Crypto investing is in a completely new place from where is was a year ago. Then, the hype was in driving Bored Ape Yacht Club, Axie Infinity (AXS-USD) and Shiba Inu (SHIB-USD) “to the moon.” Now, investors are focusing their attention on more meaningful projects that further the reach of blockchain. One of the best pieces of evidence backing this transition is the growth of Ethereum Name Service (ENS-USD).

The macroeconomic factors at play last year made the crypto market ripe for speculative investing. Meme coins and non-fungible token (NFT) creators were thus able to leverage these market conditions for their own benefits. As a result, the market saw astounding growth among tokens like Shiba Inu, while NFTs regularly sold for tens of millions of dollars.

With the crypto crash sending the market into a much-needed corrective period, though, investors may notice a maturing when it comes to prominent themes taking up the spotlight nowadays. Bored Ape drawings are on their way out as the trend sours, and meme coins have failed to maintain the same relevancy as the days when Elon Musk was tweeting about them. Now, things like the Ethereum (ETH-USD) Merge upgrade have taken center stage. Investors are less concerned with get-rich-quick schemes and more concerned with finding practical use cases for the blockchain world.

Ethereum Name Service’s growing success is another symptom of this maturing. The project aims to connect investors with web domain names stored on the blockchain as NFTs. It’s a much more practical use case for the technology than what the digital art trend has demonstrated. Recently, the service even passed the monolithic Bored Ape collection in terms of trade volume on platforms like OpenSea, as well.

Growing Pains: Ethereum Name Service (ENS) Takes on GoDaddy

The last few months have been particularly kind to Ethereum Name Service. The ENS crypto has been able to nearly double its value since early July, approaching $16 today. But even more impressive is the project’s revenue figures. Developers say that they have been making over $4.7 million in August alone, thanks to over two million new domains being registered through the service.

ENS’s wild success recently has prompted interest from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Buterin is offering up a potential fee system for the service to adopt after he noted that the project wasn’t maximizing its revenue in the face of its uptick in new customers.

The service ENS offers to its users is evidence of the blockchain industry’s infiltration of mainstream tech. But the project’s successes aren’t without their growing pains. This week, ENS found itself filing a suit against a more mainstream domain name service, GoDaddy (NYSE:GDDY).

ENS parent company True Names’s complaint alleges that GoDaddy wrongly declared the “eth.link” domain name expired before selling it to a third party. Ethereum Name Service, however, claims ownership over the domain name and calls the sale illegitimate. Back in July, GoDaddy posted a notice to its website saying the name would be up for grabs in early September; this notice came after GoDaddy chose renewed and then promptly un-renewed the domain earlier in the summer.

Blockchain is starting to get serious, and it’s having a major effect on the broader tech space. Though unfortunately, this step in the market’s maturing is seemingly leading to clashes with the more traditional tech world.