENS integration for Gnosis.

• We now power the eth.link service.

Reasons to Be Bullish

We aim to continue to partner with and support ENS ecosystem projects and their users. Ideally, our future state is one in which we have removed the vast majority of implicit trust assumptions relating to the eth.limo service, without sacrificing performance or usability.

Ethereum Follow Protocol

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We are building Ethereum Follow Protocol (EFP), a decentralized onchain social graph protocol for Ethereum accounts. It is a new primitive of the Ethereum identity stack that complements the other existing elements, especially ENS.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

The Ethereum ecosystem needs a native onchain social graph protocol that complements the other existing elements like ENS. It adds a social layer to all the things that we’re already doing in crypto.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

• EFP launched on September 24, 2024!

• Activity in one week: ~4.4k lists created by ~2.5k unique users, who have performed nearly 100k list operations (follow, unfollow, tag, untag).

• Activity on the public testnet: ~1.2k lists created by ~1.1k unique users, who performed ~72k list operations.

• For up-to-date stats, see the EFP Leaderboard and our Dune analytics dashboard.

• EFP has 13 confirmed integrations so far. For those interested in integrating, see our public API docs.

• EFP is the only web3 social graph protocol that does not have its own competing name and profile system and instead makes full and exclusive use of ENS: Primary Name, avatar, header, bio, twitter, github, telegram, discord, URL, and contenthash.

Reasons to Be Bullish

EFP’s ambition is to become a new protocol of the Internet, alongside ENS, enabling a new era of Internet accounts that enable self-sovereign, portable identities.

Unicorn.eth

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

Adding utility to names. We want to make every name a safe, user-friendly wallet, or even better, a wallet creation portal!

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Onboarding new users to web3 is unreasonably difficult.

• 0x addresses

• Networks

• Seed Phrases

• Phishing

• Countless ways to make expensive mistakes

We want to make all of the above a thing of the past and help anyone with a domain name onboard their users to web3.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

Our infrastructure is going to be used by everyone at ETH Denver, and that's only the beginning. We hope to soon enable anyone who wants to launch a wallet to be able to launch the safest wallet in web3 in just a few clicks, all built on top of ENS.

Reasons to Be Bullish

Everyone talks about onboarding the next billion, but we have a strategy to actually do it. We want to enable brands to SAFELY onboard users into the space, while also promoting their brands via their domain name. Each brand can control what their users are able to access in the brand's wallet space, and if the user has wallets with multiple brands, the assets underneath are the same (one smart contract wallet, multiple domain names; Thx ENS!) Our wallet design makes phishing nearly impossible and we remove all the complexity from the normal web3 experience, giving the user and CEX-like experience.

Wildcard Labs

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We're building a unified records resolver that empowers users to manage their ENS records across any Layer 2 (L2) network that posts its proofs on Ethereum Mainnet. Whether it's Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, or others, we want users to have the freedom to manage their ENS data on their preferred L2. Our motto is "Unchain your ENS records"—emphasizing the flexibility and interoperability of ENS across the Ethereum ecosystem. ENS is inherently multichain, and we want to ensure it serves the entire community, especially as L2 adoption grows.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Our contributions to the ENS ecosystem are all about breaking down barriers between chains and making ENS management simpler and more intuitive for users. As people engage with different chains, they shouldn’t feel restricted or locked into one network. By supporting multichain ENS record management, we’re making it easier for users to interact across the ecosystem, aligning with the multichain future of Ethereum. This approach not only helps onboard more users but makes the entire experience of managing records seamless and user-friendly.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

We’re excited about integrating existing tools like AvatarSync and ENSRedirect into our platform. AvatarSync will allow users to pull their social media avatars from platforms like Twitter, Farcaster, and Lens directly to their ENS profile, or even generate new avatars automatically. ENSRedirect will let users link their ENS name to a URL seamlessly. These are just the beginning. We'll keep building and adding new plugins to our unified resolver manager to enhance the user experience further.

We’re also experimenting with different in-person strategies for onboarding users to ENS. At ETHSafari 2024, we recognized that gas costs were a significant barrier for non-Web3 native users, especially those new to wallets like Coinbase Wallet. To address this, we set up a site where attendees could gaslessly claim a safari.eth ENS subdomain. The response was amazing—over 250 people claimed subdomains, astonished that they could get an ENS name for free without paying gas. Each subdomain was even set up with an autogenerated avatar, aligning with our goal of eliminating barriers to entry and making ENS easy for casual users. You can still claim these subdomains at http://safari.eth.limo.

Reasons to Be Bullish

Looking ahead, in the next 5 years, we see a future where network switching on wallets is a relic of the past. Our vision is an interoperable, multichain Ethereum ecosystem where managing ENS records is as seamless, intuitive, and chain-agnostic as possible. We'll continue building new tools and plugins that make ENS more interactive and fun, allowing users to do even more with their names and records. ENS will become an integral part of everyday Web3 experiences, making it fun, functional, and easily accessible to everyone.

Namestone

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We aim to be the premier subname provider for ENS. We believe that issuing subnames should be easy. Today there are over 10 million subnames, we hope to facilitate the next 100 million through NameStone.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Our products and tech help anyone with an ENS name, including brands like POAP and Converse.xyz, create and issue L2 or gasless subnames. We also built enspro.xyz, a personal subname management system free for anyone to use. Further, we strive to not only provide technology but education as well. We are proud of our work with Columbia Business School professor Omid Malekan, where we issued L2 ENS names on Arbitrum for his class of future leaders.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

We’re proud of our accomplishments so far!

• Over 15,000 subnames

• 100+ domains using our products

• 2,000+ L2 subnames

• 1m+ resolutions and growing

Reasons to Be Bullish

NameStone’s internal mantra is “your name, your way, fast”. We aim to deliver subnames with the right amount of customization, from 100% gasless to issuing on and L2 your choice, from trusted to trustless. Whatever a business needs we are here to serve. Our number one goal is to support ENS in being the first and last username of every person, business, and event on the planet.

Blockful

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

Until now our biggest effort as a service provider was working towards a better user experience and developer experience for the offchain domains, by creating a standard for write operations such as editing records, issuing subdomains, and transferring them. The standard is called wildcard writing.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

The proposed standard will enable the integration of any given domain issuers such as Base, Linea, and Namespace by providing a common writing interface, meaning that all those domains could be managed by the ENS app and any other frontend that adopts it. Creating a network effect that will improve user and developer experience.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

Milestone:

• Fully working database implementation deployed to Mainnet enabling CCIP-Read and wildcard writing.

• A frontend application to show how the user experience looks like with this standard. name.ful.xyz/

• dapp integrating with the proposed standard for the Database Resolver (Arbitrum L2 WIP)

• Development of the L2 version of the standard and deploying it on Arbitrum Sepolia. Soon we'll deploy it on Optimism and Arbitrum Mainnet.

• ENSIP-16 modified to gather the most important information of the offchain domains

Next Steps:

• Support the integration with the existing offchain issuers (e.g. Base, Linea, Namespace, Namestone) and ENS Labs for the ENS app.

• Deploy on production to L2s

• Integrate with the ENSv2 architecture

Reasons to Be Bullish

Our future vision is also related of how we wanna evolve the service provider relation with ENS for the next year. We aim to become an organization that supports the governance, through tools that increase security, transparency and efficiency of the DAO. Currently we are a team of 15, doing work supported by the Uniswap foundation, Optimism, Arbitrum, Shutter DAO and others coming soon.

NameHash Labs

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We're building NameKit to help reduce the barriers for devs to build strong ENS integrations into their platforms. There's many subcomponents to NameKit, including NameGuard and ENSNode which our team is working hard to release. More details here: https://github.com/namehash/namekit

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Some of the key outcomes we're working towards right now include improvements to the core ENS protocol and refinements to the UX for key ENS interactions. For example: social profile records are a key opportunity for improvement. We're working on an ENSIP that can accelerate the loading time of ENS profile data by 10x or more while also always serving the latest state and not stale cached results. Additionally, this ENSIP can support cross-chain resolvers and offchain resolvers.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

At frENSday we'll be sharing more details about the above ENSIP under development.

Reasons to Be Bullish

We're actively building, hiring, and looking for special talent to join our team to help ENS grow!

Unruggable

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

We are working on making ENS better overall and easier to use.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

We are addressing fundamental challenges with ENS, including scaling and improving multi-chain support.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

We recently launched Unruggable Gateways, which allows resolving data cross-chain, including resolving ENS names from L2s to L1 Ethereum with proofs.

Namespace

What Are You Building/Focusing On as a Service Provider?

Our focus is on growing ENS userbase. We are building apps and developer tools that streamline the adoption and use of ENS and expand its utility. We are building both for the end-users - allowing them to seamlessly issue subnames to anyone on any chain, and for developers - enabling them to easily integrate subname registrations and management into their dapps.

How Do Your Contributions Benefit the Protocol/Users/Community/Web3 Space Etc.?

Our products are directly tied to the ENS. We work with wallets to issue subnames to their users, with games to implement ENS as a gamer username system, with AI launchpads to assign a human-readable identity to all agents, with blockchain tools and service providers to extend their core offering with namespace-as-a-service, etc.

Highlight Achievements, Milestones, KPIs, Metrics, Results, and/or Future Plans

We built Namespace App, Namespace Dev (soon), and Namespace SDK!

In terms of partnerships and integrations, we are constantly working on moving the needle forward and keeping active conversations going. Currently talking with multimillion-user wallets, payroll, rollup-as-a-service, identity providers, etc.

• We are closing in on 30,000 Subnames in total.

• More than 100 ENS Widget integrations.

• More than 100 namespaces running.

• Dev tooling integrations with Web3js, QuickNode, Tatum = more than 1,000 downloads.

• Farcaster frames integration.

• Subname minting available on Ethereum, Base, Optimism, or Offchain.

Reasons to Be Bullish

We are constantly working on new things, experimenting, following industry evolution, and staying in the loop with all innovation and development. We will not stop until we have minted 1 billion subnames and installed ENS subname registration with every wallet, app, protocol, and social network, and completely replaced the 0x addresses with human-readable names!

UPDATE (Feb 2025)

These Q&As are a couple of months old and A LOT has happened since then:

• EFP kept growing and the team has launched IdentityKit - a new flagship product complementing EFP in the beginning but in the future be used as an open-source library with all identity-related tools and services for Web3 apps.

• Unicorn has partnered with ETH Denver and onboarded 20,000 users and got accepted into Orange DAO.

• Wildcard Labs has launched Records.xyz - an easy multichain record management website.

• NamehashLabs has launched NodeAI and NameAI - further compiling their developer tooling system for scaling ENS.

• Namestone has launched Durin - easy-to-launch L2 registries that enable L2 subname minting.

• Namespace is soon releasing its Dev Portal - making Offchain subnames easily accessible to everyone and is also working on V2 version on the Web app and an AI agent naming standard.

And probably a ton of new updates and developments that I’m not aware of.

So I’ll say it once again:

You, are, not, bullish, enough, on, Service Providers!

🥂