The Silent Revolution: How Enscribe Is Making Ethereum Safer for Everyone

In this episode, we’re exploring the fascinating world of ENS-powered contract naming with Conor, the founder behind Enscribe.

Conor takes us through his journey from discovering Ethereum back in 2016, inspired by its “world computer” ethos and close ties to the open-source community, to launching pivotal projects like web3j and now Enscribe. Enscribe sets out with a bold mission: to eliminate confusing hex addresses from Ethereum's user experience and make interacting with smart contracts safer and more human-friendly through recognizable names.

We discuss the technical challenges of contract naming, the slow but steady adoption across the ecosystem, and the powerful impact this seemingly simple innovation can have—improving trust, usability, and the everyday crypto experience. Conor also sheds light on how integrating ENS with existing contract deployment tools could make it easier for developers to bring this to the mainstream, and we touch on the potential for DAOs and public goods funding to help drive adoption.

00:00 "Discovering Ethereum: A Tech Journey"

04:05 "Journey from Mining to Web3"

07:52 Innovating Beyond Established Block Explorers

12:01 "Digital Verification and Authenticity"

15:14 "Name Your Contracts Initiative"

18:52 ENS Name Resolution Challenges

22:47 Automating Naming in ENS Deployment

26:19 Streamlining Token Launch with ENS Integration

28:32 Ethereum's Decentralization vs. Super Apps

35:18 ENS Ecosystem Funding Initiatives

40:24 Subdomains: Untapped Potential in Communities

44:35 Enhancing Smart Contract Verification

48:21 Enhancing ENS for Safer Contracts

50:36 Trust Signals Beyond Audits

54:17 Careful Expansion of ENS Initiative

57:30 Pakistani Cuisine in London

Links:

Twitter

Website

Incentive Campaign

Transcript

0:00

When we strip everything back with everything we do, it comes back to the question of can this make Ethereum safer for the users? GM welcome back to another episode of behind the Screen with Rumalho, the podcast where we unravel the untold stories of the best on chain builders and creators. I'm your host, Grimaho, an avid crypto enthusiast that's been in the space since 2012. Yeah, so this week I sat down with Connor from Inscribe. Inscribe is a really cool product or tool that's basically further pushing the whole idea of ENS about naming smart contracts bots. Really anything else, not just your wallet, which is super simple but like very empowering. Once you see like the user experience or user interfaces, once they support this, it's going to really unlock and make it feel more human for us. It's very powerful stuff. Before we dive in, I wanted to also take a moment to thank the ENS Dao community. They've been really like, welcoming into, like sitting down with me and wanting to chat. So that would include Maurice from the Fluid Key team, Cap from the Namespace team, and now Connor. They've all, you know, everyone's been very welcoming and they've been great about, you know, wanting to talk about how ENS Dow is really changing how we interact with, with crypto on an everyday basis. So, yeah, hope you enjoyed this episode. Let's dive in. Yeah, so I wanted to kind of dive into who, who you are, obviously. Feel free to dox yourself as much as you'd like. And how did you get into Web3? So it's going back to 2016, basically. I had been working, I'd broken out of the, the corporate world, which I'd spent far too many years in, always being a technologist. And I, yeah, escaped at the end of 2015, worked on a somewhat optimistic startup with some people trying to redo mortgages in the Australian home loans market, which is a pretty closed place unless, you know, you've got a big balance sheet. And after sort of six months of realizing it wasn't going anywhere, I stumbled across Ethereum. I'd always been kind of aware of Bitcoin, but had never really going to capture my interest as much, just because it was always the Bitcoin narrative back then anyway was certainly about this digital money system, whereas Ethereum had this kind of distributed computer narrative about it, or the world computer, whatever you want to say it. And that just captured my attention. I've been a massive fan of Linux going back to like the 90s and early 2000s and the kind of, that view of it being such a transformative technology really reminded me of Linux back then and that there was, it was just like this community of hackers working on this thing, you know, that everyone loved and yeah there was, there was of course the, you know, Ether, the cryptocurrency associated with it and actually the first project I did was to build a mining rig. I was like going around Gumtree which is like the buy and sell place in, in Australia and just trying to find people who are trying to like offload like their own, their old like graphics cards to pick them up and then you know, when it went and bought the stuff to build like a metal mining rig and did that and we went along to the Sydney Ethereum meetup and met some of the other you know, people in the community like and you know, talked about building a mining rig and randomly like the Sigma prime team were there as well. They had their mining rigs and it was just kind of fun back then. But as I, you know, I liked the whole ecosystem and I liked, you know, what it stood for and really just started thinking about other things I could do in it and I'd spend back then anyway you had digital asset they were like, you know, they, they were probably the big kind of venture backed play on the scene talking about the transformative potential of Blockch and how it's going to completely change financial services. And I'd spent a lot of time in that world. I'd been building on the Java and the JVM for many, many years and I'd seen how much infrastructure is built on that. And something that I noticed was a very clear gap was that Java developers didn't have an easy way to work with Ethereum. And this is, I think it was in August, September 2016 I authored a library called web3j and that was kind of, I guess my first proper contribution to the ecosystem and things kind of went from there. I can kind of continue on this journey but that's, that's how I first got into Web3. But a lot's happened since because I've been working on it every day since. Yeah, no, that's epic. I think it's, with it hitting its 10 years and the types of people that it attracts. Like, like there's a lot of overlap especially like you said, with the Linux community. Like I also like Linux as well. Big, big supporter of it. Haven't been involved with Linux since not that long. I would say maybe four or five years ago. When I started building my home lab here at home, I started liking and really diving into Linux and you know, like that it's actually, it looks like it's getting like a bit of a renaissance or like people are like really digging it again, which is great, but fantastic. So you're from Australia, so I know you're currently building enscribe. Is that like the best way to say it? Yeah, I call it Inscribe but ENS for emphasis especially when we first launched it was really obvious that there's a connection with ENS there. Enscribe. Okay, there you go. That's the best way to. That sounds more fluid actually, so I was emphasizing it too much. But yeah, what is Inscribe? And when did you get this idea to build something like it? So Inscribe we have a very simple goal and that's to see hexadecimal smart contract addresses eliminated from the Ethereum user experience. And off the back of that, really our broader mission is to make Ethereum dapps safer for users. By virtue of that, the real idea for inscribe actually came to me off the back of being at devcon last year in Bangkok. I've been to a number of dev cons over the years. I think the first one I went to was it DEVCON 2 in Shanghai as I was living in Australia back then, but now I'm back in London. But I think it was just that I hadn't been to the one a couple of years before that and I'd been to osaka. What's that, DEVCON 4? Maybe no, 5. Anyway, but I think the point was it was getting out there, chatting to people, just having some headspace to really think about Ethereum and so on in the kind of the last five years or so with my company Web3Labs, which I did start back in 2017, we kind of been relying on on consulting revenues, trying to keep Web3J going. And then we have a block explorer called Chainlens that we built. But I think the challenge was that we really weren't the only explorer in town. You've got Etherscan, Blockscout, they've definitely cemented their position, I'd say there. And whilst we have customers for didn't excite me in the way I wanted to feel excited and look, I feel like the biggest way you can give to the Ethereum ecosystem is solve a problem that other people aren't solving or find ways to accelerate a problem. And something that just kind of struck me and actually I think part of this was from some conversations I had there with people. But it was this idea that I remember probably 10, 15 years or so ago, when I first played around with Heroku, which was like one of the original web platforms for just deploying apps. What you do, you type like a Heroku deploy command, I think, on a cli. And what it do is package up an app and then deploy it to be like a few words tied together, like your awesome app.herokuapp.com I thought, why don't we have something similar to that for Web3 apps? We're in this crazy place where we have the ENS protocol and there's this inevitability. Everyone feels that ENS will replace hex addresses. But then it's been going for eight years and no one seems to be using it for smart contract naming. And I just thought, surely when people talk to smart contracts, they should be seeing an ENS name. If you saw before you sign a transaction, this is from Uniswap Eth, then you're going to have a bit more confidence. It's the right contract instead of just some hexadecimal. And then it's hosted on the Uniswap eth. Sorry, the uniswap.org domain. And so that was kind of the inspiration. It was this idea of how can we have this Heroku like, thing where you can deploy contracts and suddenly it's got a cool name and inscribe came off the back of that within the team. We really started thinking more deeply about it at the end of last year and then beginning of this year, sketching down our ideas in a white paper and just trying to think about this kind of contract naming pie and also really understanding the lay of the land. On the ENS side. We had kind of been associated indirectly with ENS for a number of years because the web3j library, which I wrote back all those years ago, we've always supported ENS ever since. I think it was in 2017. I added the initial support to it. And then whenever there were big changes being made there, the team would get in touch. And so we've always been, you know, aligned with them. But I think that the thing here was that, you know, how can we start accelerating the naming of smart contracts? And that was kind of where inscribe came from. Yeah, no, it's like a. When I saw that you were building this on Twitter, I think that's where I ran into it at first. It clicked so quickly. I was like, man, like, how has this not been a thing in the past? I think about it constantly too, with AI and smart contracts, like you said with worldcoin, we want to verify that you're speaking to a human. And I was like, I just want to verify that I'm speaking to the right agent or bot or thing that's out in Web three to make sure it's a legit one. And it reminded me a lot of back in the old Bitcoin days, people used to sign their commits with their PGP key. So you were able to verify that, hey, this is actually the right. Obviously if the PGP get compromised, then you're after. But for the most part, it was like a digital signature saying like, hey, this is actually me and this is the legit version of the code. And you would sign off on that with like a blog post or your code commit or whatever. And so I remember like learning that was like the first time I ever got exposed to that kind of thinking, where it was like, okay, you know, trust by verify, you know. So it was like, okay, so I was downloading a new, like, software for some bitcoin thing that I was doing and I was like, you have to like, go to some key register and check like what they submitted it with. Actually matched and was like a valid one to the original creator. Obviously that's a very technical, like, kind of janky solution. So I'm like, so when I first got involved with like, when I decided I wanted to get involved with ENS Dao more, the thing that excited me was like, hey, man, I'm done with like hex addresses. Like, or even just long text addresses. Like, I. I've made mistakes with Bitcoin, like 12 plus years ago doing stuff like that. And Ens, when I first found out about it and everything, it all just clicked. And then with this, it just makes a ton of sense. I think of BankerBot. BankerBot's so popular on the base ecosystem, and I would love nothing for Bankerbot to have a little check mark or something to be like, hey, you are interacting with the legit bought or even like token launches, you know, like, I have a couple tokens that I have and I know I tagged you with with the Clanker team with Dish, and I was like, hey, I'd love to name my, my token, you know, so it's like more you could see it like you said, it's not like this weird address. And you're like, I don't know if that's the right token or not. Like, now it would just say like, I can name it Token Gramaho Eth. And now, you know, it's like as, I mean, assuming, you know, Grandma Hoddie didn't get compromised on my side, like, you can kind of be rest assured, like, that's my token, you know, because it's attached to my. My actual ens. Yeah. So it's, it's a great thing. Can you share kind of some, because I think you've been in. You've been live now for a couple months or have you been live for a little bit longer, like than a year? So we kind of only launched officially in March time and that was kind of when we came out the woodwork. So it's still early days for us. But I think there's two kind of sides to this. One is almost the meme of naming your contracts in that we just want to get people thinking about this. I think, as you were saying, it seems like a clear thing we need, but it also feels like it's kind of like a blind spot that permeates throughout the ecosystem and that people have got so accustomed to signing transactions with hex contract addresses, they don't give it another thought. But once people start to get used to it, then there will be that sort of snowball effect. But when you're coming out and you're not going for a token incentive, you're just trying to take technology that's established, it's proven. ENS has been around for years. I think it's very widely supported and embraced by the ecosystem. But it's turning people onto this opportunity for contracts. You've got to capture attention. And that's kind of the slow burn where it's about just keep putting out regular updates in terms of what we're up to, building our following via the channel so we can build a legitimate community rather than trying to do some sort of token gated quests, which are projects who are launching tokens, obviously going to go towards, but it's trying to really capture the attention that way. But then on the other side, it's building out the technology for this as well, because there are technical challenges with this. For instance, the ENS app, which people generally use for working with their ENS names, that's very much so optimized for accounts. It wasn't designed for smart contracts. And so these are kind of the areas where we're really thinking about, it's building that infrastructure, but it's also just trying to plant the idea in people's heads and just keep, keep banging that drum saying name your contracts over and over. Again and eventually it sort of, you know, it starts to catch on. Yeah, I know you mentioned like, I think I saw it on your forecast or maybe your Twitter or both. But you were saying, like, when you create something, you name it. Like, how is that not the same concept? You know, like. And that resonated with me because I was like, yeah, you know, like, I created a blog recently and I was like, I gotta name this thing. Like, you know, so I had to come up with a name and I was like, okay, I guess I'll go my last name something like blog or I don't even know, you know, but like, yeah, so like, it, it's common in our lives, but for some reason it's not. Yeah, I guess people haven't given it much thought or we haven't really thought about it. Do you know, I actually had a random question and I think I may know the answer to it, but if I. So I named one of my contracts recently. So I have like a fully on chain photography collection. And I just gave it like a name because one, I wanted to get the PO app that was kind of the main driver. The other one was like, this is cool tech. I want to do it. I want to be supportive of this idea because I totally agree with it. Does it update on like the Etherscan side of things? So, like, will people, like. Let's say someone's gonna. How do I phrase it? I guess so if someone, if I minted a new piece and it's an auction when someone buys it, will it actually be reflected like in all the other apps, like in Etherscan or on openc or is that also part of the challenge as well that you're facing is like they need to also I guess recognize that the, like resolve the name that it like it has like a name and don't show the hex kind of thing. So there's, there's kind of, I guess 2, 2, 2 sort of components to this. One part is what we call primary names for ENS names. And so if you think about an ENS name, there's. There's effectively two parts to it, right? You have, you have the, the forward resolving name, which is, you know, it could be a gramoho eth or contract or MyApp Grimoho ETH that goes to hex address 0x123 followed by 37 other characters. And then you have what's called the reverse resolving name. And so this is where you actually have that hex address. And then it. That 0x123. And that resolves back to, you know, MyApp, so grimo eth. And for both, if you have both of those things set, then you have what's called a primary name on ens. And so that means, is that, you know, what that means is when someone has like say Block Explorer, for instance, or a wallet, they encounter a contract hex address, they can call the ENS reverse registry and get the ENS name back from it. But that only works if you've got this thing called a primary name set. And there are limitations in the ENS protocol currently on contract primary naming in that there are ways in which you can set both of those records in terms of both ways, but there isn't a way you can do it for everything. So to kind of unpack that a bit more, you can have an ENS name point to anything but that, that reverse record going from the contract address back to the ENS name, that can only be set in certain situations. And so that can create some challenges for resolving the name. Now, where we are right now, like such a small proportion of contracts are named, like we're in the 0.00 somethings of percent in terms of the proportion of contracts that are named. And one of the things we're actually going to be releasing very soon is just some analytic dashboards with Dune, that kind of show, you know, really kind of call home how small a proportion of contracts are named. So there are some sort of technical challenges there, but that's stuff that we are working to resolve and figure out best way forward at the protocol level in the ens. But then the other part of it is the integration with the different providers. You know, your block explorers like Etherscan and Blockscout, your wallets like Metamask, Rainbow and, you know, various other ones. And the support for ENS is generally good there. Like, if you have a primary name set for a smart contract, you will see that in Etherscan and I haven't checked, but I'd imagine Block Scout as well. But if you only have the forward resolving record is in, you know, that one Direction lookup, then it likely won't show up there, just because anyone can create a record that points to any contract address. So you could, I don't know, you could come up with any ENS name and you could have it pointing to, say, official Uniswap contracts or whatever else. But the way it's designed is that for that reverse record, only Uniswap could claim what's called the reverse record. So you know which One's true. So that is a challenge. But at the same time it's, you know, none of this stuff's insurmountable. It's more about us just having ongoing dialogue to figure out the best way forward. But in the meantime, even having a single forward name is better than no name. You think about DNS on the Internet, right? People are accustomed to having a web address to take them to a website. They're not so fussed about the reverse lookup. And whilst it's not quite the same analogy between that web two mental model and web three, our view is any name is better than no name. And the way inscribe has been set up is that if a contract can have a primary name set, it will get set. If it can't, you should. You still use it to name your contract. Yeah, yeah, I know. That was the experience that I had where I think I couldn't go back, I couldn't set up the reverse, but I could do the forward and it still let me kind of name it, which was fine. Like, you know, like for me it was like it's early, it's early days on this. I was like, I was down to try it. Have there been any. I know you mentioned a Dune dashboard, like what are. Do you have any insights like from going live now for the last six plus months on the types of people behaviors, who are the kinds of people naming it or is it. I mean, I'm guessing it's like early adopters, but yeah. Any insights there on early usage and behavior? So at the moment it's just very much so that early adopter camp and, and often people involved in the ENS ecosystem. And I think part of this reason, it always comes down to this idea developers are lazy, I mean that in the positive sense in that they want to automate everything. And so ways in which we can incorporate naming into the deployment workflow is a really important way to make that happen. I see there has been two main routes there to really build the proper momentum. One is that if you can convince some high profile, whether it's DAOs or projects, to actually use the platform to name their contracts and then ensure that's being reflected in the wallets. So that's one part, but then the other part is just making it easy for people to do that. So that's ensuring that at the point of deployment in the main dev tools that it's feasible. And you know, we're lucky in that there's kind of a precedent with contract verification services like, you know, Via sourceify, Etherscan, Blockscout, I think the Verifier alliance as well, they're kind of, you know, trying to really standardize this stuff. But that's a similar kind of thing in that, you know, you people want to see more than just bytes associated with contracts. They want to be able to know that the source code of the contract exists. They can look at it. Yes, not your average user, but certainly people who are more technically focused. And so hence it's very normal when people use tools such as Foundry or Hardhat to do their deployments, they also do a verification there as well. Typically it is still Etherscan or sourcefire, the main two that are used, but that is kind of, if we tag on naming onto that as well, that's kind of a good way to do it. And so we've got it working with Foundry, but we are having a bit of back and forth with the team in terms of when you're the new kid on the block, it's like people aren't willing to necessarily just let you go all in and just put stuff into the technology. But that's more a feature of how Foundry's been designed. But we're going to be. We have bases on Chain Toolkit, which we're going to be starting work on an integration very soon with. We are going to be integrating with Hardhat as well, and also Remix two. Very, very positive conversation there with the team recently about that. So that's the key part of it for us, is to make sure we've got those integrations. So when you've got the people creating the contracts, you're able to. To feed in the naming piece of it there to what we provide with the app. So I think the apps where you can. It's almost easier to start with the app so that people can go through the experience. You can figure out what are the good integrations, how you can surface the information. But to actually make it easy, you've kind of got to go to where the contracts are being deployed. Rather than trying to say, hey, come and use our app to deploy your contracts. Because that was kind of our starting point within Scribe. But I think the reality is people don't want to have to use a different app to deploy a contract, even if it comes within ENS name, they'd rather stick to what they've got and then, you know that then afterwards, potentially, you know, try and persuade them to name their contracts on our platform or just use the tools that they already do. Yeah, no, I would agree. I feel like almost the app side of it is probably, it's probably what also will get you like just like casual users to be aware of it as well. Because like, I know I just launched a clanker recently and it had been a while and that whole flow is really nice on their interface for launching a token and it already captures the data of my ENS name that I'm the one that launched it when the flow is either about to hit deploy or I don't know when. But it would just be like, hey, do you want to name this thing with your ens? It would just be a good. Because they have a little checkbox of. Do you want to put some in like a vesting account? So like a savior or some kind of hedgy kind of account where it gets locked up. So like they have like a nice little checklist of like for deploying a token and just add like another step of like, do you want to name it and tie it to your ens? I would have done. I would have been like, yeah, you know, and then if people get curious about it, like then they're aware of it at least or know that that's possible. Let's see, because I know we have another 30 minutes. Do you foresee a world where verified contracts are kind of prioritized inside of wallets or explorers? So like the example I think about is kind of like forecaster. Like they're leaning into kind of like social credibility or social proof of when tokens get launched. Like you're able to see who the kind of like who created it, who else has bought it within the ecosystem. So you're kind of like there's like social credit back to it essentially. But like, do you see it also being kind of prioritized from like the, the user experience as well? Like in apps, you know, like if, if it's verified then it's, it's good, you know, like it'll show it or. And it'll kind of like they kind of do that now. Like, you know, like when I go to Matcha sometimes they'll say like, hey, make sure you trust this actual token because we don't know, they give you a little carve out. So if it's linked and everything then that goes away kind of. Do you foresee a world like that? I think that it kind of comes down to staying true to the sort of decentralized roots of Ethereum and the various L2s versus whether you end up with super apps that kind of control too much of, you know, the Experience because there's always going to be sort of, you know, compromises with either approach. Right. One is that, you know, we, we have these, you know, we're in this place where it's like people just have their, have their wallets, they then typically interact directly with contracts and wallets might have a sort of, you know, garden of recommended dapps and so on. But you know, when it comes to the transactional experience, it's still very much so staying true to the Web3 ethos in that it's using like a non custodial wallet and that the users are kind of free to kind of connect to whatever dapps they want. Whereas you have that other side which is where you have a much more integrated experience which is more seamless for users. But then a lot of the detail is kind of abstracted away to the point where you know, you can just work with the apps easily within their walled garden. But then if you look to go outside of that, then it's made quite hard. And I think in that sort of case, which is obviously the more profitable one for any companies to go after, it also is the one that kind of risks the decentralization that Web3 Networks kind of stand for at their heart as well. Because you know, if you, if you effectively limit what, what people can do in their, in, in their, you know, wallet, say just to pre selected apps, then you don't need to necessarily show them the details of what's happening behind the scenes. They don't necessarily need to see the details of the smart contracts or the, you know, before they sign a transaction because it just gets abstracted away. And so there, there is kind of a, there is of course risk with that in the same way that what we saw happen with the web in that once upon a time everyone just went to different websites as they wanted to, but then over time it kind of grew into the app store and then all of a sudden people are just using their phones to use the pre selected apps. And behind the scenes Apple's providing all of the plumbing. And so yeah, it's a playbook we've seen play out. Hopefully history won't repeat itself too directly again in that respect with Web3. But that's, that's definitely a, you know, big risk to it all because you know, the easiest way to hide complexity is to, you know, just create your own walled garden and what people can do in it. Yeah, no, totally agree on that. Yeah, I think I saw, I've been seeing more like a spectrum of like onboarding, you know, and it's like it starts off like centralized exchange. Like that's about as much as your crypto journey kind of just starts and ends there. And then it's like as you keep going it's like self custodial wallets, like social and then you keep going to down to the defi land and decentralized interfaces. So essentially no one can or immutable contracts as well. No changes. It's all clear rules. And yeah, you just keep going down the rabbit hole. I know for me, well, I guess the reason what brought me to crypto was a lot of the decentralization and kind of like the big fu to like like institutional the things that we had. So I always tend to lean further, further away from, from the centralized ideas. It is nice though from like a user experience like you said to, to be in the wall garden sometimes. Let's see. So I saw a post on the ENS style regarding kind of like incentives and going back a little bit on the Dow side of things. So like you know, myself like I'm a, I own a noun and and one of the things I'm trying to work on now is like getting buy in from everybody to, to name our contracts actually to actually use ENS inscribed to go name our contracts. We have a couple contracts that just make sense for us to name in my opinion. And I saw that there was like a post about incentivizing folks to like do this activity essentially. Yeah, I wanted to kind of get your takes on, on that whole post on like you know, incentivizing the right behaviors from, from ENS because I feel like even sometimes I still encounter apps nowadays where I think it's less now like where ENS is definitely like there for sure. Like it resolves. But there are some times where I'm like it's not doing it and I'm like what the hell's going on? Like I need to go copy and paste it. Like what do you mean you don't accept my.eth as an address? But yeah, like yeah, I wanted to get your take on kind of like incentivization and what you, what are your thoughts on that with like with inscribe and. Yeah, so the post came about from fireeyes, who's one of, who's the largest ENS delegate so effectively has the most voting power on the ENS dao, which is still, you know, we're still not talking like you know, tens of percent but it's still enough to you know, have their opinion is you Know, it's meaningful when they say stuff on this because you know, how certainly, you know, the NSDAO is really the first one I've started to really pay a lot more attention to for obvious reasons. But a lot of the time there it's delegates with significant well who have more influence on the daos. People tend to pay more attention to what they say. So it's the point, the point that they were making was effectively that the ENS treasury has, you know, it's got a very large treasury of ENS tokens. I think the, you know, ballpark is somewhere around like a billion dollars. So it', a, it's a, it's a good size war chest there and why don't they create some incentives for people to do more on ens? So within the ENS ecosystem they do have a number of different kind of working groups and certainly the two that are, you know, quite, you know, positive for builders generally in Web3. One is you have their public goods working group which effectively gives grants to public goods projects. They don't have to be an sli, but it's just ones who are doing, you know, good impact, impactful things in Ethereum. And then you also have the ecosystem working group which also has grants there. But again that's much more about projects building on ENS and kind of related to that you have what's called the service providers program as well, which is about funding projects who are really helping ENS grow. But I believe, and this is an area where I'd need to double check my facts but the, you know, generally anyway, you know, certain, I know for, for sure that some of that funding comes directly from the revenue associated with ENS name, you know, purchases and renewals. That's kind of where it is. And then in the meantime you have a whole load of tokens sitting there which are, you know, being, being managed by the Treasury. And so the point here was that can we start deploying some of those. A great example as a case in point has been things like Optimism's retro public goods funding rounds where they've, you know, they've spent significant amount of their, well, not a significant amount in terms of, you know, as a proportion of their entire trophy, but in terms of, you know, enough to be very impactful for a number of teams building on that ecosystem. And so that was really the point the fireeyes was making about well, could we have some similar sorts of incentives with ens. And so some of this was about, you know, it could be incentivizing Some web to projects to do, some you know, collaborations or you know, work more with ens. I can't remember all of them off the top of my head. Oh yeah, yeah, no worries. Yeah, yeah, I'll link it so people can go check out that blog post or like the, the, the post and they can also figure out like some of the other projects. But I, I did find it kind of cool that like you guys came up and I was like, yeah, like I don't know what that number is. You know, I'll let people figure out what the, what the financial incentive is. But like I think that's super cool. Like if they, if they even did like dude, like 50 cents, I'd be like, yeah, you know, just get people to name stuff. Like also builds that muscle, you know, and then like brings awareness and also tells people like, hey, this is possible. We should be asking all of our apps, everyone, whoever we can. Like I know now like that's once I found out about you guys, like, you know, I was like hey, I've been asking everyone, I was like hey man, can you name this? So but it's great to see the validation from coming from one of the delegates there just because they, as you're saying there, they just like where we're coming, how we're approaching this. And I do see naming contracts as being a big potential unlock for ENS because we've got tens of millions of contracts, maybe even hundreds of millions that could potentially be named. And so there's some good reasons there to embrace ENS for that. So there's that side. But then yeah, when it, when it comes to the incentives, it's just that challenge with. Well, part of it of course is that it's a dao, so you've got to get support from a lot of stakeholders. But the other side is what is a way of doing this that can be meaningful for just actually ensuring that we see ultimately widespread naming. But we have a sort of economic system around the, any, any tokens there that can't be gamed too easily. So it's like, do we say something up front like, well if you take these actions then you get X amount of ens or is it done like in a retroactive thing? And it's, it's just trying to figure out what are sort of good ways forward there. And yeah, it's certainly a discussion that's, that started now and we just need to, yeah, start, start making progress with it. But it's, it's certainly, it's very cool to you know, get, get that sort of buy in from, you know, that delegates and the community as well. There's certainly been a good response there. All right, let's take a quick break. I hope you're enjoying the episode. This episode was made possible with the support of my premium subscribers, Seattle Dog Mike, Lionels, Vernon. If you'd like to receive exclusive drops access token gated content, make sure to subscribe to my hyper sub. Also make sure to join our Telegram chat links all below. If you don't want to subscribe, that's fine too. You can mint this episode on Pods Media. Think of it as like a tip. You can tip me as well. It's available on all major platforms. Yeah, let's get back to it. Yeah, Yeah, I mean, you got my vote. I don't have that much, but you got my vote. I think we should name it like you said, you know, like, definitely would want to like keep an eye on like people gaming it or doing, you know, funky business kind of stuff. But people will come out of the Woodward for sure. But yeah, I think it's like it would, it would get the wheel going and like, yeah, people would start doing it and it becomes more commonplace and yeah, I think it'd be a net positive, you know, for everyone to, to do that. Even like I had a cap from the Namespace team on here as well. Yeah, even like sub names too. You know, like sub domain names. Like, I feel like that still feels like, like no one's taking advantage of it other than maybe like, I know Bass has and a couple other ones, but like, yeah, you know, I feel like I would love to see like the more, more Shifi. I think the. That's the name of that group. More smaller communities, you know, Like, I've even thought about it for like nouns, you know, like nouns would be a perfect candidate to have like a. Because we have people that come in and like will leave a comment or vote or like, and it's just that hex address. And I'm like, dude, who is this person? Like, I just need to know, like name wise. Like, you can call yourself Bob Marley for all I care. At least now you're just Bob Marley for the rest of my life. Like on this forum. Yeah, it's fun seeing the names people come up with as well. Right? Because you just like, yeah, you talk to like your spouse or just people are, you know, outside about this, this, this person you're chatting with on Telegram or whatever else and you know the alias they're using there. It's yeah, just. It's that extra layer of it all. It's fun. She. She. My poor wife, you know, I'll be like, yeah, I'm talking to Humpty. And she's like, who? And then I finally meet these people in real life and she's with me. And I'm like, it's Humpty. And she's like, no, what's his real name? And I'm like, no clue. It's Humpty. That's it. I'm good with that. Exactly. Let's see. I had another one. Yeah, I actually had a question regarding, like, audits and, like, reputations on smart contracts. And, like, do you see, like, some kind of use case around that for. For your team? I know you kind of mentioned a little bit of like, you know, decentralization and like, you know, you don't want to be. Maybe you don't want to have that role at all. But, like, have you thought about that maybe? Like. Like everyone has audit again, like, there's some smart contracts that have been audited. They have these reports. So on top of naming their contract, like, is there a way to like, maybe even link set audits? And then being like. And then, I don't know, I'll leave it up to all the people that are better at designing and thinking about this, but is there a way to kind of surface that? So when then I'm doing a transaction, it's like, hey, you're interacting with Uniswap. App Eth. Whatever. App, Uniswap Eth. And here's what it's doing. And then maybe there's a way to surface to all the audits that it's gone through. So then you're kind of starting to build a little bit, like, as an end user, you're like, okay, I know I'm interacting with the right app. I know I'm interacting. It has a ton of audits. I mean, obviously up for debate. Like, maybe someone can somehow fake all this stuff, but, you know, like, is there. Do you see inscribe. Maybe tapping into that a little bit, like, going down that path? Or is that like, you're like, hey, one thing at a time. All the contracts. It's definitely something we've thought a lot about. And because, yeah, fundamentally, when we strip everything back with everything we do, it comes back to the question of, can this make Ethereum safer for the users by having this broader mission? It makes all of these decisions a lot easier for us because we strip things back to think in those Terms and so smart contracts, that's not just about naming. We think that naming is kind of like the biggest uplift we can kind of get for free and that we're not waiting a big, you know, we're not waiting for like the next Ethereum protocol upgrade or anything else. It's like everything's there now, people just need to do it. So it's, that's why it's such a key thing because it just, it's a no brainer in our view. But the, but yeah, there's 100%, there's other things as well. And so you know, one of the ways I thought about this was like with the, you know, the TLS padlock that you have in Web two, which I think it's this idea of what it stands for that it means this thing, this website. Sure. The TLS padlock, it's about secure communication between the front end that you're dealing with and then the back end for transmitting information. But it also kind of signifies safety for users. And so that's definitely been an area that we've kind of spent quite a lot of time thinking about. And so once we added the contract naming capabilities to Inscribe, so the first thing was to be able to deploy name contracts through the platform, but then just name contracts, we then added search functionality so you can view contracts and you can see information about them. And that's quite key to us because we want to get to a point where what we show in inscribe is very useful information just to indicate to people should I be okay dealing with a smart contract. Of course the long term view would love is that that becomes the standard place everyone goes to before they sign a transaction. But that's kind of how we're thinking about it. And so the first thing we did beyond naming, the first thing we did was add contract verifications in terms of has this contract been verified with Sourceify, Etherscan or BlockScout? Because anyone with good contract hygiene should be doing that. And by kind of aggregating across those kind of three main sources as well, we think that that's quite important because it doesn't matter. So if, sure, you know, I've got a preference for people to use sourceify because of, you know, what they're doing. But at the same time a lot of people still verify with Etherscan. So you know, we trust Etherscan. So as long as you know it's named in one of those two place, verified in one of those two places, fine. Then the next level of that Is, of course, audits right now. We were certainly having conversations with auditors and talking to teams about that, but we have found that there are. There are other teams working on this stuff. And specifically, we haven't actually done the integration yet, but this is certainly on our roadmap that there's trying to remember what the name of the company is. But anyway, there's effectively, I think it's trust block, Trust block. They're basically aggregating together audit data. And so our view as a starting point is to integrate with them and then see how the information looks. Does that kind of provide what we need from an audit perspective? Because audits are an interesting one. We spoke to some auditing firms to say, well, could we, off the back of if this contract's been audited, have something that's as powerful as the TLS padlock or a check mark to say this should be a safe contract? Some of them said, yeah, that sounds cool. Others said, no, no, no, because we don't want to be responsible for any problems with the contracts. Because some of these people who come to us, their contracts, they're not following, like, good code hygiene. They just want us to say, yeah, it's okay. But then they don't have good test coverage on their contracts and, you know, they don't want to be held liable for it. So which, you know, which makes sense in that, you know, it's not the silver bullet, unfortunately. And so we're kind of working on that assumption that audits are definitely very useful additive information to have. But at the same time, you can't get to the point of a binary decision for the end user to say, should I trust this or not? Just on the fact of if a firm has audited it. And so we think the way forward is we'll have that integration there. People can see it in inscribe in a similar way that we've added the open labels integration in there. So we're kind of aggregating together the information that people. People can. Can better inform them. I'd love us to get to that point of having something that's such a powerful indicator that says, yes, it's safe or no, it's not. But I don't think we're there yet. And in the meantime, you know, there's enough to do just to get people naming their contracts and making them safer and. But, you know, building on this. So whilst, yes, we're not able at this point, it feels like to have this standardized, this is safe thing, we are seeing some, what we think could be some really good opportunities, more about trying to create what is effectively more of a DAPP or contract registry on ENS within the ENS DAO or the ENS ecosystem. One of the other initiatives right now is all about serving up DAO specific metadata for daos so that you can kind of, you can go to a DAO's record in ENS and you can get all this sort of information associated with the DAO verse. And we're thinking, well, what about having a lot of this key smart contract metadata linked via ENS records as well, so using a similar sort of thing. So then what you could have is you have myApp eth and then associated with that specific sub name you could have records pointing to the license, what's the GitHub repo where the code is, what's the website this should be running off, what's the content hash for it running on the D web somewhere. And so that could maybe evolves into a proper full blown app registry built on ans. I mean we're constantly iterating and thinking and moving with sort of evolving our direction here. But I think that there's definitely a lot of scope to really increase the surface area of how much information people see about dapps and smart contracts in a way that's kind of aligned with ENS but also more broadly Ethereum. So it's not just here's a hex address, signed transaction, it's like there's all this other information you can see about it, whether it's source code, verifications, audit reports, oli labels, whatever else. And then also all this useful metadata there. And if you can bring all that together, then you start to have something that looks like a much more solid kind of foundation for these, for working with decentralized apps. Yeah, no, it's great to hear you say even some of the other examples because my brain was kind of stuck on the audits from the padlock example. But even like kind of the way that we're doing it now where there's like other indicators or signals that you can use to like bring up your trust levels. Like it's not just like you know, who and that they have an audit, but like even like signals like how many times it's been in, engaged with or interacted with. Like you know, like that would be like a strong signal. So like then if you, if someone was somehow able to like duplicate or make it like a similar looking ENS name to try and trick people, I mean like the signal would be like you know, you have the audit, the social stuff, like the social in terms of like how many like times it's been activated or used or something. I don't know like what those KPIs are, but you know, like then it starts really building like a cohesive like story. Like this is the real one, this is a fake one. Obviously you can fake on chain transactions and stuff like that, but like, you know, you know, we're getting down to like a smaller pool of people that are gonna put this much work into a scam. I guess they exist out there for sure, but you know, it's like a smaller one. But yeah, like there's, it was great to hear you say, like it's not even just audits. Like there's other signal indicators too that we can do. And whether it's like, like you guys or ENS or someone else too, you know, I think it's going to be great for the ecosystem overall. But yeah, great to hear. What's a milestone that you guys are, you know, we're what, It's August, mid August. What's like a milestone for you guys that you have like, where do you want to be like next March, you know, one year anniversary? You know, obviously I'm not going to hold you to anything. It's just like, you know, I want to know like, like where you want to be. You specifically or the team. I think there's, there's of course the, the roadmap's evolving and you know, there's based on feedback and everything else. Things, things do change. But we definitely, in the more immediate term we are, we're going to be making available at least, definitely at least the June analytics dashboard that's focused on contract naming. We're just kind of making sure that the information seems accurate that we're collecting. And so we've got that kind of North Star for us because that's the metric that really matters. It's like what is the proportion of smart contracts that have ENS names associated with them and primary names being the kind of key one. So that's a big one. And whilst it's not a lot of work, it's more having that and seeing, being able to actually see progress against that. Because if I'm being honest, we're not at a point yet where we've got, you know, hundreds of people naming contracts every day, you know, when they deploy it. I think with, you know, with contract verifications, I think at best you're probably looking at about 10%. Well, she's probably more like 5 to 10% of all contracts verified. You know, getting to that in the next few years would be an awesome thing for contract naming. Of course, you know, we want to aim for 100%, but I think if we can at least have something similar to verifications, that's something that's, you know, seems, seems feasible. So yeah, there's, there's those metrics. We want to get these, these, develop these dev tool integrations live as well. And so, you know, I hope by March, you know, we've got, we've got a few of them out the door there and we're starting to see stuff happen off the back of that with regards to primary naming for all contracts. This is kind of like a passion thing that we have that we want to, you know, we want to find a way to do this, but we've got to also tread carefully with it as well because whilst there are limitations with ens, it's not like you can just make big changes to ENS on a whim because it has implications for the whole protocol there. But I'd hope that come March at least we have a way that we started work and maybe even got some stuff live there in terms of setting the headway for that side. The other thing though too, which you touched on earlier, was these kind of token incentives. Having done our first of initiative there before March, to bring people on and incentivize them would be awesome. One of the things we're actually working on at the moment is a dashboard kind of to inscribe as well. So you have that core functionality, but when you actually land on inscribe, you can see details of who's naming their contracts, who are the projects that are doing it, and this sort of stuff just to get people a bit more excited and adding that level of gamification. So I think that those are kind of the big ones. Certainly in terms of collaborations, I think the thing would be getting some notable projects having named their contracts with Inscribe by then, because that's what's going to really, I think build the awareness more than anything if people start to see that. So that's by March, that would definitely be a big win for us. I don't think we'd have convinced all the wallet providers necessarily to support inscribed by then. I think that'll come later. But at the same time it's, it's just, it's the momentum, right. And yeah, this stuff compounds and you know, when you're starting from zero, it takes time. But we're we're good with that because, you know, we believe in what we're doing. Yeah, no, you've been, you've been in this space for a long time too. So, you know, I'm betting, I'm betting. Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna compound really quickly, I suspect, so I'm trying to be conscious about time. Want to say thanks for, for doing this. This. I did want to ask you one more question. Hopefully your wife is okay with it. But we've got time if we need. Okay, cool. All right, so I have a question. It's a weird one, but this initially all got started with it used to be called, like bite sized information. So I don't know if you've, if you know what a pincho is, but it's like a Spanish kind of tapa, but from like the fast region. But, but anyways, I've asked every guest what is their favorite snack? So that is a hard hitting question. Yeah, no repercussions either too. There's no, like, gaining weight in this world. Nothing of that nature. So when we're saying snack, are we talking about like just, you know, meal, or is it like, if you just need like a sort of, you know, pick me up or. Definitely not a meal. So not a meal replacement. But so. So up to you. How, how much of a big snack we're talking about. You know, I've done like, you know, taco. You know, so hypothetically, if you ate five tacos, that's like a meal, but like one. It's a snack. Yeah. So not a meal replacement. That's my definition of it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So. Yeah, I know, I know. What? So at the, at some of the, the Pakistani, like, restaurants you have here in London, like, there's, there's a big, you've got sort of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and like Indian sort of communities who, you know, they, I think in the 50s or 60s, like, there's, you know, a lot of people migrated here, but it's, but it's also like a big part of British culture. And again, I, I think it's this, the Pakistani style. But you get these, you get these amazing grilled lamb chops and it's like, they're just. There's, there's a place that's called Tayabs, which I'm presuming is still going in East London. And they, they just. That, that was like, that's like the best thing where, you know, there'd always be queues to get in there. You go inside and like the thing you order is the grilled lamb chops because they come out sizzling platter and they are like. They're really nice and spicy as well. So it's like you've got that sort of good with spice here. And it's like just really delicious, like lamb. It's. Yeah, that's. I never, never have too many of those. There you go. That sounds really good, actually. That's good. You know, someone gave me a carrots and hummus earlier and I was like, guy, that's the one thing you chose, carrots and hummus. Just kidding. All right, so, yeah, thanks again for doing it. Where should people. Where should people go? I think people should go to inscribe. With an E. Yeah, yeah, I see inscribed@XYZ. And I'm actively posting and talking about inscribe every day on X as well and reposting stuff on Farcaster too. So that's just Connor Svensson. Well, X.com Connor Svensson. I'm sure we can link to that easily enough. Yeah, I'll link your account. The inscribe one. There's a POAP still going, I believe, right? Yeah, definitely. Our limited PO app drop for our early inscribers, as we're calling them. So. But yeah, if you. If you name your contract now, you can claim one of those while they're still available. Yeah, exactly. There you go. That's what got me. I'm telling you. It's hilarious. I'm. I'm a simple man. I saw PO up and I was like, hey, this is cool. I'm gonna do it. Nice. If you're hearing this message, you've listened to the entire episode and for that I want to thank you for making it to the end. As mentioned before, this episode episodes available on pods to download and collect. 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