Ethereum Name Service Teams Up With Para Wallet to Simplify Registration

The Ethereum Name Service has partnered with embedded wallet maker Para to make it far simpler to sign up for an ENS name.

ENS names take the long, hexadecimal Ethereum wallet addresses and turn them into human-readable forms like MyName.eth. The goal is to make it easier for crypto users to transfer funds and to connect with Web3.

Now, ENS is taking that drive for simplicity into the signup process. Working with Para’s embedded wallet, users can now go to app.ens.domains, select Para as the wallet option, and get an ENS name using just their phone number, email address or a social media login like Google or X.

“For the first time ever, you can now claim an ENS name without having to have a wallet downloaded ahead of time,” James Beck, head of growth at ENS Labs, told The Defiant. “For the rest of whatever you try and do in Web3, whether it’s DeFi or buying an NFT, you’ll be forever able to sign in with that name.”

That means no need to get a wallet like Metamask before getting an ENS name, and no long hexadecimal string of numbers and letters to plug in, Beck said. “I used to work at Metamask, so I understand the difficulty of trying to get people to download a wallet.”

You can still sign up for an ENS name with a wallet, he added. There are more than two million registered ENS names with more than 850,000 unique owners.

A portable wallet

ENS chose Para because it is a universal wallet, Beck said.

With other embedded wallets, what ends up happening is that you sign up with an app, get an embedded wallet, and fund it from an exchange.

“But then you have a little bit of money there, and pretty soon you have five, 10, maybe dozens of wallets and then you kind of forget you have $10 here, $30 there, one ETH over there,” he said. “The idea that you could have an embedded wallet but have the universality of one account for all these different apps really was appealing.”

Under the hood, Para is a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet that uses a private passkey for a distributed key generation process. MPC allows multiple parties to collaborate without revealing their individual inputs. So, using a passkey to protect their wallet, users can create private keys that are broken up and distributed among different parties, none of whom sees the whole key.

What the user sees is a wallet that lets them buy an ENS name easily, said Nitya Subramanian, CEO of Para. It also makes sure they see their name displayed in apps, instead of a long code.

“Then, let’s say they want to prove that they own that ENS name on another site or to connect that wallet elsewhere, all they have to do is log back in with that same email or phone number on the second site, and then they’ll get that same wallet with their ENS in the second app as well,” she said.

The most successful products in crypto are a little bit different from what the centralized Web2 social media-type companies have built, Subramanian said.

“ENS has built this idea that identity is a primitive with an ecosystem built around it,” she said. “I think whenever a project is building in that direction, portability of wallets is really important.”