The internet still needs names, but the people using them are changing. From governments and universities to banks and applications, a growing number of institutions are beginning to treat onchain identity as infrastructure rather than a feature.
Governments don't typically wake up one morning and decide they need an ENS name.
Decisions like these tend to follow months, if not years, of research, evaluation, and planning. When a public institution adopts new infrastructure, it's rarely an experiment.
Earlier this month, the Republic of Türkiye Directorate of Communications chose ENS for its official decentralized identity, cbiletisim.eth. This decision is a part of a series of initiatives focused on artificial intelligence, blockchain infrastructure, and digital sovereignty.
What makes announcements like this noteworthy is that they offer a glimpse into how organizations are beginning to use ENS.
For most of ENS's history, the story has been fairly straightforward. People registered names to replace wallet addresses, build onchain identities, collect digital assets, and signal their membership in online communities.
While, that's still the story today, it's only the beginning of the story of tomorrow.
The next major phase of ENS adoption will come not only from individuals, but also from the organizations, applications, and institutions that millions of people interact with every day.
A commonly held misconception about ENS is that it's a product designed only for crypto users.
While this belief may have felt true in 2017, when the primary use case for an ENS name was sending and receiving crypto, the internet looks very different today.
Users move between wallets, applications, Layer 2s, social platforms, AI systems, and digital communities. Increasingly, they're carrying pieces of their identity with them everywhere they go.
Larger organizations like PayPal, Coinbase, and Uniswap are noticing this and are making active decisions to get ahead of this trend.
For most organizations, a website is no longer the whole story.
The modern internet is made up of layers upon layers of interconnected systems.
The question isn't whether those systems will continue multiplying. They will.
The question is: how will people know who they're interacting with when everything is connected to everything else?
When most people don't spend much time thinking about essential infrastructure, that's usually a good sign that it's working.
This is what makes the announcement from the Republic of Türkiye Directorate of Communications interesting.
The ENS name wasn't registered because a shorter wallet address was needed.
This initial step is an essential part of a broader effort around cryptographic verification, decentralized publishing, and institutional identity. The announcement specifically highlights the role of ENS in establishing an official decentralized identity that can be verified independently of centralized infrastructure.
More importantly, that identity becomes a common reference point across everything else the institution is building.
Its publications can be associated with it. Smart contracts can be associated with it. Websites, services, and future applications can be associated with it.
In a world where organizations increasingly operate across multiple platforms, networks, and systems, a portable identity becomes more than a convenience.
It becomes a coordination layer.
In other words, registering an ENS name isn't the destination. It's the foundation.
For most of ENS's history, adoption has grown from the bottom up.
Individuals registered names. Communities embraced them. Applications integrated them because users wanted a simpler way to navigate onchain systems.
Today, we're beginning to see another class of users arrive for different reasons.
Stablecoins have moved beyond crypto-native circles and into mainstream financial conversations. Governments and public institutions are experimenting with blockchain infrastructure. At the same time, advances in AI are creating entirely new questions around attribution, authenticity, and trust.
As more of the internet becomes programmable, organizations are finding themselves in environments where identity needs to travel across systems rather than remain trapped inside them.
An ENS name provides a persistent identifier that can be recognized across applications, networks, smart contracts, and digital services.
That's useful for an individual.
It's arguably even more useful for an institution.
A university might use it to connect identities across departments, services, and communities. A bank could use it to establish trusted identities for products, applications, and financial infrastructure. A government agency could use it to tie together publications, services, and public communications.
Just as every organization eventually needed a website and a domain name, there may come a point where every organization needs an onchain identity.
An institution may require identities for departments, services, applications, employees, publications, wallets, and eventually autonomous systems acting on its behalf.
Managing all of those identities separately creates complexity. But managing them as part of a shared namespace creates structure.
This is where ENS shines.
A single root name can support an entire ecosystem of identities beneath it, each with its own purpose, permissions, and level of trust.
If that sounds familiar, it's because organizations have been doing some version of this for decades. Domains, email addresses, internal systems, and user accounts all follow similar patterns.
ENS extends that model into onchain environments.
With ENSv2, names become more flexible, interoperable, and easier to integrate across applications and networks. The goal isn't simply to help users manage individual names. It's to make naming infrastructure more useful for the increasingly complex ecosystems being built onchain.
One of the defining characteristics of today's internet is that it keeps fragmenting. There are more chains, more applications, and more ecosystems than ever before, and soon there will be more autonomous agents acting on behalf of users, businesses, and institutions.
The challenge is no longer simply establishing an identity online. Increasingly, the challenge is ensuring that identity can be recognized across the many environments where people and organizations operate.
A name that only works in one application is useful. A name that works across applications, networks, and contexts starts to look a lot more like infrastructure.
That's ultimately the role ENS was designed to play.
ENS began by helping individuals navigate blockchain networks. Increasingly, the same infrastructure can help organizations navigate a world that spans multiple chains, applications, and digital environments.
The internet still needs names.
The biggest shift today is who needs them now.