Meme Insider
The Ethereum Name Service just made one of the most based moves of 2025.
Instead of following the usual rollup playbook (start centralized for speed, promise to decentralize later), ENS looked at the landscape and said: nah, we’re shipping Namechain as a fully based rollup from day one, powered by Taiko’s stack through Nethermind’s Surge framework.
That’s huge.
Most projects take years of “progressive decentralization” because they need a centralized sequencer to hit the performance numbers users expect. ENS is skipping that entire phase because Taiko’s tech is already running 50M+ transactions on mainnet with zero downtime and real sub-second preconfirmations in production.
No whitepaper promises. Just proof.
What This Actually Means (in plain English)
Name Service (ENS) just dropped a massive infrastructure flex: they're building Namechain – their dedicated ZK rollup for .eth names – on Taiko's proven tech stack via Nethermind's Surge framework.
This lets them launch as a fully based rollup from day one, meaning Ethereum validators (not a centralized operator) sequence the chain. No single point of failure, no censorship risk, no trust assumptions beyond Ethereum itself.
That's the dream everyone has been talking about since the rollup-centric roadmap dropped, and ENS is actually doing it.
Why Taiko Won the Bid
Taiko mainnet has been live since May 2024 → 50+ million transactions processed → zero downtime → sub-second preconfirmations already live in production.
When ENS said they needed near-instant cross-chain name resolution with institutional-grade security, Taiko + Surge was the only stack that could deliver both speed and full decentralization without trade-offs.
The result? Namechain solves the ancient CCIP-Read bottleneck that made offchain expiry checks painfully slow, adds TEE-backed proofs, and gives users state updates in seconds instead of minutes or hours.
All while staying Stage 1 rollup at launch (with a clear path to Stage 2).
Straight from the Teams
ENS Labs:
“We were presented with the rare opportunity to skip several steps in the progressive decentralization pathway entirely.”
Taiko basically replied:
“Proof, Not Promises.”
And they’re right. The numbers don’t lie.
Timeline
- Internal testing → ongoing
- Public testnet → Q2 2026
- Mainnet → to follow
Three teams are shipping this together:
- ENS (product + naming expertise)
- Nethermind (Surge framework + ops)
- Taiko (based sequencing + preconf tech)
This isn’t just good for .eth names. It’s the strongest real-world validation yet that based rollups have graduated from theory to production-grade infrastructure that even the most critical Ethereum protocols trust.
When the people who literally run web3’s identity layer choose your stack, you’ve won.
Bullish on Taiko. Bullish on based rollups. Bullish on Ethereum actually delivering the endgame.
If you're holding $TAIKO or just love seeing Ethereum infrastructure actually ship decentralized from day one, this is the kind of news that matters.
The era of “we’ll decentralize later” is over. The based era is here.
Read the official announcements:
