Summary

Despite advances in decentralized protocols, most users still access DeFi and Web3 apps through centralized frontends, which can be fragile points of failure vulnerable to downtime, censorship, and DNS hijacks.

PinMe.eth provides an elegant solution for this — a one-command deployment tool that pins static frontends to IPFS and maps them to ENS subdomains. The result is a permanent, verifiable, censorship-resistant frontend infrastructure.

Within months, PinMe has become one of the most adopted ENS-powered tools in the ecosystem, responsible for over 125,000 ENS subdomains + contenthash records set, generating 2.6M+ monthly website requests via eth.limo.

Introduction

In Read, Write, Own, Chris Dixon describes the internet’s evolution as a cycle of openness and enclosure: new technologies open the door to creativity and participation, only to be captured by centralized platforms that consolidate control. Blockchains broke that cycle at the backend/infrastructure level, enabling code, money, and governance that no single actor can own or shut down.

But even as protocols became credibly neutral, frontends remained trapped in the old paradigm. Websites, dashboards, and apps are still hosted on servers, routed through DNS, and subject to the whims of companies, regulators, and outages. Users may interact with contracts that will live forever onchain, yet the interfaces connecting them to those contracts can vanish overnight.

This paradox — decentralized backends paired with centralized frontends — is one of the great unsolved problems of crypto. That’s where PinMe.eth comes in. Building on ENS+Namespace, IPFS, and Filecoin, PinMe is building the missing piece of the decentralized stack: frontends that are as resilient, verifiable, and permissionless as the protocols they serve — the missing piece in making Dixon’s vision real, not just at the protocol layer, but at the interface where people actually connect with and use web3.

Problem: Frontend Fragility

When NounsDAO funded a set of governance frontends, the expectation was creative projects and permanence. Yet once the initial grants dried up, many of those sites quietly vanished.

“Contracts lived on; the interfaces did not.” — Dusk

This highlighted a gap in the market: DeFi, DAO, and Web3 infrastructure was credibly neutral, permissionless, and verifiable, but the frontends were brittle, centralized, ephemeral, and prone to attacks and exploits.

The broader challenge was clear:

• Centralized servers are subject to outages or shutdowns.
• DNS can be hijacked or censored.
• Short-lived teams abandon frontends once funding ends.

In short, the decentralized stack was incomplete without permanent, immutable, verifiable frontends.

The Solution: PinMe.eth.limo

From fragility to permanence, PinMe.eth is a tool that enables you to deploy decentralized frontends with a single command or use a simple frontend to upload files and folders, pinning them forever. It uploads your content (file, site, picture, music, anything) to IPFS, writes the content hash to an ENS subdomain, and makes the site accessible through ENS gateways like eth.limo. No DNS, no servers, just a portable, verifiable, censorship-resistant frontend. PinMe was designed to make decentralized site deployments trivial.

How it works:

1. Simple frontend to upload files or folders, automatically get assigned pinme.eth subdomain (customizable in the future), or connect to your own .eth domains.

1. Dev-friendly way:
2.   npm i -g pinme
  pinme upload ./build-folder

Under the hood, PinMe:

1. Builds static assets (React, Next.js, Hugo, Hexo, etc.).
2. Uploads and pins content to IPFS.
   1. On IPFS, files are stored in a Merkle DAG structure and addressed by their Content Identifier (CID) — a cryptographic hash of the content.
3. Verifies availability across multiple gateways.
4. Creates and manages subdomains using Namespace.
5. Writes the ENS contenthash (EIP-1577) to a subdomain.
6. After contenthash is set, subdomains resolve in browsers using eth.limo.
7. (Soon) Uses Filecoin for persistent storage.

Benefits:

• Permanence: Frontends persist independent of any team or server.
• Verifiability: Content-addressed publishing ensures fetching authentic files.
• Trust: Eliminates tampering risks common in centralized hosting.
• Resilience: No DNS hijacks, shutdowns, censorship, single points of failure.
• Simplicity & Speed: Deployment reduced to a single command.
• Composability: Easy to integrate across Web3, apps, tools, CI/CD pipelines, or DAO workflows.
• Global Accessibility: Content served across multiple gateways ensures access in regions where servers might otherwise be blocked.

As one user put it:

“PinMe feels like Vercel for ENS/IPFS deployments, but without
the leash of centralized infrastructure.”

Results & Adoption

PinMe’s adoption has been both rapid and unexpected. In a landscape where the majority of ENS domains sit dormant, PinMe has unlocked a new utility. It has quickly established itself as one of the leading ENS-centric deployment tools:

Stats:

• 125,000+ ENS contenthash records created (compared to ~30k across all 1.6M ENS domains registered).
• 2.6M+ monthly requests routed through eth.limo to PinMe-deployed frontends (~5% of all eth.limo traffic).
• Diverse use cases: protocol dashboards, personal portfolios, docs, news sites, music distribution, and even banned books distributed via ENS in China.
• GitHub Forks: 34, GitHub Stars: 589 (as of writing).

Users and usage:

• Primary users: Web2 frontend developers using PinMe as a deploy tool.
• What they deploy: personal sites/portfolios, protocol docs, news pages, books, and even music.
• Unexpected use cases: ePub distribution; some users pin censored books (in China) and make them reachable via ENS!

Developers consistently highlight:

• Ease: “Setup took minutes.”
• Reliability: Requests to charge for long-term stability.
• Flexibility: Composability to use however they want.

Why this matters

The importance of PinMe isn’t only that it makes websites harder to kill. It redefines what it means to publish online in an era where information is increasingly fragile, yet its source, truth, and accuracy are more and more important. Throughout history, the power to preserve knowledge, whether etched into stone, printed in books, or mirrored across servers, has determined whose voices endure. PinMe takes that lineage and gives it a 21st-century form, allowing anyone, anywhere, to publish something that resists time, censorship, and institutional collapse, and tie it to a domain that will outlive them.

Traditional hosting models concentrate power: whoever controls DNS can reroute traffic, whoever owns the servers can shut them off, and PinMe flips the traditional model into the everyday user’s favor.

In a world where trust in institutions is crumbling, this ability to create unkillable interfaces is less about technical convenience and more about reshaping who controls the access and memory of the new Internet.

The Road Ahead

PinMe’s roadmap reflects the evolution of the decentralized web:

• Deepening the Storage Layer
• Today, PinMe relies on IPFS pinning for content distribution. The next step is integration with Filecoin for persistent, incentivized storage.
• Evolving with ENS
• ENS is moving forward with ENSv2 and Namechain. PinMe will track and integrate these upgrades to ensure publishing onchain is possible.
• Expanding UX
• The drag-and-drop interface is already opening PinMe to non-technical users; still need to normalize PinMe upload for creators, DAOs, communities.
• Sustainability
• PinMe will remain open and free at its core, but a path is emerging for premium features. Custom subname flows, DNS-to-ENS reverse proxies, Filecoin-backed persistence, and enterprise-grade reliability.

From Tool to Standard (3-year vision)

The ultimate vision is cultural as much as technical. In 2-3 years, deploying a frontend with PinMe should feel as routine as deploying code with Git. Protocols, DAOs, and creators won’t ask whether they should use it; they’ll assume permanence is the default. PinMe is not just a CLI tool — it’s the emerging standard for publishing in a world that refuses to accept fragility as the norm.

Why we’re excited

Namespace has always believed that ENS is the origin of decentralized identity and publishing. PinMe proves ENS isn’t just about names and identity, although those remain one of our core focus areas, domains, and permanence are equally important. By pairing ENS subdomains with verifiable IPFS content, PinMe provides the missing glue for a truly decentralized stack.

Content-addressed frontends are becoming standard operating practice for serious crypto projects. And when the next DNS hijack, hosting outage, or regulatory takedown hits, the difference between centralized and decentralized deployment will be existential.

Conclusion & Next Steps

PinMe (using ENS/Namespace, IPFS, Filecoin), demonstrates that the future of web3 requires not just decentralized contracts, but also permanent, verifiable, and permissionless frontends.

Next Steps:

• Developers:
  • npm i -g pinme
  • pinme upload ./build-folder

• Teams, Builders, Partners, DAOs: integrate PinMe into workflows to guarantee frontend permanence.
• Community: contribute, test, submit PRs and feature requests, and expand censorship-resistant publishing.

👉 GitHub: github.com/glitternetwork/pinme
👉 Live: pinme.eth.limo
👉 Check out the full Twitter Space.

About ENS

ENS (Ethereum Name Service) is the open, decentralized naming protocol built on Ethereum. It maps human-readable names like alice.eth to wallet addresses, smart contracts, websites, and more—making blockchain interactions simpler and more secure. ENS is governed by the ENS DAO and functions as public infrastructure for Web3 identity.

About Namespace

Namespace is the official ENS Service Provider. It builds infra and tooling—SDKs, APIs, subdomain systems, and integrations—that enable wallets, apps, rollups, and even AI agents to issue and manage ENS subdomains at scale. By working on core tooling and partnerships, Namespace expands ENS adoption and helps bring decentralized identity to millions of users.

About IPFS

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a peer-to-peer protocol for storing and sharing data. Instead of using location-based addresses (like URLs), it uses content addressing—files are identified by cryptographic hashes. This makes data permanent, verifiable, and resistant to censorship, without relying on a single server.

About Filecoin

Filecoin is a decentralized storage network with a built-in economic layer. It coordinates a global marketplace where storage providers earn FIL tokens for proving they store data reliably, while users pay to store and retrieve files. This creates strong incentives for durability, verifiability, and long-term data persistence.

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