Theres a trend going on with people adding a .eth ending to their name on Twitter. I started noticing a few weeks ago, but I really took notice when people that I follow and know personally updated their name on Twitter. I knew it had something to do with crypto because ETH is the ticker symbol for Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency.
In layman terms, it’s just an alias for your cryptocurrency wallet, which is easier to remember then the 42-character hexadecimal public address that’s generated when you create a new Ethereum wallet. An address looks like this:
0x71C7656EC7ab88b098defB751B7401B5f6d8976F
This address is how people can send you money (aka tokens) in the crypto world. If they enter the address wrong then they will send money to the wrong person and unlike a bank it’s nearly impossible to get the money back if you make a mistake. Hence, using an alias reduces the probability of sending money to the wrong person.
You can use Etherscan.io to look at the mapping between the alias and the assigned 42-character hexadecimal public address. Etherscan.io is a tool that allows you to explore the Ethereum blockchain. Click the link to look at the mackhendricks.eth address mapping. You can then click on my public address and see every transaction I did with my wallet. This is a good and bad thing. It’s great that a distributed ledger is tracking all transactions so that I can prove that I own an asset such as an NFT, but it’s bad if you are trying to be low-key. There are techniques and strategies to minimize your exposure, but we won’t discuss them right now.
