Ethereum
The leading smart-contract blockchain, and the network most tokenized domains are issued on.
- glossary
Ethereum is a programmable blockchain launched in 2015 that introduced the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) — a shared computation environment where smart contracts execute deterministically on thousands of nodes worldwide. Its native currency, ETH, pays for computation in units called gas. Ethereum's rich token ecosystem — including the ERC-721 NFT standard — made it the dominant platform for representing real-world assets on-chain, including domain names. Because every NFT transfer is recorded in Ethereum's public state, ownership history is fully auditable without trusting any intermediary. Layer-2 networks like Base and Polygon extend Ethereum's reach by settling transactions cheaply while inheriting its security guarantees.
Related keywords
- ethereum
- ETH
- smart contract
- EVM
- decentralized applications
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.