A Survey on ENS, ID and Privacy Management

7 min readNov 17, 2021

At Sismo, we love both ENS and privacy. More precisely, we aim to build up Ethereum user accounts with private ZK Badges. We use ENS because they provide what is the closest to native Ethereum profiles.

We built an ENS-centric DAO (we opened the source code), and our founder applied as an ENS delegate and became one of the top delegators of the ENS DAO. We are also glad to have welcomed the ENS team in the Gen[X] of the Sismo DAO. As a result, we have been extremely grateful to receive a ≈46,000 $ENS grant from the ENS DAO as part of the External Contributors distribution to keep working on new ways to improve the ENS ecosystem and experience through the use of private attestations.

In order to validate long-term assumptions on which Sismo is based, we have conducted a survey asking respondents (≈300) how they manage their ENS, Ethereum accounts, and their privacy.

We coupled the results and analysis with some publicly available data from sources like Etherscan and Dune Analytics. Enjoy the read (sources at the bottom)

An intro to ENS and Ethereum accounts

We think ENS is a simple but foundational tool to improve the UX of Ethereum accounts. It allows to turn any Ethereum account into a public profile.

With ENS you can assign names (eg. nathansexer.eth) or pseudonyms (eg. nethan.sismo.eth) to your 0x....1234 Ethereum address. You can also add records associated with this name (e.g. your Twitter handle, profile picture) which will be read among all applications supporting the standard.

Users manage multiple accounts as a way to silo their activities (trading, social, NFT collecting..) and use ENS to share their public Ethereum profiles. This survey aims to better understand this behaviour.

ENS & Privacy Survey results

90% of users frequently use multiple Ethereum addresses.

Wallets let you manage your Ethereum accounts, which have a balance and address associated. They give access to your funds and Ethereum applications.

Advanced Ethereum users generally use multiple accounts, addresses, and wallets for different uses cases. According to our survey, most of them use frequently 2–3 Ethereum accounts. Some addresses are used for public-facing applications, others are kept private.

More than 60% of respondents have an ENS

63.8% of our respondents have an ENS.

On November 12, 2021, there were 439,011 ENS names registered*, a total of 176,682,750 unique Ethereum addresses* and more than 10,000,000 MAU* on Metamask.

For the context:

0.25% of Ethereum addresses have an ENS
0.66% of Ethereum addresses with a balance >0 have an ENS
4.4% of Metamask Monthly Active addresses have an ENS

(to take with a grain of salt since addresses do not represent individuals)

Most of our respondents own multiple ENS domains

On November 13th, 2021, according to https://dune.xyz/makoto/ens, 439,011 ENS have been created by 173,785 registrants.

This indicates that users own, on average, 2.5 ENS domains. Our research matches those results as most of our respondents own multiple ENS and use 2–3 addresses frequently.

Why do people use ENS?

Based on our answers, the vast % of users own an ENS domain for day-to-day use, in order to remember, find and share their address easily and without errors.

💬 “idiot-proof transfers to vault”

Some respondents said they have an ENS to build up their on-chain reputation, for vanity and status, to label and compartmentalize their wallets. Others said they had one to be part of and support the ENS ecosystem.

💬 “Subdomains for compartmentalizing use cases and different social roles.”

A third category of respondents hold an ENS for business purposes: as advertising and on-chain presence for their company, to prevent name squatting, and to host their static website.

💬 “accept payment for business”, “for simplifying public address and hosting my static website”

Finally, some users simply have an ENS to display on socials (Twitter) or in their DAOs (e.g. via snapshot) by setting their primary records.

Users care about privacy

Most users own “private” Ethereum addresses (≈73%), ie. addresses they keep private by not linking them to their public Ethereum addresses, real-world identity, or any information that could compromise their confidentiality.

According to our studies, they use them for (in no particular order):

“cold storage, storing most of their assets safely and privately”
“financial activities (trading, farming) and to keep them away from their public identity”
“testing and “garbage” activity”

Most users keep their ENS and private addresses separate

Most users do not want to link their identity to their wealth, finances, and/or experimental activity. Some simply want to make sure their right to privacy is respected:

≈70% never linked their ENS with their “private” addresses

Keeping public and private addresses separate can present issues. You sometimes need to prove that you own X or Y assets, or that you’ve done W or Z, but you do not want to reveal the content and history of your private addresses.

The struggle for privacy-preserving aggregation is real

Because we are using multiple wallets for privacy and security reasons, there is a need for wallet data aggregation.

≈72% of our respondents feel the need to be able to aggregate their data without being doxxed.

They need to get an aggregated overview of their **portfolios (addresses and balances), without overtly connecting them, in order to:

calculate tax liability more easily
build a reputation by consolidating their assets and achievements (eg. POAPs)
get through token gated accesses (via guild.xyz / collab.land)
prove that they own assets stored on their cold wallets, on their hot wallets (eg. NFTs)

Users do not want to share more information than they need to

58% of our respondents refused to connect to services because of privacy issues.

“When I use various web3.0 websites, I pay special attention to the description of authorization information. For those websites that require a lot of authorization, I will refuse to connect. For me, the security of personal information is the first.”

Where Sismo can help

This survey shed the light on 2 major intertwined problems of all public blockchains:

Privacy is lacking in public-by-default environments like Ethereum.
It leads users to painfully manage multiple addresses, causing fragmentation of their history and reputation.

Sismo on the other hand allows proving on one public account (such as one linked to an ENS name) that you hold assets or that you have done something on your other private accounts without ever linking them both. It would allow for a privacy-preserving aggregation of your history and compute it into proofs on-chain.

Users could for example join token-gated communities (read more on this). Those use cases are growing strong; almost ≈66% of our respondents used a token-gated service in the past.

That’s a wrap.eth

ENS is the most widespread blockchain naming standard.

As such, it is a fundamental brick of the Ethereum ecosystem and improves our day-to-day UX.

Web 3 users are concerned about their privacy and go through tedious processes in order to maintain it. The existing methods, such as the creation of multiple addresses with no link between each, come with a big trade-off, the user’s on-chain reputation is split among the different addresses he/she holds.

We need tools that protect our privacy but maintain our on-chain reputation

Sismo can help the Ethereum ecosystem answer this need.

Sismo is able to add layers of privacy and security to ENS names that will create a huge unlock, especially for those using their ENS name as their web3 identity.
— Alisha.eth from ENS

Special thanks to Alisha.eth & Bettina.ass.eth for the feedback

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