Cloudflare will take over Eth.link service operations to revamp the reliability and scalability of gaining distributed web domains.
American internet infrastructure company Cloudflare recently announced its foray into the distributed web today, revealing a partnership with the Ethereum Name Services (ENS) that will make ENS and Interplanetary File System (IPFS) domains more accessible widely.
Last January 18, the distributed web gateway service operated by the Ethereum Name Service at eth.link will transfer to one operated by Cloudflare instead.
An ENS blog post says that the collaboration has been in process in the past year, and will result in improved uptime for ENS and IPFS domains and also improved scalability for the future. Cloudflare’s gateway will bring a hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) to domains for improved security, as well.
“We originally created the service with the help of Protocol Labs in 2019. Since then, usage has grown so much it’s gotten to be too much work for us to manage it,” states the post from Brantly Millegan, ENS Director of Operations.
“If you use it regularly, you may have noticed we’ve had some downtime in the last few months (sorry about that!). We’re focused on developing ENS, not running infrastructure, so we reached out to Cloudflare. We’ve been working with them to help them develop their own similar service to which we could point eth.link, and we’re pleased to see it come to fruition.”
The Ethereum Name System is a lookup service built on the Ethereum smart contracts. It provided an easier way to access data on the blockchain by providing a human-readable domain for wallets and websites, than the garbled alphanumeric string that constitutes Ethereum addresses. That makes it easier to share censorship-resistant information on the blockchain, and it also helps evade mistakes from mistyped addresses.
While the ENS addresses are accessible through specialized distributed web browsers or those furnished with an extension like the MetaMask wallet, standard web browsers can’t access them as they are. But affixing “.link” to the end of the address makes it visible to anyone. This is where this new Cloudflare gateway will come in, changing the current eth.link service operated by ENS.
“So are we distributed yet? No, but we are getting closer, building bridges between emerging technologies and current web infrastructure,” reads Cloudflare’s tedious and technical description of the imminent service. “By providing a gateway dedicated to the distributed web, we hope to make these services more accessible to everyone.”
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