From theblock by Danny Park

ENS Labs, the organization behind the Ethereum Name Service, is building its own Layer 2 network titled Namechain. ENS is a decentralized naming system built on the Ethereum blockchain that gives readable names to crypto addresses. 

“The industry’s success metric for rollups these days is TVL,” Jeff Lau, co-founder of ENS, said at the “frENSday” event in Bangkok on Monday. “We don’t need to prioritize TVL. ENS already has users, and we can really prioritize things that other L2s don’t.”

The launch of Namechain is expected to take place around the end of 2025, ENS Labs told The Block. Namechain, built on zero-knowledge proof technology, is expected to process and execute transactions off the main Ethereum network while preserving the “full security” of Ethereum at a lower cost.

The interoperability-focused Namechain plans to have L2-to-L2 bridging built into the protocol. “So you can do things like commit whilst you bridge, and pay from your preferred L2,” Lau said.

Lau also said that Namechain, dubbed “L2-agnostic,” is expected to lower barriers to entry by allowing users to start their ENS journey from any L2 networks. ENS Labs noted in the press release that name registration and management will cost 99% less than the fees that occurred on Layer 1 networks.

“Deploying onto another public chain makes it harder to build that UX right into the protocol, and being able to control the entire stack from protocol to governance, means that the rollup is here to serve ENS and naming,” Lau said at the Monday event.

The upcoming chain’s three priorities will be fast finality using zkEVM, open source software, and maintaining the decentralized nature of ENS, according to Lau.

Namechain is designed as part of a bigger movement called “ENSv2,” the second version of ENS unveiled in May, which is a protocol aimed at expanding the naming service onto Ethereum Layer 2 networks to make the service more flexible and affordable.

The ENS co-founder revealed that the team has already chosen its L2 partners for Namechain but did not disclose their names. 

In September, ENS Labs announced that Paypal and Venmo have integrated ENS into their payment platforms. The team said at the time that ENS had over 2 million names registered on-chain and over 4 million names off-chain.