If you’re deep into web3 and active across the ecosystem, in any typical week you’re signing multisig transactions, voting on Snapshot or Agora, minting NFTs in a hot wallet before sending them to cold storage, or trying to chase the next 100x memecoin in the degen Olympics. Suffice to say, your wallet interface gets a lot of use.

You may like to use multiple wallets for these tasks — perhaps a combination of hot and cold wallets — but keeping track of which wallet is for which action can be challenging. An additional factor is that copy/pasting wallet addresses is not only inefficient but also provides scope for mistakes and subterfuge, particularly address poisoning. Fortunately, there’s a great web3-native solution to your wallet management woes: the Ethereum Name Service.

Most of us know this protocol as ENS, which pioneered technology to map wallet addresses to human-readable names; it’s what gives users the .eth suffix to the user names you see in Discord and on X. ENS enables users to send funds to hirokennelly.eth rather than a long hexadecimal address, but the protocol also enables a host of other functions to help you manage your web3 life, including ENS subnames. The guide below assumes you already have a top-level ENS name set up, but if you don’t, you can find several resources across the web, including the ENS official documentation.

What Is a Subname?

A subname can be set as a prefix to your ENS name, for example vote.hirokennelly.eth. In my current wallet management system, I actively use five different subnames depending on the function of the wallet:

An aside on security: Subnames are easy to set up, but require a bit of forethought to make sure you are managing your wallets as securely as possible. For example, the admin.hirokennelly.eth address is the owner and manager of the top-level ENS (hirokennelly.eth) and subnames, and I have it linked to a Ledger that I only use for ENS management. This is because if someone gains access to the wallet with which you manage your ENS names, they can change the addresses and you would probably be none the wiser until it was too late.

Subnames make a complex web3 more manageable and transparent, allowing you to create named wallets for the different types of actions you want to take. If you want to send funds to cold storage, link your cold wallet to a ‘vault’ prefix. Do you often sign multisig transactions? Create a ‘sign’ prefix. Do you have a wallet for degenerative cryptoeconomics? Create a ‘degen’ prefix so you can easily fund (and track) your memecoin chasing. In fact, since I’m a lover of degenerate cryptoeconomics but don’t have that subname, we’ll create one in this guide. Let’s get started….

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