As announced in a recent post, the .onion domains of the Tor network, famous for its ability to make it difficult to track the user while surfing the web, have arrived on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).
Say goodbye to randomized .onion links. @ENSdomains now supports human readable Tor resolution. https://t.co/3f5WmUp5jT
— ETHGasStation (@ETHGasStation) August 14, 2019
The Tor network allows users to hide their IP addresses and, through the Tor browser, it is also possible to access sites that use the .onion service. Consequently, these websites have the extension .onion but this creates a problem of nomenclature because the result is not clearly readable.
Thanks to this new feature, when using the Tor browser and the MetaMask extension available for Firefox, it is possible to write the name of the website with the .eth extension and in a few seconds be redirected to the .onion website.
MetaMask, in fact, will recognise that it is an Ethereum Name Service and will then search the Ethereum blockchain to find the relative address, which will be found in the “Content” field, the same field used for the IPFS protocol and the Swarm hash.
This function was developed by the sTorgate team, which participated in the ETHNewYork hackathon last May and, after making the project open-source, it was welcomed by the Ethereum community.
