A platform and solution which aims to be to Ethereum what a Domain Name System is to the Web today, Ethereum Name System replaces long strings of random characters for addresses for human-readable names. If you have seen anyone brandish a display name with .eth, this is what an ENS domain name looks like. In addition to that native domain name, they even support .com and .org domains in Web3.
The ENS token was launched years after the protocol itself was employed on the Ethereum mainnet. It was distributed in a retroactive airdrop in November 2021: about half of the total supply of ENS went to the .ETH owners and active contributors, from coders to translators and Discord members. As a governance token, it can be used to lock in as "votes" in various proposals for improvement of the protocol and its components, such as price oracle and pricing.