What is DNS?

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the naming system of the Internet. People access information online by using domain names, such as google.com or go.kred. Computers interact through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are numeric IPv4 (eg 192.168.1.1) or the newer IPv6 alphanumeric address (eg 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334)
DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources, and humans only need to interact with more easily memorable names.

What is ENS?

ENS is the Ethereum Name Service, a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain.

ENS’s job is to map human-readable names like ‘alice.eth’ to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, content hashes, and metadata. ENS also supports ‘reverse resolution’, making it possible to associate metadata such as canonical names or interface descriptions with Ethereum addresses.

ENS has similar goals to DNS, the Internet’s Domain Name Service, but has significantly different architecture, due to the capabilities and constraints provided by the Ethereum blockchain.

You can read more about ENS at ens.domains

What is EthDNS?

EthDNS provides a mechanism to access DNS records stored in ENS. However, storing entire zonefiles on-chain is prohibitively expensive. A cheaper alternative is to store the zonefiles externally to the blockchain and store a hash of the zonefile at the relevant ENS domain. This provides the same benefits as storing records on-chain, but for arbitrary size zonefiles and at a fixed cost per update.

What is a Kred Domain?

A Kred domain is firstly an ENS domain token for a .Kred TLD domain name. It also grants control of the matching .Kred DNS domain. The Kred Top Level Domain Registry maintains a daemon that monitors the Ethereum blockchain and looks for updates to the DNS information stored against .Kred ENS tokens.These changes are validated, and then automatically propagated through to the .Kred DNS server infrastructure with no further input needed from the token holder, within a minute of the transaction being written to the blockchain. The .Kred DNS servers effectively act as a cache of the EthDNS information.