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Nick Johnson, unsure of the capital needed to establish the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), was surprised when Vitalik Buterin offered him twice the amount he requested from the Ethereum Foundation. The founder of ENS evaluated the project’s development at ETHGlobal in London, which enables users to create user-friendly Web3 addresses for cryptocurrencies and NFT wallets, as well as decentralized websites.
Significant Remarks from Nick Johnson
The New Zealand-born software engineer, who worked at Google before encountering Bitcoin and Ethereum, expressed his interest in the Ethereum ecosystem due to its programmability. Johnson shared his thoughts on the subject:
“I learned about Bitcoin shortly after it emerged. Initially, I thought it was really great, but then I realized it was just money. There is no programmability here.”
Johnson began to personally engage with Ethereum coding. His strong background in infrastructure, tools, and libraries enabled him to write his own Ethereum strings library.
A string is a programming data type that represents text rather than numbers. It typically consists of a sequence of characters including letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces. Front-end software engineer Jeffrey Jenkinson described string manipulation as one of the most complex tasks in software. Jenkinson provided his perspective on the matter:
“Anything human-readable can be considered a string, and developers start with this string manipulation when they write code that needs to be parsed into machine language.”
Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin
The Ethereum Foundation hired Johnson and one of his first projects was to start working on a name service. Initially working for the EthSwarm team, a decentralized data storage and distribution technology within the organization, Johnson was tasked with addressing a gap in the infrastructure. Johnson shared his experience:
“They identified a gap; their content needed to be named. I said that everything else, accounts and the like, needed it too. So that became my project there. When I moved from the Swarm team to the Go Ethereum (Geth) team, I continued it as a side project.”
The Ethereum Foundation encouraged Johnson to work full-time on the project by creating a separate organization funded by a grant. The ENS founder sketched rough figures to support a two-year roadmap with a small team. As Johnson explained, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin stepped in at this point:
“They took it to Vitalik, and he said no, this is not enough, take twice the amount. That’s how everything started. If he hadn’t stepped in, ENS would have faltered and failed.”
