In early November, ENS rebranded itself into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Governance tokens were given to existing owners of ENS addresses. (...)

The snapshot for the airdrop was taken October 31, 2021. Nothing you do after that date will change your airdrop amount or get you an airdrop if you don’t already have one (...) -Brantly.eth Source: ens.mirror.xyz, Introducing $ENS, Nov-02-2021

In this post I will look at the daily number of ENS registrations around the ENS airdrop cutoff date. I look for any suspicious increase in registrations right before the cutoff date. Such behavious would be indicative of insider trading.

Context

My post on ENS 1 provides a few pieces of relevant information:

The key dates to remember are the following:

• The cutoff date for eligibility to the ENS token airdrop: October 31, 2021; and
• The official airdrop announcement: November 02, 2021.

Let's look at daily ENS registrations around those two important dates.

There was no increase in ENS registrations before the October 31 airdrop snapshot date. In fact there was a slight decrease in registrations a few days prior to that date. This speaks highly of the integrity of the team working on ENS. Insiders could have easily exploited their privileged knowledge to obtain airdrop tokens. The media often portrays the crypto market as an unregulated wild west full of scammers. It is good to see an example of a team that behaved flawlessly and with upmost integrity.

ENS registrations increased sharply right after the airdrop announcement. Two potential reasons come to mind:

1. Some poor folks were not aware that they were too late for the airdrop; and
2. The airdrop announcement generated a lot of buzz in the media and on twitter. This made a lot of new people register ENS addresses.

Takeaways

• There is no indication of insider trading on the ENS airdrop.
• This speaks highly of the integrity of the ENS team.
• There was a sharp increase in ENS registrations after the airdrop announcement.

The Ethereum Name Service is great innovation. I hope the new DAO will shepherd this protocol towards a bright future.