ENS board

When an ENS name lapses it goes to auction with a temporary premium on top of the registration fee. The premium starts at $100,000,000 and halves every 24 hours for 21 days until it reaches $0.

Time to $75 in premium is when the name becomes affordable. Time to $0 in premium is when it becomes free of premium, and also when everyone else waiting for a bargain shows up. Buy inside the gap between those two columns, which is always about 33 hours wide. You pay a few dollars over the registration fee and you are ahead of the crowd. Registration is $5 a year for names of 5 letters or more, $160 for 4 letters, $640 for 3.

A name showing as available is not the same as a name being cheap. Everything mid-auction reports available. One name reported available at a premium of $81,600,000. Always read the two time columns before you buy.

Most Google figures are estimates. Treat them as right to within a factor of three. Anything above a billion moves by half between two reads even on Google itself. Check the number yourself before spending $640 on a 3-letter name.

One visible competitor, 0xcf48a8fa…, holds 656 .eth names and registered 71 in 14 days. They took carbons, neutrons and quasars within three hours of each other. Their book is Chinese lucky-number strings, English plurals, brandable business compounds and Latin — the plural half overlaps you directly. Almost everything they buy is registered for the 28-day minimum, so that batch lapses around 10 September. Churn and flip, not a hold.