Ahead of the upcoming merger, ENS domains topped OpenSea’s seven-day chart in terms of trading volume.
Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain names have surpassed Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) as the top-selling asset in OpenSea’s non-fungible token (NFT) market in the last seven days – presumably before the Ethereum merger.
According to OpenSea data, Ethereum’s weekly NFT volume has exceeded 2249 Ether (ETH) at the time of this writing, ahead of RTFKT Clone X since 1992 ETH and Bored Ape Yacht Club since 1777 ETH.
ENS domains are a distributed, open and extensible naming system on the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to convert a long keychain for a crypto address into a single ENS domain such as “vitalik.eth”.
This makes it easy to copy and paste a long wallet address to send and receive cryptocurrency, as users only need to share their domain name like any other regular address.
These domain names can be bought, sold and exchanged between users in the form of NFTs.
The recent increase in ENS trading volume has seen the average price of ENS items increase by 167% to 0.3895 ETH or $641 at the time of writing, while daily volume increased from 120.7 ETH to 1044.6 ETH increased.
There are currently over 2 million ENS articles published on OpenSea, distributed to over 508,000 owners, with a total turnover of 2,682 ENS domains sold.
Average ENS price change on OpenSea over 60 days. Source: Open Sea.
According to OpenSea, some of the most expensive ENS domain names are 000.eth, which was bought for 300 ETH and sold for 5,000 ETH, along with opensea.eth, crypto.eth, google.eth, and nike.eth.
A strong start in September is followed by an impressive sales month for ENS in August with over 300,000 new .eth registrations and a monthly turnover of 2,744 ETH, the third biggest month since ENS was founded in 2018.
The surge in demand for ENS domain names comes just over a week before the scheduled date for the Ethereum merger, which is scheduled around September 15th.
Related: Ethereum Name Service Registrations Up 200% With Lower Gas Fees
On Sunday, Vitalik Buterin asked his 4.2 million followers what the price of a five-character ENS domain name should be in 100 years:
The poll showed that 49.8% of 91,130 voters chose “Under $100”, while 18.9% of voters thought “$10,000 or more” could be considered a fair price.
According to OpenSea, the average price of an ENS domain is 0.3207 ETH or $533.71.
