Ethereum Cookbook

How it works…

ENS is used to map a human-readable name, such as packt.eth, to more complex identifiers such as an Ethereum address. ENS shares its goal with the Domain Name Service (DNS) of the internet, which maps IP addresses to easily recognizable strings of characters. ENS contains two important components: the registry and the resolver. A registry is a smart contract that owns a domain and issues subdomains of that domain to users. The user has to follow the set of rules defined in the contract for registering a domain. 

The registry maintains a list of all domains/subdomains and the following information about each of them:

• The owner, which can be an externally owned account or contract address
• The resolver
• The lifetime for all records ...