This was originally a 20 “xeet” thread on X, now consolidated here in a single post.
Your .eth is integated into the web whether you want it to be or not and whether you believe it or not. If you type your-name-here.eth in Chrome, no website pops up, but if you append .limo to the end of it, something does. your-name-here.eth.limo can be customized to show whatever content a .eth user wants. That’s just the beginning. That page can be indexed by traditional search engines, generating an actual resolvable landing page result for regular web browsers if someone were to google just your-name-here.eth.
Let’s google: nick.eth
Nick is the founder of ENS. Two of the top results I get are:
https://nick.eth.limo
https://nick.eth.xyz
It also pulls up a profile link on coinbase, voting history on snapshot, among other content related to the name.
Most people think of .eth names as wallet addresses but in this case, the name has become actual digital real estate on the web and search. If nick.eth sells his name, the buyer inherits all the web properties connected to it! The buyer can now monetize those pages with links, ads, or any other creative concept. Many internet users don’t use the address bar of a browser anyway. They use search. There are real world clicks to be gotten here.
If someone were to google nick.eth and 10 pages linked to the wallet owner of nick.eth come up like a .limo, .xyz, .photos, .whateverelse with links, images, content designed by the owner of nick.eth, then it must have some monetizable value on the traditional web. Consider also that there are nearly a thousand extensions beyond .limo, .xyz, .photos, etc. The domain name eth.link whereby one could type in your-name-here.eth.link is considered so valuable that it’s currently in litigation.
So imagine a thousand different combinations of your-name-here.eth.___ in search all built in some way to display content that the .eth owner has set up. The owner can just update their ENS profile and it will update data across the entire integrated web.
While your-name-here.com may be vastly superior to your-name-here.eth in domain name value, to say that your-name-here.eth is not a webpage or can’t be built on or has no web value at all is just wrong. Beyond eth.___ domains, many web platforms are now building self-generating pages and profiles so that website.com/your-name-here.eth generates content pulled from the .eth wallet owner. And that’s a no-brainer to do because there are currently more than 2.7M active .eth names.
So, any web platform looking to attract users or generate content can instantly integrate 2.7M+ pages of users and content. The more .eth names that are created, the more profiles the platforms get, the more pages that can be discovered in search results. Get it yet?
Think this is all overblown? It’s not. Let’s look at the founder of Ethereum. He’s vitalik.eth. When I type vitalik.eth into Bing, the 1st result I get is: https://vitalik.eth.li
It’s NOT .com
It’s a real webpage result connected to the vitalik.eth wallet owner. If Vitalik were to sell vitalik.eth, he’s not just giving away a wallet address for payments, he’d be giving up the very first web page result in search for his own name. Just think about the value of that alone. Yahoo and Duckduckgo produced the same result for me as Bing.
How about beer.eth, which Budweiser purchased in 2021 as part of a web3 marketing stunt. One wonders now if they can ever release the name back into the wild. Not only does the name beer.eth generate news story results about the purchase but there are virtually unlimited web platforms that show content content related to beer.eth’s wallet.
https://profile.coinbase.com/beer.eth
https://rainbow.me/beer.eth
All current and future web3 platforms
That means a new owner of beer.eth would inherit all of them and could even add more. Would be a pretty amazing possibility for an upstart beer company to capture the unlimited sites and profiles connected to beer.eth, where all links and branding reroute to the new brand.
All of this means that there is no need for .eth to ever resolve natively in a web browser because it’s already being integrated into the web. This system establishes a framework for how one can legitimately value a name. What comes up in search? What COULD come up?
Building in this way would still require the skills and know-how to create a business and generate revenue. If you don’t know how to do that, then having your-name-here.eth resolve natively in Chrome wouldn’t change a thing. You’d still have to know how to make money.