Budweiser and cryptocurrency? The American brewer who likes to call itself King of Beers has bought the domain name beer.eth via the online marketplace OpenSea. They paid 30 ethers for this, at the current rate of Ethereum that is about 79 thousand euros.
Rocket is a symbol
The official Budweiser Twitter account has also changed the profile picture to a Budweiser rocket. NFT artist Tom Sachs designed the rocket as part of his Rocket Factory Collection. According to OpenSea, the rocket was bought on Tuesday for 8 ether, about 21 thousand euros. The NFT of this design was only 12 days old at the time.
But what does all this mean? Should we see this as a one-off from Budweiser and look beyond it? Perhaps this is the start of a trend, as the fact remains that the largest beer brand in the US has confidence in Ethereum, but also in the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and NFTs. Since last year we have written a lot about Ethereum and about NFTs, but ENS is barely passing by. Time to dig a little deeper.
What is the Ethereum Name Service (ENS)?
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open naming system that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. You can buy internet addresses, but instead of .com or .nl you get .eth. That seems pretty nonsensical to pay a lot of money for that, but this is Ethereum, there is always more. What actually happens is that Ethereum converts receiving addresses, metadata, and hashes (string of numbers and letters) into identifiable web addresses.
The great thing is that this can also be done the other way around, so that you can find out the Ethereum receiving address based on a web address. ENS works just like Domain Name Service (DNS) on the normal internet. https://moveco.io/ has enough information. For example, every website has its own IP address, your computer or web browser reads these IP addresses and shows the correct website. With DNS you don’t have to remember or type IP addresses, but simply enter btcdirect.eu. You can also compare this with your phone book, if you want to call mom, search for mom, not the phone number.
Large amounts
The right domain name can be sold for a nice price, which has led speculators to pick up domain names in the hope of a large amount. These are the most expensive domain names in the Netherlands according to Ipsis:
Vakantie.nl € 2.5 million
Voetbal.nl € 453,780
Sex.nl € 200,000
Shoes.nl € 120.000
relationgift.nl € 72,000
That is nothing compared to the most expensive domain names (at least publicly) worldwide. According to godaddy.com, the first place is carinsurance.com, which sold for 42 million euros. The second is insurance.com, which was sold for 30 million euros. And vacationrentals.com takes third place, with 29.8 million euros.
Nearly 700,000 Ethereum in 90 Days
This trend is also reflected in the .eth domain. For example, both artist.eth and artcollector.eth were sold for 10 ether respectively. Visit folm.io for more information. At the current ETH rate, that amounts to approximately 26.5 thousand euros per address.
The great thing about OpenSea is that it is a public marketplace, and according to data, the average selling price over the past 90 days has been ENS 0.6113 ETH. The total volume is 691,968 ETH. At the moment 226 thousand addresses are offered. To be fair, most don’t make sense at all and are meant to make a quick profit somewhere.