Ethereum's ENS Identity System Picks Consensys' Tech for Its Layer-2

ENS Labs, the company behind the Ethereum Name Service, said Tuesday that it picked Linea’s technology to build its upcoming layer-2 network, Namechain.

Linea is a zero-knowledge rollup that came out in July 2023 and was built by Ethereum infrastructure giant Consensys. It is the seventh-largest rollup network, according to L2Beat, with $1 billion locked in its ecosystem.

ENS Labs said it picked Linea to build its network for two reasons. “One is sort of values alignment,” said Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS. The other has to do with speed.

Rollups are a special type of blockchain where one can transact faster and at a lower cost. There are two kinds of rollups: optimistic and zero-knowledge. Optimistic rollups use optimistic proofs, which have a seven-day window to dispute transactions before they are finalized (proofs are assumed to be “optimistic” that no one will dispute their contents). Zero-knowledge rollups, by contrast, use zero-knowledge cryptography, seen by many as a superior technology, to secure proofs and finalize those proofs within minutes.

ENS has been described as “the phone book for Web3,” but a more precise analogy is the web’s domain name service (DNS). The domain name “CoinDesk.com” is easier to remember and type than a numerical IP address. Similarly, ENS handles like parishilton.eth, which the namesake heiress acquired in 2021, are more relatable than the strings of letters and numbers that make up Ethereum wallet addresses.

For this service, “we need fast finality,” Johnson said. That’s because “you want to be able to update your ENS name and have the chain reflect it in the smallest interval possible. And to do that and have it remain decentralized and secure, we need fast finality, and optimistic roll-ups can’t deliver that,” Johnson said.

The news comes as other major crypto projects announce their intentions to roll out layer-2 networks, though unlike ENS, some of the biggest names in blockchain have tapped Optimism’s OP Stack to build out their networks.

ENS will be one of the first major projects to build out a layer-2 blockchain based on Linea’s technology (Linea is also building a layer-2 network for blockchain wallet application Status.)

The team behind Linea said last month that it plans to issue a Linea token. Both Johnson and Nicolas Liochon, the founder of Linea, told CoinDesk that there are no concrete plans yet for how that token would be used in the Namechain ecosystem.

Liochon said having the Namechain team working on the Linea stack will help strengthen and decentralize the L2 protocol.

“We really want to have multiple organizations contributing to Linea, and we work on having more organizations too, as a way to make [the network] more secure,” he said. “So really, we want to have multiple teams so there’s no centralization point.”