The latest craze for three and four-character Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains in the form of NFTs has skyrocketed, pushing their prices to record levels.
The demand spiked after ENS announced a limited .eth domain name NFT collection, and numerous collectors rushed to own one.
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a domain name provider for the Ethereum blockchain offering names with the “.eth” suffix, which can be used as a simple, more user-friendly alternative to traditional Ethereum wallet addresses. Traditional crypto wallet addresses typically come in long streaks of numbers and characters.
ENS allows anyone to choose a unique domain name and mint it as an NFT for some Ether coins. Short three or four character names, for instance the nft.eth or defi.eth, are said to be limited to 10,000 options available.
ENS claims it is the most widely integrated blockchain naming standard. As of today, the project accounts for 825K unique .eth domain names belonging to some 349K users.
Sales Volume Surpasses BAYC
The scarcity of the brief ENS domain name collection spawned a spike in demand, and the sales of ENS domains on the NFT open market have soared by over 4000% this week.
On Wednesday alone, the sales topped an all-time high daily volume of 1,785, while just a week ago, that same daily sales volume was lingering at a meer 45.
On just the OpenSea marketplace, ENS’s weekly volume increased by more than 2,800%, far surpassing the legendary Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, whose sale volume climbed 40% over the same period.
The unexpected surge drove the total value of ENS domain NFT sales to 756.83 ETH, or almost $2.2 million USD in a single week. At the time of writing, the domain sales numbers have corrected as a result of a 32% decrease in demand over the past 24 hours. The current average floor price of the three to four digit ENS domain names on Opensea starts at 0.009 ETH, which converts to around $26 USD as of the asset’s $2,890 price at press time.