Gm!
This blog post is the first in a series we are calling ENS Monthly Roundup. Our goal is to cover all the big sales that occurred this month, share some interesting sales we’re keeping an eye on, and provide readers with alpha in the form of similarly valuable domains that are still unregistered. Early readers will enjoy first dibs on these domains, so follow us on Twitter to get notified when these blogs get uploaded.
January saw a small rebound in terms of registrations, up to 56,000 from December’s 52,000. Still a ways off from September’s high of 437,000, but it’s good to see that people are still exploring for new domains.
🤑 Top Sales
When it comes to sales, digits still dominate. Here’s the 5 largest sales this month:
- 021.eth - 38 wETH
- american.eth - 31 ETH
- ethiopia.eth - 25 ETH
- 260.eth - 25 wETH
- 233.eth - 24.94 ETH
🔟 Top Ten
Of the top 10, 7 were 3 digit names. It’s interesting to see domains like american.eth and ethiopia.eth get attention. It’s possible that we’ll soon see a lot of attention towards country related domain names. As more and more countries begin to explore the possibilities of CBDC’s and their influence, these domains could play a huge part moving forward (whoever bought that knows the importance of Ethiopia and their TLD that ICANN is holding hostage).
Outside of the top 5, there were a few interesting sales that caught our attention:
- babylon.eth - 20 wETH
- boredapes.eth - 6.9 ETH
- vaccine.eth - 4 wETH. A total steal
🔎 Monthly Similar Search
Using Kodex’s natural language powered similar search, we browsed for unregistered domains related to countries and ancient empires. Here are some interesting ones we found:
- ptolemaic.eth - An ancient Greek state in egypt.
- antiochus.eth - Antiochus III the Great was a greek king during the 3rd century BC
- parthian.eth - Another ancient middle eastern empire.
- seleucid.eth - An Ancient Greek state in West Asia
- abdicated.eth - Formally relinquishing monarchical authority
🙏 Your Saving Grace
There are also quite a few interesting domains currently in grace period. We found these using Kodex’s similar search.
- emperors.eth
- demeter.eth - Greek goddess of harvest. Definitely one to keep an eye on if it makes it to auction
- bce.eth - Before Common Era
- pisa.eth - City in Italy
- octavian.eth - Roman emperor
Branching out a bit now into different categories, here are a few more interesting results from the similar search. These fall into names, characters, and dictionary words. The following selection are all currently in grace period:
- saruman.eth (3.5 ETH) - valar.eth - The Tolkien pantheon
- zinger.eth (1 ETH) - fritz.eth - Surname
- gabrielle.eth (1.93) - oise.eth - Surname
- taz.eth (1 ETH) - din.eth - Surname + Dictionary
- tale.eth (3.85 ETH) - narratives.eth
🎬 Conclusion
Just to wrap up the ENS monthly round up for January with a domain highlight:
stockx.eth (which sold for 6.9 ETH). stockx plays a huge role in how resellers move high end merchandise, sneakers, and other physical collectibles around the country.
StockX owning their ens domain would allow them to hand out subdomains to verified resellers on their platform as well as accept payments, set up their own website linking back, and all of the other features that come with owning and utilizing a .ETH domain.
Moving forward, companies that rely on everyday, normal janes and joes to profit will need to create ways to keep their “verified resellers” on their platform. Without doing any research into the buyer and seller accounts, it’s safe to assume this is just another degen buying a domain to sell to a billion dollar company when they come calling…if they come calling.