Remember when all of a sudden all the celebrities and crypto influencers with a name and rank started buying emoji domains? It feels like centuries ago, but it must have been earlier this year when people started adding y.at addresses to their Twitter bios. The exchange I worked on back then also secured one. I bet it was expensive as it featured the same key emoji three times. If you’re wondering what range we’re talking about, the high-end y.ats sold for over $ 400,000.
As with all the new stuff on the block, I was intrigued, but also couldn’t find an emoji combination that represented me and was affordable. A few months later, I’m glad I didn’t follow that trend. I realized that you can also buy emoji domains that are not that expensive.
And then more and more people came on Twitter with .eth in their names, and the news that Heineken bought Beer.eth. 
As a German, I’m a little sad that one of our breweries didn’t buy it.
The first thing I did after the news broke was find out how much other ENS beverage addresses would cost.
The water, which is less expensive than coca, is good news for Nestlé, but so far it has not bought it.
But let’s take a step back. What are these ENS domains anyway, and why would people (and businesses) buy them?
Let’s talk about domains first.
Suppose you are a tech enthusiast (aka not much of an IT network infrastructure or backend code reading hint) like me. In that case, you may never really think about how it is possible that we can Google and have things shown to us in a human-readable way.
When we go to a website, all we do is enter its domain name in our browser and voila. But on the backend, the domain name system is hard at work.
What is DNS?
The Internet is nothing more than a computer network. Any device that connects gets a unique IP address similar to the address you live in which allows others to find it. With the difference that street names can be used frequently in cities, while IP addresses are really unique. More like NFT.
Random fact: the most commonly used street names in Germany are Hauptsrasse (main street), Schulstrasse (school street), Gartenstrasse (garden street), and Bahnhofstrasse (on the way to the train station).
You would have to remember an IP address and enter it to connect to a website in the first few days. Smart developers created domain names to make the Internet more usable and help people find what they are looking for.
DNS connects human-readable addresses, such as google.com, with the IP of the servers they are hosted on, such as: 172.217.0.0.
The process when you enter an address looks something like this:
Enter the address, the system checks if you have visited the site before, and if so, the records are in your cache, so the next steps are skipped and immediately resends it to you. If you visit for the first time or always clear your cache, the address is sent to your local DNS server (usually through your Internet provider). Suppose the local DNS server has the records, great. You arrive at your site. If not, it is forwarded to the root nameserver. These store DNS data around the world. As soon as you are, you are connected and the website will open. The whole process takes a few seconds.
Do addresses that are difficult for humans to remember sound like a familiar problem? If yes, you may be the proud owner of one or more crypto wallets. And you are not alone.
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Ethereum alone is home to almost 175 million unique addresses. And if current price movements continue, the 175 could be surpassed soon. Even if they are not all different people, it still leaves us with a significant number of people who face challenges remembering and confirming their address.
After a few uses, I suspect that more seasoned crypto users tend not to check the full address anymore, but only the first four and last four characters. Or they are just adapting more YOLO.
Fortunately, with ENS addresses, sharing and receiving cryptocurrencies becomes much easier.
What is ENS?
ENS is the Ethereum equivalent of DNS, the Ethereum Name service. Like DNS, ENS connects hard-to-remember and hard-to-read wallet addresses with simple, readable names.
Initially, you may have wondered why I talk so much about DNS, but hey, didn’t it make understanding what ENS does a lot easier? It only took me two sentences 
But unlike the centralized domain name system, an eth address can be much more than just a place to host a website. It can become your wallet, your bank account, your ID (talk about decentralized ID and doing things in DeFi), and of course also point to all kinds of records that you want to direct people to.
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The best way to learn is trial and error, so let’s get an ENS domain.
How to get an ENS address (.eth)
Join the Heinekens of this world. If you’ve been in crypto for a while, it’s very easy to get your .eth address.
First, visit ens. domains, and then open the app (it seems a bit counterintuitive to me, that you can’t directly use your website, but that’s crypto). Now search for the name you want. Popular names will often be used, so you already have a registrant.
If they accept you, but you’re eager and ready to pay, then your next best option is to head over to opensea and verify the address. All ENS domains are registered as ERC-721 standard (NFT token standard), which makes them tradable on the nft markets.
A search for yourname.eth in opensea returns the following result:
For just 5 ETH, it’s yours. Congratulations. I suspect that the high price could also be related to the anime of the same name.
If the name you are looking for is available, you can register it. Note that it will never appear as “owner” in ENS.domains, as it effectively rents the address.
Registering a domain is cheap; gas rates aren’t, so if it’s a domain you want to keep for decades to come, it might make sense to pay for all of them at once. Here is an example:
To register, connect your wallet; the website will ping you to do so if you haven’t already done so when you click to sign up.
Your wallet will open and ask you to confirm the first of the two transactions. Once verified, there is a 1 minute waiting period to ensure that no other person tries to register the name simultaneously. After that, your wallet will be reopened and you can confirm the second transaction to finalize your domain registration.
Et voilá, you own your first .eth address and join a community of over 145,000 ENS domain owners. 
To get it working to receive crypto go to your address in the ens app and click add / edit records. You can freely add multiple cryptocurrency wallet addresses to your ENS domain. ENS supports ETH, BTC, Doge, LTC, Atom, Dash, and 40 other wallet addresses.
You can also add an avatar, a link to a text file, your Twitter account, and many other records to your .eth address. Ideally, you add them all at once because of the gas.
Yes, for every record you add, you have to pay for gas. On that note, I once bought ETH directly with Fiat in my Meta Mask wallet because it was cheaper than transferring ETH from any of my other accounts. The Future of France (this is a crypto insider joke because someone said on live TV talking about DeFi that it was the Future of France rather than Finance. GoodGhosting, a DeFi project, even made an NFT based on that) .
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