ENS is the Ethereum Name Service. It swaps a long wallet address like 0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045 for something you can read and say out loud, like vitalik.eth.

You register a name, point it at your wallet, and anyone who knows the name can send you crypto or look up your profile without ever handling the full address.

People use an ENS name for things like: receiving crypto under a name instead of an address, carrying one identity across apps, and hosting a decentralised website.

Replace your wallet's 0x address with yourname.eth. The ENS App stores the ETH Address (the wallet your name points at), and you can add address records for other chains too (Bitcoin, Solana, Litecoin, and many more). A single ENS name can cover multiple wallets across multiple networks.

To make yourname.eth appear in apps instead of your 0x address, set your primary name.

Your ENS profile holds your avatar, social handles, website, email, and any custom text records. Wallets and dApps that read ENS records pick this profile up when you connect, so you don't need a separate profile per service.

What lives on your ENS profile:

Some apps also support Sign-In with Ethereum, which lets you log in with your ENS name instead of a username and password.

To set up or edit any of these, see Edit your ENS profile.

Point yourname.eth at a website hosted on a decentralised network. The result is a site where both the name and the hosting live outside any single company's servers.

Supported networks:

To set this up, set the Content Hash record on your name. See Add a decentralised website to your ENS name.

Any name you own can issue subnames, like pay.yourname.eth or alice.yourteam.eth. Each subname carries its own records and can point at a different wallet. Communities use them to give members a shared identity. You can also use them to label your own separate wallets.

See Create or delete subnames.

Register a .eth name at app.ens.domains. Search for the name you want; if it's available, you can register it there and then. You pay per year of registration, in ETH on Ethereum Mainnet, plus gas. After that the name is yours to manage: edit its records, transfer it, or extend it before it expires.

When you register a .eth name, two things are recorded on Ethereum Mainnet. First, the ENS registry marks you as the owner. Second, the registration sets a resolver. That's a small contract holding the records attached to your name: your ETH address, avatar, social links, and anything else you add.

When someone sends crypto using your .eth name, their wallet asks ENS which address the name points to. The resolver answers, and the transaction goes to the right place. You can change your records whenever you like, and the name stays the same even when the wallet behind it changes.

Lookups run both ways. A forward lookup goes name to address: typing yourname.eth into a wallet finds your ETH address. A reverse lookup goes the other way: an app sees your address and checks which name is set as primary for it. That's why the primary name matters: it's what makes apps show your name instead of your 0x address.

ENS is a decentralised protocol governed by the ENS DAO. No single company owns or controls it. Names are held on Ethereum Mainnet as NFTs, and a name stays yours for as long as you keep it registered.

See Official ENS DAO links.

The job is similar (both turn names into addresses) but the machinery differs. DNS is run centrally through registries, registrars and authoritative servers. ENS is onchain: names are managed by smart contracts on Ethereum Mainnet, ownership is an NFT, and any app can read the records straight from public contracts.

No. Apps that support ENS show your name once you've set one as primary. Apps that don't will keep showing the wallet address. Most major wallets support it, but not every app does.

Owning a name doesn't tell other apps to use it. You have to set it as your primary name: the reverse-lookup record that tells apps which name to show for your wallet. See set your primary name.

Records you set are public and readable by anyone. See Is my ENS name private?

The full documentation lives at docs.ens.domains. For announcements and community chat, see the ENS blog and the ENS Discord. Protocol specs are the ENSIPs, listed in the docs. For a question about a name you own, the support team here is the fastest route to a human.