DAO.eth: How to get an ENS subdomain for your DAO

Every DAO built on Aragon OSx and the Aragon App and deployed on the Ethereum blockchain gets a dao.eth subdomain. Let’s dive into the benefits you get from having a subdomain that points to your DAO, and how to get one!

What is ENS?

Ethereum Name Service, ENS, is the most popular naming service for the Ethereum ecosystem.

The goal of ENS is to map human-readable domain names to smart contract addresses. Similar to the Internet’s Domain Name Service providing human-readable web addresses, you can purchase shortened, human-readable names for contract addresses. This is an essential service for web3 and has vastly improved UX in many ways.

Every address name is an NFT that can be purchased. For example, you can purchase “myname.eth” and set it to point to your wallet address, so that whenever someone makes a transaction to your wallet, they could type in “myname.eth” instead of your wallet address.

You can also set subdomains to nest under your primary .eth domain. This is what we’ve done at Aragon with “dao.eth.” Every DAO created on Aragon OSx receives a subdomain of the dao.eth domain!

"It’s exciting to see dao.eth subnames incorporated into Aragon’s DAO stack. Offering dao.eth subnames to DAOs allows DAOs to build up an onchain identity, improving safety and transparency for the community."

- Alisha, Governance & Ecosystem at ENS

DAO.eth subdomains for DAOs built on Aragon

Every DAO built on the Aragon App on Ethereum gets a dao.eth subdomain, which you choose in the DAO creation flow.

For example, say you create a DAO called My Experiment DAO. When you have an ENS subdomain, your contract name goes from this:

0x2607fd40e5f6ab54490905639800cf82bde337a

To this:

Experiment.dao.eth

This makes it much easier to interact with contracts and be able to verify that you’re using the correct one!

You can choose any name you like, as long as it's not already taken by another DAO.

How ENS domains improve DAOs

ENS domains improve the experience of using DAOs through:

• User experience
• Transparency
• Security
• Sense of ownership

User Experience

The user experience of interacting with your DAO is much better when the contract can be identified in human-readable language rather than a string of numbers. It’s natural for humans to struggle with long strings of numbers and prefer to have short, language-based text.

DAO.eth subdomains on Aragon OSx give you this for free!

Transparency

When members can look up the DAO’s name by just typing in human-readable language, it’s easier to look up the DAO contract on a block explorer like Etherscan and see what’s happening in the treasury.

This means that DAO members might be more likely to be able to keep up with what’s happening in their DAO’s treasury and never be in the dark on transactions.

Security

One of the most common security issues in web3 today is caused by poor UX. People accidentally send funds to the wrong address and those funds are not recoverable unless you can reach out to the wallet owner you sent them to and ask them to send them back.

Having a DAO name in human-readable language makes it easier to type in the correct address when sending funds, and also serves as another verification method if you want to double-check that you’re sending funds to the right place.

With a dao.eth subdomain, it’s easy to verify which DAO was built on Aragon OSx and which was not. Think of your ENS name as an extra layer of verification ensuring that your DAO is yours, not another DAO impersonating it!

Sense of ownership

A string of numbers isn’t great for inspiring a sense of ownership of your DAO. But when you have your own subdomain name, you can have a stronger feeling that the contract is yours. This makes the use case of DAOs all the more powerful!

How to get a DAO.eth ENS name for your DAO

There are two ways to get a DAO.eth subdomain for your DAO:

1. Create a DAO on the Aragon App on the Ethereum mainnet blockchain and set a dao.eth subdomain in the creation flow.
2. Code a custom DAO on Aragon OSx on the Ethereum mainnet blockchain and set a dao.eth subdomain.

Setting your DAO.eth subdomain in the Aragon App is as easy as typing in the name you want! There’s no coding required.

If you choose to create a DAO on the Aragon App, you will set the ENS subdomain when you define your DAO branding. This includes name, logo, description, and links as well.

Your dao.eth subdomain will always point to your DAO contract on the blockchain. So, you can type the dao.eth name into a block explorer like Etherscan and find the contract there.

Build your DAO on the Aragon App and claim your dao.eth subdomain today!

It takes ten minutes or less to build your DAO on the Aragon App! Get started here today or watch this video to see a demo of building a DAO.

If you’re looking to build a custom DAO, dive into the developer docs to learn how!