What Subdomains Are and How They Work
If you own yourname.eth, you automatically have the ability to create any subdomain under it: pay.yourname.eth, app.yourname.eth, dev.yourname.eth, or anything else. No additional registration fee. No waiting period. You control the parent name, so you control all subdomains under it.
Subdomains in ENS work the same way as DNS subdomains: they are just labels prepended to the parent name, resolved by the same ENS resolver infrastructure. The difference is that you create and manage them through smart contract calls rather than a DNS control panel.
What You Can Assign to a Subdomain
Each subdomain can have its own set of records:
Wallet address — pay.yourname.eth can point to your payment wallet, separate from your main identity address. Give this out instead of a raw 0x address for receiving funds.
IPFS content hash — site.yourname.eth can point to an IPFS-hosted static site or document. Browsers with ENS support (Brave, MetaMask Flask with IPFS extension) will load the content directly.
Text records — Any key-value metadata: email, Twitter/X handle, GitHub username, description. ENS has standardized fields that wallets and social apps read, but you can also set custom keys.
Subname delegation — You can transfer control of a subdomain to another address. alice.yourname.eth can be delegated to Alice's wallet, so she controls her subname's records while you keep the parent.
Practical Use Cases
Team or organization namespaces
If you run a project with multiple contributors, register yourproject.eth and issue subdomains to each team member: alice.yourproject.eth, bob.yourproject.eth. Each person controls their own subdomain after you delegate it. This is an on-chain org chart that any dApp can read.
Payment routing
Separate your payment address from your identity. Use main.yourname.eth for your identity records, payments.yourname.eth for receiving crypto. This keeps your primary identity address cleaner and allows you to rotate payment addresses without changing your public identity.
Multi-wallet identity
Own multiple wallets for different purposes (main wallet, hot wallet, hardware wallet, spending wallet)? Assign each one a subdomain. cold.yourname.eth → hardware wallet, hot.yourname.eth → daily driver.
Decentralized websites
Host static content on IPFS and point a subdomain at the content hash. This is the most censorship-resistant form of web hosting available today. No server, no domain registrar, no takedown vector. The content is on IPFS; the name is on Ethereum. Removing either requires compromising decentralized infrastructure.
Protocol integrations
Many Web3 protocols use ENS records for configuration. A DeFi protocol might read a specific text record off your ENS name to find your preferred fee address. Some wallet connectors use ENS names as identifiers. As Web3 infrastructure matures, ENS records are increasingly used as a general-purpose configuration layer for on-chain identity.
How to Create a Subdomain
Go to app.ens.domains and navigate to your name. In the Subnames section, you can add a subdomain by entering the label and the address it should point to. One on-chain transaction per subdomain.
For programmatic subdomain management (creating many subdomains, or building a product that issues subdomains), the ENS SDK handles this. The core operation is calling setSubnodeRecord on the ENS registry contract with the parent namehash, the subdomain label, and the target address.
The Namespace Is Already There
If you own an ENS name, you already have subdomain capability. Most holders have never touched this. The tools are available, the resolution infrastructure works, and the gas costs on mainnet are the only friction — and on Basenames (Base L2), those costs are negligible.
If you have been using your .eth name purely as a wallet alias, subdomains are worth exploring.