Ens Domain Cost Calculator

An ENS second-level name under .eth is not bought, it is rented, and the rent is priced by scarcity of length. The registrar charges a fixed annual rate in US dollars, currently 640 for a three-character name, 160 for four characters, and 5 for five or more, converted to ETH at registration time through a price oracle. Names shorter than three characters cannot be registered at all. The second cost component is the Ethereum gas needed to write the registration on chain, and for a cheap name it usually exceeds the rent itself. Registration deliberately requires two transactions: a commit that publishes only a hash of the intended name, followed after a short mandatory delay by the reveal and registration. That commit-reveal structure exists to stop observers from watching the mempool and front-running a name request. The practical consequence is that gas is a fixed cost while rent is linear in years, so the effective annual cost falls steeply with registration length. Renewal is a single much cheaper transaction of roughly 50,000 gas, which is why long registrations and periodic bulk renewals are the common strategy. Expiry is not immediate loss: a 90-day grace period lets only the prior owner renew, after which the name enters a temporary premium that starts at 100 million dollars and decays to zero over 21 days before the name becomes freely registrable again. This calculator prices rent and gas only; it does not model that premium decay or secondary market value, which for short and dictionary-word names dominates every protocol fee involved.

The Ethereum Name Service launched on 4 May 2017, developed at the Ethereum Foundation with Nick Johnson leading the implementation and the core specification set out in EIP-137. Its structure borrows deliberately from DNS: a registry that records ownership of each node, and separate resolver contracts that answer queries, so that the naming layer and the record layer can evolve independently. The original .eth registrar did not sell names at a list price at all. It ran a Vickrey-style sealed-bid auction in which bidders locked ETH, the highest bidder won and paid the second-highest bid, and the deposit stayed locked for as long as the name was held. That model was replaced in May 2019 by the permanent registrar, which introduced the annual rental system and the length-based price tiers this calculator uses, along with the commit-reveal flow and the grace and premium periods. Renting rather than selling was chosen so that abandoned names return to circulation instead of being squatted permanently. Names were subsequently represented as ERC-721 tokens, making them tradable on ordinary NFT marketplaces. In November 2021 governance moved to the ENS DAO, with the ENS token distributed to existing name holders in one of the larger retroactive airdrops of that period, and a later Name Wrapper upgrade extended programmable ownership and permission controls to subdomains.