8 posts tagged with "smart-contract-identity"

One of the stranger design choices Ethereum inherited early on is that users are still routinely shown raw hexadecimal addresses when they interact with smart contracts. These strings were never meant to be human-readable identifiers — they exist because machines need them, not because humans should be making decisions based on them.

Yet in many wallets and transaction flows today, users are still expected to look at a 42-character hexadecimal string and determine whether the interaction they are about to approve is legitimate. That expectation is only reasonable for developers. For regular people, it asks something the human brain is simply not well-suited to do.

Smart contracts are the backbone of onchain applications, but discovering information about them has always been fragmented. Contract metadata lives across multiple platforms — documentation on one site, audits on another like github, social links scattered everywhere. Basic information like "what does this contract actually do?" is often nowhere to be found.

Enscribe brings contract metadata onchain through ENS text records.

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.

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?