Conor Svensson

When we published our first Contract Naming Season update in January, the focus was on momentum and what had been achieved. Teams were beginning to name contracts, tooling had improved, and the first public protocol announcements had started to appear.

At that stage, the awards themselves were still ahead of us.

We have now reached a more concrete milestone. The first batch of ENS Contract Naming Season awards has been distributed, and with two months still to go before the program closes at the end of April, we now have a clearer picture of how participation is taking shape.

Identity is often framed as a feature​

Over the past year working on Enscribe, we have noticed that identity is often discussed as if it were a product capability. A wallet "adds identity support," a protocol "integrates ENS," and an explorer "improves labels." The framing implies that identity is something a single team can implement and ship, like a new dashboard or API endpoint.

When teams talk about shipping securely onchain, audits usually dominate the conversation. Deployment scripts are reviewed carefully, contracts are verified and monitoring is configured.

Blockscout smart contract pages now include an Identity score powered by Enscribe.

Blockscout is a leading open-source blockchain explorer for viewing transactions, smart contracts, and onchain activity across hundreds of networks.

Security audits are an essential part of deploying production-grade smart contracts. They review logic, identify vulnerabilities, and reduce the likelihood of catastrophic exploits. For serious protocols, audits are a core component of their security framework.

ENS supports two ways of associating names with addresses.

1. A name can forward resolve to an address (myname.eth -> 0x1234…).
2. An address can declare a primary name which contains a forward resolving address record and a reverse record that points back to the name (0x1234… -> myname.eth).

It’s important to be aware of this distinction between forward resolution and primary names as it defines a security boundary within ENS.

Based Nouns has adopted ENS-based naming across its smart contract infrastructure, using Enscribe to assign clear, human-readable identities to the contracts that power the DAO.

As a Nouns Builder–based DAO deployed on Base, Based Nouns operates with a faster iteration cycle and a more experimental governance environment than mainnet Nouns. Clear contract naming helps ensure that this agility does not come at the cost of safety.

If you have spent any time using Ethereum wallets or block explorers, have you ever questioned why smart contracts are still referred to via their hexadecimal addresses?

You don’t have to enter numeric digits to visit websites. Why can’t you refer to smart contracts by name?

Giveth has adopted ENS-based naming across its core smart contract infrastructure, bringing clear, human-readable identities to the contracts that power the Giveth ecosystem.

This update makes it easier for donors, builders, researchers, and ecosystem partners to understand and verify how Giveth works onchain — without changing how the protocol itself operates.