Premium auction outcomes | ENSWhois Analyses

When a .eth name expires past grace, it enters a 21-day dutch auction where price decays from $100M to base. Do these auctions clear, and if so at what premium?

Distribution of premium paid (above base price) for cleared auctions, per length bucket:

Median (P50) - typical clearing premium for that bucket
P90 / P99 / Max - tail behaviour: where the truly-coveted names land in the price decay
Total auction premium - aggregate value extracted by the auction mechanism per tier

What this tells you: Indicates if and where premium pricing creates a meaningful auction-revenue stream, or whether most of the auction volume is cheap longer names cycling through.

Premium-auction clearing prices by length

Names that cleared through the 21-day dutch auction. Percentile columns show the distribution of premium paid per length bucket — in ETH (on-chain truth) and USD (using the day's ETH/USD price at the time of each auction).

Premium share of registration revenue (monthly)

Length	Auctions cleared	Median (P50)	P90	P99	Max	Total
3 chars	1,147	0.1101	$283.46	1.40	$3.31K	8.00	$17.80K	21.46	$52.02K	672.57	$1.74M
4 chars	5,475	0.0332	$88.05	0.1838	$471.13	1.17	$2.96K	11.00	$31.50K	569.73	$1.48M
5 chars	5,943	0.0040	$10.34	0.0527	$127.21	0.4496	$1.16K	7.22	$22.84K	191.41	$499.72K
6–9 chars	12,740	0.0060	$14.46	0.0765	$183.97	0.6029	$1.50K	16.50	$29.80K	546.31	$1.35M
10+ chars	5,075	0.0058	$13.70	0.0594	$141.96	0.3625	$805.71	7.76	$17.35K	161.45	$374.98K

Premium-auction surcharge as a percentage of total NameRegistered revenue (base + premium). Highlights how much of any given month's registrar revenue came from auction-cleared names vs. fresh base-price registrations.

Chart starts at 2019-05-01 - that's when the ETHRegistrarController was updated to one that separated the base and premium components of registration cost in NameRegistered events.

Methodology

Premium auction = 21-day dutch auction after grace period ends. Price decays from $100M to 0 over the 21-day window.
All values shown are the premium component only - i.e. the dutch-auction surcharge above the pricing-tier base price. They do NOT include the base registration fee (e.g. $640/yr for 3-char × N years), which is separately determined by the USD price oracle at registration time.
Each row in the percentile table is one NameRegistered event on mainnet .eth controllers where premium > 0. Names that cleared after the auction window ended (premium = 0) are excluded from the percentile distribution but included in the monthly share chart's denominator.
ETH percentiles are computed across wei values per length bucket. USD percentiles are computed against per-event dollar amounts (premium_wei × the day's ETH/USD price), so they rank auctions by their dollar magnitude across years rather than re-converting an ETH percentile through a single rate. ETH/USD prices come from the eth_usd_daily table; missing days fall back to the nearest available date.
Monthly share chart pulls from the revenue-by-length snapshot. premium_pct = sum(premium_wei) / sum(base + premium_wei) across all NameRegistered events in that month, all length buckets combined. NameRenewed events never carry premium and are excluded.
The chart only starts when the V2 ETHRegistrarController went live (block ~16,925,617, around April 2023). V1-era controllers emit a single 'cost' field on NameRegistered with no base/premium split, so we have nothing to plot for the V1 era. Months with zero base+premium signal are dropped from the line entirely (rather than rendered as 0%, which would imply 'no premium happened' rather than 'no signal').