Every day, ENS names that someone once cared enough to register quietly expire. After a 90-day grace period, each one enters, let’s call it, a strange ritual: a 21-day Dutch auction that ENS calls the temporary premium.
The premium starts near 100 million dollars.
Not a typo. The price then halves roughly every day for 21 days until it reaches zero, at which point the name costs nothing but the standard yearly registration fee still applies.
Somewhere along that curve, every name crosses from absurd to reasonable. At day 12, a name still carries roughly $24,000 of premium. By day 15, about $3,000. By day 18, a few hundred dollars.
And that is exactly where the problem starts.
The Sweet Spot Is a Kill Zone
The premium curve creates a brutal game. Wait too long and the price is great, but so is everyone else's. The moment a desirable name decays into "reasonable" territory, you are racing snipers, or bots, and people with deeper pockets than you.
Move early and you win the race, but you overpay. Alone, most people simply cannot justify spending $12,000 on a name at day 13, even a genuinely great one. So the good names go to whoever can stomach the biggest number soonest.
I kept watching this happen and kept thinking the same thing: the auction is a solo game, but the people who want these names are usually groups.
For example:
- A DAO wants its brand name back.
- Three friends want a name for a shared project.
- A community wants to grab a word that matters to them.
- Domain traders want to acquire premium names and resell them at higher price.
So we built ens.diamonds.
Pool Up
ens.diamonds turns buying a name in temporary premium from a solo game into a multiplayer one. The idea fits in one sentence: a group pools ETH toward one specific .eth name, the funds sit in an escrow contract nobody controls, and a multisig wallet the group owns together registers the name.
It is live on Ethereum mainnet, built by our team at Namespace, open source under MIT, and it charges no protocol fee. You pay the ENS registration cost and gas. That is it.
The homepage is a live feed of every name currently in premium, decaying in real time. When you spot one worth having, you start a vault.
How a Vault Works
A vault is a funding campaign for exactly one name. You pick the name, and it is locked in from that point on, so choose carefully.
Then you set four things:
- target amount in ETH,
- funding deadline between 1 and 14 days,
- and the people you want as co-owners.
- You invite them by ENS name or address, up to 10 signers total.
- You also make your own first deposit when you create the vault, so every vault starts with skin in the game.
Invited contributors deposit ETH toward the target. Every deposit is a transaction to the escrow contract, and your share of the name is tracked onchain, proportional to what you put in. If someone tries to deposit more than the remaining gap, the contract accepts what fits and refunds the rest in the same transaction. There is a 0.01 ETH minimum per contribution, mostly to keep the co-owner list meaningful.
While a vault is funding, anyone can withdraw their full deposit at any time, without asking anyone. If the deadline passes without hitting the target, the vault expires and everyone withdraws the same way.
When the target is hit, a 24-hour execution window opens and withdrawals lock. This window exists because a group needs a brief moment where the money is actually committed, otherwise someone could pull out at the exact second the group tries to buy. Within those 24 hours, any contributor can finalize the vault.
Finalizing does two things in one transaction.
- It deploys a Safe multisig whose owners are exactly the people who contributed, with a strict majority threshold.
- Then it sweeps the pooled ETH into that Safe.
If nobody finalizes within 24 hours, the window lapses and withdrawals simply reopen. The money is never stranded.
From that point on, the escrow is out of the picture. The group's Safe holds the money, and the group's Safe buys the name.
The Name Is Born Co-Owned
On mainnet, ENS registration uses a commit-reveal scheme, so buying takes a few steps. One contributor sends a small commit transaction. Sixty seconds later, every owner signs the same Safe transaction, the one that calls the ENS registrar. Once a majority has signed, anyone can execute it.
The name mints directly to the Safe.
The name never passes through any individual's wallet. There is no trusted friend who buys it and pinky-promises to share it later.
Ownership economics and ownership control are deliberately separate. Your economic share is proportional to your deposit, and it is readable onchain. But voting in the Safe is one owner, one vote, majority rules.
Someone who put in 60% of the money cannot outvote everyone else, and no single person can act alone. For small invite-only groups, headcount beats capital weighting. If you fund it all yourself, you do not need a vault; there is a solo buying flow for that.
Nobody Can Hit Pause, Including Us
The escrow contract is a singleton: one immutable contract holds every vault. No proxy, no admin key, no pause switch, no upgrade path.
I want to be precise about what that buys you, because "non-custodial" gets thrown around loosely.
We cannot touch your funds. The contract has no function that would let us. There is no owner role in the code. If Namespace disappeared tomorrow, if the website went down mid-vault, every deposit remains withdrawable and every vault remains finalizable by calling the public contract directly from any block explorer. The website is a convenience, not a dependency.
Small-Group Coordination Is the Actual Product
The thing I keep coming back to is not really about ENS names.
Crypto is good at two extremes. One person with a wallet can do anything alone. Ten thousand people with a governance token can do things very slowly. The middle, five friends who want to own one thing together this week, is weirdly underserved. That middle is where most human coordination actually happens.
So this does one thing really well: it lets groups win auctions that none of them could win alone.
The feed is live at ens.diamonds.
The code, contracts, tests, and audit history are at github.com/thenamespace/ens-diamonds.
If you have been watching a name decay and waiting for a price you can justify alone, stop waiting alone.
Pool up!
Sources
- ENS Diamonds: ens.diamonds
- ENS: ens.domains
- Safe: safe.global + docs.safe.global
- Resolvio: resolvio.xyz
- Github Repo: github.com/thenamespace/ens-diamonds
- Temp Premium Docs: support.ens.domains
- EnsDiamondsEscrow contract: etherscan.io