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ENS for Businesses in 2025: From 'Nice-to-Have' to Programmable Brand Identity

· 11 min read
Dora Noda
Dora Noda
Software Engineer

For years, the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) was seen by many as a niche tool for crypto enthusiasts—a way to replace long, clunky wallet addresses with human-readable .eth names. But in 2025, that perception is outdated. ENS has evolved into a foundational layer for programmable brand identity, turning a simple name into a portable, verifiable, and unified anchor for your company’s entire digital presence.

It’s no longer just about brand.eth. It’s about making brand.com crypto-aware, issuing verifiable roles to employees, and building trust with customers through a single, canonical source of truth. This is the guide for businesses on why ENS now matters and how to implement it today.

TL;DR

  • ENS turns a name (e.g., brand.eth or brand.com) into a programmable identity that maps to wallets, apps, websites, and verified profile data.
  • You don’t have to abandon your DNS domain: with Gasless DNSSEC, a brand.com can function as an ENS name without on-chain fees at setup.
  • .eth pricing is transparent and renewal-based (shorter names cost more), and the revenue funds the public-good protocol via the ENS DAO.
  • Subnames like alice.brand.eth or support.brand.com let you issue roles, perks, and access—time-boxed and constrained by NameWrapper “fuses” and expiry.
  • ENS is moving core functionality to L2 in ENSv2, with trust-minimized resolution via CCIP‑Read—important for cost, speed, and scale.

Why ENS Matters for Modern Companies​

For businesses, identity is fragmented. You have a domain name for your website, social media handles for marketing, and separate accounts for payments and operations. ENS offers a way to unify these, creating a single, authoritative identity layer.

  • Unified, Human-Readable Identity: At its core, ENS maps a memorable name to cryptographic addresses. But its power extends far beyond a single blockchain. With multi-chain support, your brand.eth can point to your Bitcoin treasury, Solana operations wallet, and Ethereum smart contracts simultaneously. Your brand’s name becomes the single, user-friendly anchor for payments, applications, and profiles across the web3 ecosystem.
  • Deep Ecosystem Integration: ENS isn't a speculative bet on a niche protocol; it's a web3 primitive. It is natively supported across major wallets (Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask), browsers (Brave, Opera), and decentralized applications (Uniswap, Aave). When partners like GoDaddy integrate ENS, it signals a convergence between web2 and web3 infrastructure. By adopting ENS, you are plugging your brand into a vast, interoperable network.
  • Rich, Verifiable Profile Data: Beyond addresses, ENS names can store standardized text records for profile information like an avatar, email, social media handles, and a website URL. This turns your ENS name into a canonical, machine-readable business card. Your support, marketing, and engineering tools can all pull from the same verified source, ensuring consistency and building trust with your users.

Two Onramps: .eth vs. “Bring Your Own DNS”​

Getting started with ENS is flexible, offering two primary paths that can and should be used together.

1. Register brand.eth​

This is the web3-native approach. Registering a .eth name gives you a crypto-native asset that signals your brand's commitment to the ecosystem. The process is straightforward and transparent.

  • Clear Fee Schedule: Fees are paid annually in ETH to prevent squatting and fund the protocol. Prices are based on scarcity: 5+ character names are just 5/year,4−characternamesare5/year, 4-character names are 160/year, and 3-character names are $640/year.
  • Set a Primary Name: Once you own brand.eth, you should set it as the "Primary Name" (also known as a reverse record) for your main company wallet. This is a critical step that allows wallets and dapps to display your memorable name instead of your long address, dramatically improving user experience and trust.

2. Enhance brand.com Inside ENS (No Migration Required)​

You don't need to abandon your valuable web2 domain. Thanks to a feature called Gasless DNSSEC, you can link your existing DNS domain to a crypto wallet, effectively upgrading it into a fully functional ENS name.

  • Zero On-chain Cost for Owners: The process allows a brand.com to become resolvable within the ENS ecosystem without requiring the domain owner to submit an on-chain transaction.
  • Mainstream Registrar Support: GoDaddy has already streamlined this with a one-click “Crypto Wallet” record, powered by this ENS feature. Other major registrars that support DNSSEC can also be configured to work with ENS.

Pragmatic advice: Do both. Use brand.eth for your web3-native audience and treasury operations. Simultaneously, bring brand.com into ENS to unify your entire brand footprint and provide a seamless bridge for your existing user base.

Zero-to-One Rollout: A One-Week Plan​

Deploying ENS doesn't have to be a multi-quarter project. A focused team can establish a robust presence in about a week.

  • Day 1–2: Name & Policy Claim brand.eth and link your existing DNS name using the Gasless DNSSEC method. This is also the time to establish an internal policy on canonical spelling, use of emojis, and normalization rules. ENS uses a standard called ENSIP-15 to handle name variations, but it's crucial to be aware of homoglyphs (characters that look alike) to prevent phishing attacks against your brand.

  • Day 3: Primary Names & Wallets For your company’s treasury, operations, and payment wallets, set the Primary Name (reverse record) so that they resolve to treasury.brand.eth or a similar name. Use this opportunity to populate multi-coin address records (BTC, SOL, etc.) to ensure payments sent to your ENS name are correctly routed, no matter the chain.

  • Day 4: Profile Data Fill out the standardized text records on your primary ENS name. At a minimum, set email, url, com.twitter, and avatar. An official avatar adds immediate visual verification in supported wallets. For enhanced security, you can also add a public PGP key.

  • Day 5: Subnames Begin issuing subnames like alice.brand.eth for employees or support.brand.com for departments. Use the NameWrapper to apply security "fuses" that can, for example, prevent the subname from being transferred. Set an expiry date to automatically revoke access when a contract ends or an employee leaves.

  • Day 6: Website / Docs Decentralize your web presence. Pin your press kit, terms of service, or a status page to a decentralized storage network like IPFS or Arweave and link it to your ENS name via the contenthash record. For universal access, users can resolve this content through public gateways like eth.limo.

  • Day 7: Integrate in Product Start using ENS in your own application. Use libraries like viem with ensjs to resolve names, normalize user inputs, and show avatars. When looking up addresses, perform a reverse lookup to display the user's Primary Name. Be sure to use a resolver gateway that supports CCIP-Read to ensure your app is future-proof for ENSv2's L2 architecture.

Common Patterns That Pay Off Fast​

Once set up, ENS unlocks powerful, practical use cases that deliver immediate value.

  • Safer, Simpler Payments: Instead of copying and pasting a long, error-prone address, put pay.brand.eth on your invoices. By publishing all your multi-coin addresses under one name, you drastically reduce the risk of customers sending funds to the wrong address or chain.
  • Authentic Support & Social Presence: Publish your official social media handles in your ENS text records. Some tools can already verify these records, creating a strong defense against impersonation. A support.brand.eth name can point directly to a dedicated support wallet or secure messaging endpoint.
  • Decentralized Web Presence: Host a tamper-evident status page or critical documentation at brand.eth using the contenthash. Because the link is on-chain, it cannot be taken down by a single provider, offering a higher degree of resilience for essential information.
  • A Programmable Org Chart: Issue employee.brand.eth subnames that grant access to internal tools or token-gated channels. With NameWrapper fuses and expiry dates, you can create a dynamic, programmable, and automatically-revocable identity system for your entire organization.
  • Gas-Light User Experiences: For high-volume use cases like issuing loyalty IDs or tickets as subnames, on-chain transactions are too slow and expensive. Use an offchain resolver with CCIP-Read. This standard allows ENS names to be resolved from L2s or even traditional databases in a trust-minimized way. Industry leaders like Uniswap (uni.eth) and Coinbase (cb.id) already use this pattern to scale their user identity systems.

Security & Governance You Shouldn’t Skip​

Treat your primary ENS name like you treat your primary domain name: as a critical piece of company infrastructure.

  • Separate “Owner” from “Manager”: This is a core security principle. The "Owner" role, which has the power to transfer the name, should be secured in a cold storage multisig wallet. The "Manager" role, which can update day-to-day records like IP addresses or avatars, can be delegated to a more accessible hot wallet. This separation of powers drastically reduces the blast radius of a compromised key.
  • Use NameWrapper Protections: When issuing subnames, use the NameWrapper to burn fuses like CANNOT_TRANSFER to lock them to a specific employee or CANNOT_UNWRAP to enforce your governance policies. All permissions are governed by an expiry date you control, providing time-boxed access by default.
  • Monitor Renewals: Don’t lose your .eth name because of a missed payment. Calendar your renewal dates and remember that while .eth names have a 90-day grace period, the policies for subnames are entirely up to you.

Developer Quickstart (TypeScript)​

Integrating ENS resolution into your app is simple with modern libraries like viem. This snippet shows how to look up an address from a name, or a name from an address.

import { createPublicClient, http } from "viem";
import { mainnet } from "viem/chains";
import { normalize, getEnsAddress, getEnsName, getEnsAvatar } from "viem/ens";

const client = createPublicClient({ chain: mainnet, transport: http() });

export async function lookup(nameOrAddress: string) {
  if (nameOrAddress.endsWith(".eth") || nameOrAddress.includes(".")) {
    // Name → Address (normalize input per ENSIP-15)
    const name = normalize(nameOrAddress);
    const address = await getEnsAddress(client, {
      name,
      gatewayUrls: ["https://ccip.ens.xyz"],
    });
    const avatar = await getEnsAvatar(client, { name });
    return { type: "name", name, address, avatar };
  } else {
    // Address → Primary Name (reverse record)
    const name = await getEnsName(client, {
      address: nameOrAddress as `0x${string}`,
      gatewayUrls: ["https://ccip.ens.xyz"],
    });
    return { type: "address", address: nameOrAddress, name };
  }
}

Two key takeaways from this code:

  • normalize is essential for security. It enforces ENS naming rules and helps prevent common phishing and spoofing attacks from look-alike names.
  • gatewayUrls points to a Universal Resolver that supports CCIP-Read. This makes your integration forward-compatible with the upcoming move to L2 and off-chain data.

For developers building with React, the ENSjs library offers higher-level hooks and components that wrap these common flows, making integration even faster.

Choosing and Protecting Your Name: Brand & Legal​

  • Normalization and Usability: Familiarize yourself with ENSIP-15 normalization. Set clear internal guidelines on the use of emojis or non-ASCII characters, and actively screen for "confusables" that could be used to impersonate your brand.
  • Trademark Reality Check: .eth names operate outside of the traditional ICANN framework and its UDRP dispute resolution process. Trademark owners cannot rely on the same legal rails they use for DNS domains. Therefore, defensive registration of key brand terms is a prudent strategy. (This is not legal advice; consult with counsel.)

What’s Next: ENSv2 and the Move to L2​

The ENS protocol is not static. The next major evolution, ENSv2, is underway.

  • Protocol Moving to L2: To reduce gas costs and increase speed, the core ENS registry will be migrated to a Layer 2 network. Name resolution will be bridged back to L1 and other chains via CCIP-Read and cryptographic proof systems. This will make registering and managing names significantly cheaper, unlocking richer application patterns.
  • Seamless Migration Plan: The ENS DAO has published a detailed migration plan to ensure existing names can be moved to the new system with minimal friction. If you operate at scale, this is a key development to follow.

Implementation Checklist​

Use this checklist to guide your team’s implementation.

  • Claim brand.eth; link brand.com via Gasless DNSSEC.
  • Park ownership of the name in a secure multisig; delegate manager roles.
  • Set a Primary Name on all organizational wallets.
  • Publish multi-coin addresses for payments.
  • Fill out text records (email, url, social, avatar).
  • Issue subnames for teams, employees, and services using fuses and expiry.
  • Host a minimal decentralized site (e.g., status page) and set the contenthash.
  • Integrate ENS resolution (viem/ensjs) into your product; normalize all inputs.
  • Calendar all .eth name renewal dates and monitor expiry.

ENS is ready for business. It has moved beyond a simple naming system to become a critical piece of infrastructure for any company building for the next generation of the internet. By establishing a programmable and persistent identity, you lower risk, create smoother user experiences, and ensure your brand is ready for a decentralized future.

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