What ENS Data Suggests About Pricing, Retention, and Speculation

TL;DR: ENS data suggests demand is strongly influenced by speculative periods, and highlights the need for clearer modelling of how pricing changes may impact behaviour.

Recently there was a temperature check for potential ENS pricing changes alongside the release of ENSv2. It’s been one of the more active threads in a while, with a wide range of opinions being shared.

Having recently built out ENSWhois.com, I now have access to a well-structured and easily queryable dataset covering the entire second-level .eth namespace. I thought it would be useful to use this to look at what has actually happened over ENS’ lifetime, and to try to ground some of the pricing discussion in data rather than intuition.

The full set of analyses can be found here: Ethereum Name Service Data Analyses

High Level

The thing that surprised me - and worried me most - is that at the second level, ENS only has 432,884 unique wallet owners, who collectively own 948,357 unique names.

Over ENS’ lifetime there have been 3,380,665 unique registrations, meaning that 72.6% of names have been allowed to expire and not re-registered. This level of churn is higher than I expected, and suggests that the majority of ENS registrations do not translate into long-term ownership.

The ENS Constitution states that “the primary purpose of registration fees is as an incentive mechanism to prevent the namespace becoming overwhelmed with speculatively registered names”. Depending on your definition of speculation, the Holder Concentration analysis arguably shows that this has worked.

That said, as outlined in the Registration Timing by Length analysis, registrations are down year on year, with 2026 looking particularly weak.

At the same time, the Premium Auction Outcomes analysis shows that the proportion of DAO revenue coming from premium auction surcharges has generally trended upwards - and in 2026 is now over 50%. This indicates that a significant portion of DAO revenue is now dependent on newly released names rather than ongoing renewals.

Renewals

A particularly relevant metric for the pricing debate is renewal duration. At a high level, the pricing temperature check outlines a discount system based on the number of years a name is registered or extended for.

The table below (from the Holder Commitment analysis) shows that, historically, only a small proportion of owners renew for multiple years. When they do, it tends to be for names that are 5 characters or longer - 3 and 4 character names cost $640/year and $160/year respectively.

Looking at the “Total Committed Years” table, the majority of registrants have committed for between 0 and 3 years. Shorter names, which have higher base pricing, show consistently lower levels of long-term commitment - suggesting that higher annual costs may discourage longer-term ownership.

The 2022 NFT Boom

The graph below (from Retention based on Registration Time) shows the 12-month retention rate for all ENS registrations. The size of each point reflects the number of registrations in that cohort.

Retention rates for names registered during the 2022 NFT boom are noticeably lower than in other periods, suggesting that a significant proportion of registrations during that time were speculative rather than long-term.

This is also reflected in the Length Churn Heatmap, which points to a weaker overall retention trend compared to 2019/2020.

Taken together, these trends suggest that ENS is currently characterized by relatively low long-term retention and a high proportion of short-term or speculative registrations. Higher pricing for shorter names appears to correlate with lower levels of long-term commitment, while the increasing share of revenue coming from premium auctions points towards a growing reliance on new registrations rather than sustained usage.

Conclusion

My initial reaction to the temperature check was generally supportive — I do think that $12 (now revised down to $8) per year for your core identity is a reasonable price to pay. I accept that it is not accessible to all global participants, but I would hope that initiatives could be put in place to subsidize costs for genuine users for whom this is not affordable.

That said, having looked at the data and the range of opinions shared in the thread, it does concern me that there does not appear to have been sufficient projection analysis to understand what the real effects of these pricing changes might be. Without that, it’s difficult to have confidence in the outcomes.

I have seen people suggest that declining registrations and sentiment are simply a function of the bear market. There is likely some truth to that, but if ENS usage is this strongly correlated to speculative cryptocurrency cycles, it raises a more fundamental question around the strength of its underlying value proposition.

If ENS is to be a long-term identity layer, then demand should not be so dependent on periods of heightened speculation. If long-term retention is low and demand is driven by speculative cycles, what behaviour is the current pricing model actually optimizing for?