What’s the latest hype around the NFT market? Bored Apes? Mutant Apes? Well, not really. Now, the latest ETH craze involves four-digit numbers.
Four-digit Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains have become hot property. Domain name sales on OpenSea went up nearly 2,300% as investors want in the much renowned “10k club”.
Sending invites soon?
The ENS NFTs saw a surge in volume recently as investors dive in to purchase three- and four-digit domains. In fact, this craze caused the daily trade volume, on 28 April, to surpass that of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) on NFT marketplace OpenSea. Although, at press time, BAYC surpassed the statistics recorded, thanks to the wide-following and speculations around its Metaverse project.
Nonetheless, the last week of this month witnessed some skyrocketing views as seen in the 30-day graph below. ENS NFT trade volume went up by 191.59% over the past 24 hours and 2,012% over the past week.
Source: OpenSea
Likewise, the current floor price of three-digit domains stood at around 6.5 ETH ($18,850). While that for four-digit domains rapidly approached 0.5 ETH ($1,450).
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a domain name provider for the Ethereum blockchain. The ENS controlled by a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, which used governance tokens to make collective decisions. It had close ties to the Ethereum Foundation and has been around since 2017.
Several celebrities and public figures currently use their ENS names as their Twitter usernames, like Jimmy Fallon (fallon.eth), Paris Hilton (parishilton.eth), Trey Songz (treysongz.eth), Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong (barmstrong.eth), and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (vitalik.eth).
One of the largest sales of all time took place with the 555.eth NFT purchased for $158,000 worth of ether (ETH).
555.eth bought for 55.5 ETH on OpenSea 🌊 #domains $ENS https://t.co/nGGw30COGQ
— ENS Sales Bot (@EnsSales) April 28, 2022
Overall, such traction led to ENS domain sales hitting their highest levels on record. Per data from Scarce.guide, sales of ENS names hit 1,785 on 27 April. Funny enough, just a couple years, the scenario was completely different.
Source: scarce.guide
According to data from Lead ENS Developer nick.eth, the ENS went from taking in about $700,000 from April 14 until April 21, to $3 million from 22 April 22 until 27 April.
Making sense here?
Why some are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a name?
Maybe the realization that there are only 10,000 four-digit combinations- drove prices into the thousands of dollars. After all, owners of ENS domains containing four digits or fewer gain entry into an elusive private Discord channel. The 10k Club described itself as
“A web3 social club for ENS holders 0-9999. No roadmap. Just the first 10k numbers on the Ethereum blockchain.”
But not everyone rode the same bandwagon. NFT collector and content creator Jennifer Sutto opined:
I don’t know who needs to hear this but you do not need to buy any number ENS names… the 4 digits selling for multiple ETH will not age well imo
— JennyFromTheBlockchain.eth (@jennifer_sutto) April 27, 2022