Murray Loses Election for ENS Foundation Directorship

deBanked president Sean Murray was one of two nominees earlier this month for an open director position of the ENS Foundation. ENS stands for the Ethereum Name Service, a protocol that allows users to substitute human readable usernames for long hexadecimal strings commonly associated with crypto addresses.

Instead of one’s address looking like this: 0x64233eAa064ef0d54ff1A963933D0D2d46ab5829, it could be debanked.eth or debanked.com or sean.debanked.com or some other domain name owned by the user.

Murray has been an advocate for ENS names as a form of web-based identity. He was one of the first 500 people in the world to use a .com address as an ENS name and the first in the world to turn a .com address into an NFT on mainnet using the official ENS Namewrapper contract. debanked.com, for example, is not only a website address, but also a crypto address and an NFT. Murray has been studying crypto since 2014 and deployed his first deBanked smart contract to ethereum in 2021.

Murray lost the election in a blowout but has expressed that his candidacy led to some positive changes in the ENS ecosystem. The ENS Foundation represents the technology’s official DAO. Murray’s competition was more qualified than he was for the role. The victor, Alex Van de Sande, helped launch ethereum, launched the first Ethereum wallet and Web3 Browser, and was a co-founder of ENS.

“I anticipate there eventually being some crossover between the traditional financial system and blockchain technology,” Murray said. “A username system would be an integral part of that. I’m not into speculating on coins or anything of that nature.”