Table of Contents
Overview
The Ethereum Naming Service(ENS) has announced their airdrop on Nov 2 2020 and it has caused a lot of buzz on social media and traditional media at the same time. This attention from the media generated a lot of free marketing for ENS and led to the acquisition of a number of new users, including celebrities like Paris Hilton and Shaq. We will now explore how much revenue ENS has generated since their airdrop.
The ENS has generated 13.65 million USD in revenue since this airdrop. The majority of the revenue came from newly registered ENS domain registrations, about 12.64 million. The remaining 1.01 million USD was generated from users renewing their ENS domains.
The following chart shows the daily revenue generated by the ENS, with a breakdown of new domain sales and renewals. From November 8th, the day when airdropped tokens were allowed to be claimed, revenue began to increase dramatically and continued for the next seven days, exceeding over 400,000 USD per day. A daily revenue peak of 830,000 USD was recorded on November 9th 2021.
In addition to the above chart, here is another view of the distribution of revenue from new domain registrations in comparison to existing domains. As you can see from this chart, the revenue generated from new ENS domains registrations for most of the time was way over 90%.
How Much Revenue Does Premium Domains Generate?
Any domain that has four or fewer letters in the name is considered a premium domain in the ENS system since they are rare as well as most sought after. In comparison to standard domains with five or more characters, registering a new premium domain or extending an existing premium domain is expensive. Domains with 1-3 characters cost about 640 dollars, 160 dollars for 4 characters, and 5 dollars for 5+ characters. Let’s compare the revenue generated by Premium Domains to Regular Domains since the airdrop announcement.
Premium domains generated around 51% of total revenue or 6.93 million dollars, while regular domains generated 6.62 million dollars. Further analysis of the data reveals that out of the 6.93 million dollars generated by premium domain names, 4.35 million dollars were generated by 1-3 letter domain names.
ENS Revenue Before and After Airdrop
While the Airdrop has brought a considerable amount of attention to the ENS ecosystem and resulted in a huge influx of new users registering their favourite ETH domains, how does the amount of revenue before the airdrop compare to the amount after airdrops? It would be worthwhile to compare revenue generated by ENS before and after airdrops in order to gain a better understanding of what is happening. In the chart below, you will see the daily revenue of 60 days in both directions, based on the Airdrop date, Nov 2nd, as the midpoint.
After 60 days the marketing boost that ENS Airdrops brought to it seems to have wearing off slowly. There has been a slowdown in the number of ENS transactions and the daily revenue has been returning to levels seen before the ENS Airdrop began.
Web3 vs Web 2: How does ENS compare to its peers in the Web2 world?
Since the entire crypto ecosystem is still in its very early stages (or on the verge of infant stage), and ENS is not even two years old (launched in 2020 May), comparing these results to those of an established 25+ year old Internet is like comparing apples to oranges. Having said that let us check how the ENS application is stacking against the Web 2 players. Take these comparisons and metrics with a pinch of salt!
The following chart compares GoDaddy’s 90 days from internet domain revenue with ENS revenue. GoDaddy’s revenue is 453 million, so the 15.5 million revenue of the ENS application is roughly 3.5% of the 453 million revenue of GoDaddy. Though the current revenue of ENS application is very low, ENS domains adoption is growing at a triple-digit rate month-over-month, while GoDaddy’s growth is around 17 percent on a quarterly basis. I am of the opinion that it is only a matter of time before ENS catches up with Web 2 giants such as GoDaddy.
Now lets us compare the number of ETH domains registered with number of dot-com domains registered. ENS domains at the moment are like a drop in the ocean of dot-com domains, but tailwinds on ETH domain adoption we are going to see a rapid raise in ETH domains adoptions in next decade or two.
Forecasting ENS Revenue
Let’s end our analysis with a Machine Learning based forecasting of monthly revenues using ARIMA model. The models are projecting ENS monthly revenue reaching 28 millions by end of 2023.
References
The following sources are referred for analyzing ENS application revenue