2022 proved to be a fruitful year for Ethereum Name Service, with the platform recording 2.2 million registered domains despite unfavorable market conditions for the cryptocurrency space.
According to the service, over 80 percent of the total ENS domains created since the project’s inception were registered in 2022. Data from Dune Analytics shows that ENS has around 2.82 million names registered as of Jan. 2, with 630,340 owners of ENS domains.
Happy New Year everyone!
2022 was an incredible year for ENS!
Over 2.2m ENS names were registered in 2022 (that’s 80% of ALL names created)
If you’re ready for 2023, drop your ENS below ✨
— ens.eth (@ensdomains) January 1, 2023
As Cointelegraph previously explored in an exclusive interview with ENS founder Nick Johnson, the service allows users to map human-readable names like “nick.eth” to machine-readable information like cryptocurrency addresses and URLs.
The service has been driven by users adopting ENS names for decentralized profiles that work across decentralized applications and platforms. ENS domains serve as ETH wallet addresses, cryptographic hashes or website URLs and are effectively nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
Related: Ethereum co-founder’s poll shows people want $100 lifetime .eth domains
The growing popularity of the service saw a number of partnerships with major exchange operators like Coinbase come to the fore. The American exchange announced the integration of ENS in September 2022, giving users the ability to replace traditional Coinbase cryptocurrency wallet addresses with language-based usernames.
While default ENS domains end with .eth, Coinbase’s integration of the service allows users to claim “name.cb.id” usernames using Coinbase Wallet’s browser extension. Coinbase’s adoption of the ENS service was driven by the utility of ‘human-readable’ names in making Web3 more user friendly.
Data shows that September saw the largest number of ENS registrations created last year, with 437,000 ENS domains registered. The data suggests that the exchange’s ENS integration significantly impacted new sign-ups in 2022. May 2022 was also a bumper month for ENS, as low gas fees on the Ethereum network played a role in a surge of .eth domain registrations.