ENS is the governance token of the Ethereum Name Service, a decentralized system for domain names that shortens Ethereum's long wallet addresses into readable addresses.

Outside of the ENS DAO, the ENS is a regular ERC-20 token. It trades on cryptocurrency exchanges, and the price of each token waxes and wanes according to market demand.

The ENS token hit its all-time high price of $85.69 in November 2021.

The token has a maximum supply of 100 million. At launch, the project airdropped 25% of the supply to holders of .ETH domain names. More than 137,000 wallets were eligible for the drop. As of May 2022, about 100,000 addresses have claimed 19.5 million ENS from the airdrop, or 78% of the total airdropped supply, according to a dashboard on Dune Analytics.

Also at launch, another 25% of the supply was airdropped to contributors, who include the development team, translators and advisers, subject to a four-year vesting schedule. The remaining 50% was reserved for the DAO Community Treasury, with 10% at launch and the rest set to be released over the next four years.

The total liquid supply should reach the fixed, capped amount of 100 million by early 2027, according to crypto data provider Messari.

ENS powers a vast network of decentralized domain names. The domain names themselves are technically NFTs – non-fungible tokens – meaning that each is unique and relates to a specific domain name. They are used to shorten wallet addresses, kind of like a nickname for an Ethereum wallet that can be shared with senders instead of the full address that holds “0x” as its prefix.

The domain names can be used as website addresses for sites hosted on IPFS – the Inter-Planetary File Service, a network for hosting decentralized, censorship-resistant websites on Ethereum. ENS charges an annual rental fee for one of these domain names.

The ENS token, however, is a fungible token that’s used to govern this network of decentralized domain names. Holders can determine the parameters that define the future of the Ethereum Name Service by staking them in ENS’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

The Ethereum Name Service was one of the first Ethereum NFTs. Launched in May 2017, it predates art projects like CryptoKitties by about six months. The NFTs use the same token standard, however, or ERC-721, while the fungible tokens are regular ERC-20 tokens.

ENS was developed by developers from the Ethereum Foundation, mostly Nick Johnson and Alex Van de Sande. Johnson left the Ethereum Foundation in May 2018 after receiving $1 million to work on the project.

The ENS DAO has effected genuine changes since it launched in November 2021. One of its first high-profile moves, in March 2022, was to remove Brantly Millegan as the director of the ENS Foundation – the Cayman Islands nonprofit that handles the day-to-day operations of ENS – for his views against homosexuality, abortion and transgender people.