A Beginners Guide to Ethereum and ENS | ENS Blog

This ENS blog post explains the history of Ethereum and the Ethereum Name Service to newcomers, aiming to show why ENS was created and where it is headed. Nick Johnson, a former Google software engineer, began contributing to Ethereum, then worked on Swarm at the Ethereum Foundation, where the challenge of readable content inspired him to build a naming system that later became ENS. ENS is described as a DNS-like translation layer that maps names such as "nick.eth" to Ethereum addresses, and it is governed by the ENS DAO and $ENS token holders through votes on proposals.