According to Khori Whittaker, the Executive Director of ENS, “Virgil Griffith, who was working at the Ethereum Foundation when ENS launched, was an early contributor to the ENS protocol. Because ENS is a permissionless protocol, anyone can build dApps on top of it, which is the case for Virgil’s involvement with eth.link. He purchased the domain and built an application that resolves ENS domains.”
