First Loan Ever Made Against a .eth Happened in 2020

The first loan ever made against a .eth name happened on April 14, 2020 against brantly.eth. The name was owned by Brantly Millegan who was then serving as Director of Operations for the Ethereum Name Service. The 6.5 Ξ loan (then equal to $1,000) was repayable over 3 months with 15% interest. The transaction, then considered a landmark event, was memorialized with a one-time NFT mint of the terms.

While this was considered a technological achievement and done for publicity, Brantly opined at the time that loans of such nature would actually make sense.

“I put up the ENS name brantly.eth as collateral,” he wrote in his blog post about it. “Brantly is my first name and has great personal value to me, so I have a strong incentive to repay the loan; and first names are generally valuable .ETH names since they’re short, and there can only be one owner per name.”

The lending platform was called RocketNFT. Rocket called it “the first ever domain name backed loan ⌨️🚀” at the time.

Brantly further wrote that he’d still be able to use the name while it was being held in escrow.

“In this case, I was able to transfer the Registrant power over to the Rocket LP DAO multisig wallet but keep myself as the Controller,” he wrote. “This means that while Rocket LP DAO now owns the name and could remove me as the Controller if I default on the loan, in the mean time I can continue to manage and use the name. This is akin to how when you buy a car with a loan, the bank holds the title but still lets you use the car while you’re paying it off.”