Why Raffles are important?

Ethereum domains are gradually becoming more and more popular and used in the web3 landscape.

There are many volumes of exchanges of these domains, in the form of NFTs that are traded in major NFT marketplaces, foremost among them Opensea.

Dedicated ENS marketplaces have also been created over time, the most famous being ENS Vision.

Thus, most of the exchange volume occurs through marketplace listings and direct purchase.

Why do we think this is inefficient?

• 1. Domains do not have an easily identifiable price, and standard listing does not allow for a price discovery process
• 2. In marketplaces, domains can only be reached via search, and listings are almost always lost in the multitude of domains and NFTfs offered for sale
• 3. At the launch of Ethereum Name Service, domains were offered via auction, with a calendar accessible to anyone who wanted to participate
• 4. On Opensea and other large marketplaces, referral links no longer exist, whereas at the time of the first ENS auctions they were present on Opensea and were an incentive for word-of-mouth of domains for sale

Our solution

ENS raffles is a space dedicated exclusively to ENS domain. The main difference from marketplace is that Domains here are sold via a Raffle process. Basically, a domain owner can offer his domain for sale through a raffle, which takes place on Layer2 (right now Arbitrum).

Anyone interested can purchase tickets on the Arbitrum network, and at the end of the process, a winner is identified in a trustless way via Chainlink. The winner can redeem his or her domain on the Ethereum network.

As it is designed, Ethereum Name Raffles allow for several advantages:

• 1. the main page is dedicated to ongoing raffles, with a maximum limit of 10 simultaneous raffles shown in the main page
• 2. joining the raffle is very cheap thanks to transaction costs on Arbitrum network for the purchase of tickets
• 3. a Referral Link system allows bloggers and inluencers to help promote auctions of their interest
• 4. a raffle calendar allows the most interesting raffles to be added to Calendar
• 5. anyone has the ability to push a raffle to the main page using $ENR tokens

ENS raffles Proof of Concept

With the purpose of understanding the feasibility of this Raffle system dedicated to ENS domains the ENS Raffles team developed a Proof of Concept of raffle using

• the test version of ENS domains available on Ethereum Goerli

• Arbitrum Goerli to develop ticket sales (so as to test communication between L1 and L2)

• Chainlink to determine winners in a trustless way

This POC can be used in testnet on our website It is also available a guide to using the POC and a guide to using ENS in Goerli testnet

If you want to follow us and stay informed about ENS raffles find all the useful links here