ENS (Ethereum Naming Service) is a decentralized web3 identity and username platform. You may have seen many people displaying a .eth name as their Twitter username. These .eth names are ENS domains. On a basic level, owning an ENS domain allows you to have a simple and human-friendly username that will redirect to your long and complicated wallet address.
Instead of having to remember or constantly copy a string like this:
0x7a3d05c70581bD345fe117c06e45f9669205384f
You can instead just write or send people this:
rainbowwallet.eth
This is somewhat similar to the DNS system of the traditional internet. When you type in “google.com”, under the surface it actually redirects you to a long and complicated IP address.
ENS domains can do a lot more than just be a handy shortcut however. They can also act as your “web3” username and identity profile. If you own an ENS domain inside your wallet and set it up correctly, your domain name will actually appear on most of the sites that you connect your wallet to. When you login to Uniswap using Rainbow, it actually recognizes your username and displays it.
This phenomenon is one of the powerful potentials of Web3. Instead of having to create individual accounts and profiles with every website (thereby relinquishing your data and control over to a corporation), you instead own your profile and identity and it goes around the web with you.
In this guide, we’ll teach you how to purchase your first ENS domain using Rainbow.
<aside> 📲 This guide is written as if you’re doing this on a mobile device. You can also do this on a desktop or laptop, but a few of the steps where you connect your wallet to the website will be slightly different. To learn how to connect Rainbow to a website on desktop, check out this guide.
</aside>