ENS Use-cases | support.ens.domains (2024)

The first and most common use case for an ENS name is to use it as an easy-to-remember name for your cryptocurrency addresses.

ENS supports many different cryptocurrencies which can be added from the ENS Manager App, allowing you to receive payments in more cryptocurrencies than just Ethereum.

This alleviates the confusion associated with remembering your hexadecimal wallet address and provides easy payment options.

If you'd like to add wallet addresses to your ENS name you can follow our guide here:

How-To: Add a Wallet Address

And also for everything else

ENS names go far beyond that, however, allowing you to add all kinds of records to it from social media links, to profile pictures, custom records, and decentralized websites.

This gives you a name that can serve as your complete Web3 identity.

Your ENS name can store metadata like your e-mail address, website and social media usernames so people can easily find them.

And provide it to apps and services!

Services like games, apps and other websites can then fetch the metadata and display it so you don't have to maintain individual profiles on each service!

Social media identity

A popular use-case for ENS names is to use them as your online identity on social media:

If you'd like to add social media links to your ENS name you can follow our guide here:

How-To: Set a Twitter name

E-Mail

While ENS names cannot be used in legacy DNS-based e-mail systems, there are several projects which works around that to enable you to use your ENS name to send and receive e-mail!

Custom Service Keys

Your ENS name is also capable of storing custom records that can contain nearly anything you want to display or integrate into your services.

INFO

If you'd like to add a custom service key to your ENS name you can follow our guide here:

How-To: Add a Custom Service Key

Create a Decentralized Website

One of the most interesting and powerful features of ENS names is the ability to point them to webpages hosted on the decentralized web, creating a website where both the hosting and the domain name is entirely decentralized.

Supported protocols

	IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System) is a peer-to-peer network and protocol designed to make the web faster, safer, and more open.
	Swarm is a decentralized data storage and distribution technology. Ready to power the next generation of censorship-resistant, unstoppable, serverless dapps.
	The Arweave network is like Bitcoin, but for data: A permanent and decentralized web inside an open ledger.
	Tor, short for "The Onion Router," is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication.