The Ethereum Name Service (ENS), which had lost a court case against domain name registrar GoDaddy, now owns the eth.link domain name again.
Early this month, Virgil Griffith and True Names Ltd., which is the parent company of ENS, sued GoDaddy, Dynadot, and Manifold Finance. The ENS said that GoDaddy broke a contract to “respect, acknowledge, and protect” the eth.link name when it transferred the organization’s domain name to Dynadot before it expired and put it up for auction.
ENS uses the eth.link domain to connect “.eth” names to the Domain Name System, or DNS, which is what web browsers use to connect to websites. With this EthLink service, people with “.eth” domains can use their ENS names to make websites that can be viewed in a standard web browser. When access to the eth.link domain was cut off, ENS and its users could no longer use the service.
But the crisis is no longer happening. The U.S. district judge in the case agreed with ENS’s request for an injunction and issued an order requiring the return of the domain name eth.link, which brought EthLink services back online.
The name has been given back to us because our injunction worked, the ENS said late Sunday on Twitter.
Domain Name Wire says that Manifold Finance paid $851,919 to Dynadot for the domain name eth.link in the past. Sam Bacha, one of the people who started Manifold, explained in a locked thread on the ENS forums why his company “sniped” the name.
Bacha wrote that if the ENS wanted to, it could buy the domain name back from Manifold. “We wanted the domain name because we planned to set up a special purpose trust that would have been the legal entity that would have held key parts of our own infrastructure,” Bacha wrote. (After the injunction, Bacha didn’t answer Decrypt’s request for comment right away.
ENS lead developer nick.eth said that GoDaddy’s actions made him feel “disappointed” and “led astray.” But he has not yet answered. A GoDaddy representative said that the company won’t say anything about legal cases that are still going on.
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