The State of Blockchain Domains - Bradley Kam

all right uh let's see up next we have unstoppable domains bradley hey how's it going thanks for having me anne how are you i'm doing excellent how about you good so you ready i'm ready okay take it away hey everybody uh my name is brad kam i am a co-founder at unstoppable domains uh we build domains on blockchains and i'm here to talk about the state of blockchain domains but i actually want to start with uh with traditional domains before i get to blockchain domains and so uh going back into the 1990s that's when domain names became uh consumer ready there were some early successes one was com another one was dot org dot com was created by a company called verisign.org was created by and run by a series of a series of different uh nonprofits and over time the domain name space became a bit more a bit more advanced there were a lot of different players ultimately uh there was a system that was created called i can a system for what we call what we now just call the domain name service which dot com and dot io and most of the uh most of the other domain name systems that we use uh are a part of there's there's a small little distinction there where there's some corporate ones and then there's some uh ones controlled by countries and there's a couple of different categories there but but generally speaking this is all sort of the the same system and there's been a couple of problems that have popped up as a result of these systems and it all comes down to the fact that the domain names themselves are are sitting on a specific set of servers controlled by a group of people they're not on a decentralized peer-to-peer system like blockchain and so some of the weird things that have happened are that uh domain name registrars are required to be custodians of domain names because well someone has to actually have possession of them in the system there's no way to give an individual user custody and so uh recently there was a case where somebody was able to social engineer a hack and take control of some domain names and reroute money at godaddy back in back in november of 2020 and this is just one of the things that pops up uh if you have a system uh that requires custodians and other cases of it are it got pretty popular the ly domain extension got pretty popular uh in the early 2010-2011-2012-ish time frame among startups and some other some other types of companies but the problem is is that ly was controlled by the libyan government and when they had a new government take over they started uh enforcing uh new rules and particular morality rules and sort of taking down certain websites in canada and other places around the world um so all it all this this problem that exists is kind of baked into current dns which is uh how we find websites and so it's a pretty pretty core part of the internet infrastructure that's been working like this uh so enter blockchain domain names uh i think uh the probably the first attempt here that um you know many many folks would probably remember would be uh would be namecoin i believe that was back in i don't even know maybe 2012 2013-ish time frame soon after bitcoin that somebody uh somebody came up with this uh with this idea of domain names on blockchain multiple iterations of it uh ultimately it became really you know possible you know able to be successful in uh after ethereum was live uh and so we build and we build our domain name systems on on ethereum and there's a lot of reasons why uh why why that's um that's been an accelerator uh and one of the biggest reasons why is is because applications that would need to support domain names uh already support ethereum and so what's different between traditional domain names and blockchain domain names and by the way blockchain domain names are uh are nfts assets on a blockchain and the reason why uh they need to be supported is because uh by default they don't work inside of traditional domain in traditional dns uh like in sorry instead of traditional browsers like dns would um so because of that you need to wind up going and getting integrations uh because integrations are hard and it's very difficult to get uh these big large applications to support uh any blockchain much less you know some specific blockchain it means that ethereum has kind of been the in the the platform that uh that the browsers and other web tools have been using you've seen uh opera browser and brave browser of course having uh having ethereum wallets uh reddit uh creating their vault so now there's an ethereum wallet there uh cloudflare doing uh reading of the ethereum blockchain et cetera so the companies have been coalescing around the ethereum blockchain this winds up being a huge opportunity for domain names because domain names need to be hooked in everywhere so this brings us to the state of blockchain domain names uh today uh where we are so i would say that uh you started to see uh you started to see traction in this market going back to uh to 2017. uh without eath when they did their uh their uh launch in auction into 2018 uh you started to see uh a bit more activity and a bit more pickup uh 2019 uh we launched uh our registries and saw a couple hundred thousand domain name register uh registrations uh something that brought the total number up to around uh three hundred thousand uh in 2020 uh we started to see major application support so opera browser added support for both crypto and eth in the opera browser for android and then of course there's uh um [Music] many many wallets and other uh and other applications in the crypto space uh that have been supporting blockchain domain names in fact i would say the majority of mainstream wallets are now supporting blockchain domain names across the board that is uh the ones that uh the ones in the cycle domains has built as well as uh as well as ens with very very few exceptions at this point and uh the remaining major wallets you know we would expect would be uh jumping on in 2021 um and then exchanges uh so sorry we're still in 2020. so 2020 uh we started to see real domain name registration numbers i believe that the overall market for blockchain domain names is up to around 600 000 domains registered collectively so this is a pretty this is a pretty big deal even in the in the traditional world if you see you know even a couple hundred thousand domain name registrations per year um those would be those would be pretty substantial numbers um so we're up to six hundred thousand uh the asset classes also matured in 2020 uh so one other thing we saw so uh there was a domain name that sold on openc uh for ninety thousand dollars uh and we're consistently seeing domain names selling for uh four and five figures uh on nft marketplaces so just a sign that this is uh that this market has been progressing a lot in 2020 and in 2021 what we expect to see are kind of the the exchanges jumping on board something that has largely not happened yet but it is starting to happen very quickly at the beginning of this year and we expect that to continue and then going forward of course more and more browser support what is what has been really exciting to me and what makes me pretty excited about the state of blockchain domain names in 2021 is how many mainstream applications have or are integrating ethereum in some way uh which then enables uh enables these types of things to be to be implemented afterwards such as decentralized websites such as decentralized finance etc etc so that is a very quick version on the state of blockchain domains uh and uh if you have questions or would like to uh talk about ways that blockchain domains can be used we'd love to love to chat with you after awesome man thanks for all of that brad we got to spend some time together uh doing some interviews pre at denver and uh some of the conversations that we had were some of the most enlightening things it was a really refreshing perspective that you were sharing um we have still we're still slated for another looks like uh 20 minutes or so i'm wondering if uh if you've got some other things that we can discuss or uh we can kind of dig into i think we had a 28 minute session here i see apologize for the scheduling uh mishap that didn't pass all the details along oh yeah no worries uh are we also able to do q a yeah absolutely so we've got uh if you have questions for brad we have some uh comments here um i think there's some questions around centralization with unstoppable domains do you want to talk a little bit more about you guys and centralization and your views on that and how it's reflected in what you're building sure yeah i mean i think centralization is a word that gets um you know it's it's got a lot of different pieces to it so i think that the the thing that we believe is that domain names need to be uh user controlled um the network needs to be such that you know that there's no way for any company not just on software domains uh to be able to get in the way uh with what you're doing with your domain name um but yeah we're a corporation but you know so is um so is unit swap so are all the wallets um so are most of the defy applications um that's a common structure i think the thing that is important here is that users have custody um and so that's the that's the that's the thing to optimize for i think in terms of uh in terms of making a secure system i don't care if the company making the product is a for-profit company or if it's a uh like an open source community i think both of those structures have roles depending on what the product is yeah yeah good point uh we've got a question that says um are you guys open source uh so the registry software is open source i mean it's on chain you just go look at it um we also have we have a bunch of different products like we have unstoppabledomains.com our registrar i don't believe that's open source um although you can use our apis to to build your own version all right says uh here can traditional dns records resolve to dot eth domains um so we didn't build that eighth domain we build our crypto domains um but i think i can still answer can a traditional dns record uh yes i believe so i don't know if anybody is actually um has actually set that up we are getting ready to add some some ui support so that you can attach traditional dns records i think the use case here would be that you are concerned about maybe you're concerned about a takedown or you're concerned uh about issues that you've been having with your registrar but you're not concerned about about hosting because in that scenario you'd likely would be using some external hosting provider or i guess theoretically you could be hosting your own content zinc city says what's your opinions and thoughts on the handshake hns um it doesn't it doesn't come up that much in the wild frankly the the systems that are being used so far as we can tell are um our e s and us i think it's really challenging to be on a blockchain that's not ethereum um which you probably heard in you know in you know kind of what i what i was saying early on there and the reason why is is because uh people already all these applications especially on these web applications uh are building our building tools with ethereum already so again reddit cloudflare brave browser opera browser the other browsers that are looking at this technology are also looking at ethereum so it just seems really hard to have a separate separate blockchain for that and um i also i'm not 100 i'm not i'm not an expert here but as i understood it it sounded like the domain names um you know they're like a tld system but that once they print a domain name and give it to you the owner of the tld can still take it back which um i think defeats the purpose yeah yeah uh bartow chain asks uh what are some challenges that you're facing at unstoppable domains it's all about integrations um and this is very different than being a like a web 2 company like a traditional web company because you get integration integrations is not something that you you need to worry about because uh it all all of these things are already synced together you already have kind of like one set of dns servers that people are using as a as a single source of truth and if you're part of that then you just kind of default work inside of browsers you also at this point can default work with web tool providers like wix and things like that so all of this stuff uh doesn't exist yet and then we also have this other complexity of uh blockchain domain names can be used for for sending crypto and so you also need uh integrations with all the crypto companies and all the crypto tools and things like that so it's all about integrations that's the that's the really hard part here i think anybody could it's not nearly as hard to um write code and and put it on chain um the much harder part is to get everybody reading it cool um so so here's a question there are no dumb questions so let's just start by addressing that first um but uh do blockchain domains have something similar to dns in order to point requests to the right place yeah exactly and so what's happening is is that you're creating um you're creating these these fields like these key values and you're using the domain name as a pointer for anything so right now people are using it for uh for crypto payments uh and for websites on ipfs so they're pointing at they're they're associating ipfs hashes uh to the domain name and so the way this works is anytime you want to add any kind of record to the domain name uh then you just sign a message with the private key that controls the domain and you write that information to the blockchain so the reason why i know that uh brad.

crypto and i do have a blog up there right now it's a little ugly um the brad.crypto works as my website and the brad.crypto the owner of brad.crypto is the one that put this hash up there is because i had to sign a message with a private key that controlled that domain to do that so payments websites it's a pointer in the future you can point it to anything you can point it to any number of different networks uh you could start using it to associate real world information uh we've already done this where you can sign a message with your private key and associate a twitter handle uh using chain link oracles so it's like a real real world id attached to your domain name that could show up before someone pays you so you know you know you get some verification kind of like venmo um and i think this all gets back to like one thing that um that that we chat about and think about a lot as a company is that uh it's a bit of an accident of history that the dns went the way that it did uh in the 1990s there was a push a push for domain names to be used for consumers people were building websites i built a website when i was 15 my bunch of friends that were building websites it was like 1998 or 99 or something like that and uh we were sharing them with each other that was like pre-social media applications one of the things that people were doing and and over time social media applications kind of swooped in and now we moved all of our all of our um identifiers over into those systems and that's where you find us but there was a point in time in which the domain name was trying to be used that way and we think that because blockchain domain names are controlled by the user they're so extensible you could start to see that happen again where my domain name kind of becomes my my username my id for the internet i can store my social information uh myself i can store it on a peer-to-peer network like ipfs or i can store it on my own device or whatever and i control it and then i can kind of log into apps or give give access to apps but i'm in control of it so you could go and see me directly or you could also uh you could also find me on a social media app uh so long answer there sorry um i think i saw a question about do we work with ipfs yeah yeah so um there's uh there's i think 30 000-ish websites that have been built um on ipfs that are attached to dot crypto domains right now um the we built some like very early versions of like um like personal website builders and things like that where you can you know with a few clicks you can build a little website and launch it on ipfs um it's still a little tough to make that stuff really easy uh there's a blog tool um there's a few things uh so yeah all of that stuff is um is super cool and ipfs is the by far the most you know the most widely used network for uh for uh for distributed content so that is our our default we're open adding more networks in the future but but for now that's the default uh this person is asking if you've integrated uh your domains into new wall addresses created by wallet products yes so we're always adding always always adding support from wallets and so the way the way this works is is the wallets uh well let's read the blockchain and then when i type in say brad.crypto into the bitcoin field if they go and they read the blockchain and then they find my address um read the ethereum blockchain because the domain names are erc721 tokens so you're using lookups on the ethereum blockchain to send money using whatever currency you want bitcoin or ethereum or litecoin or whatever um but yeah wallets are adding support all the time i believe there's 30 ish so far something like that um and a bunch of exchanges as well um and yeah i think i think this is becoming uh this is on the way to becoming a standard because it's way simpler and i think one of the biggest challenges that wallets have is onboarding new users how are they gonna how do they explain all this weird crypto stuff to new users you know new users go on you know they they go on tv or social media or whatever and they hear about they hear about crypto and they want to get started and they go and they find a wallet and they get they try to get started and then they have to be introduced to and educated on long addresses there's tons of them like i might have one for ethereum i might have one for bitcoin i might have three for ethereum or four for ethereum it just starts to get very very complicated um and being able to tell the user you can start to use a human readable name much more similar to venmo is better onboarding so wallets care a lot about how to get new users into crypto and domain names are have a role to play there they can help make that a lot easier excellent um this person's asking if you can ddos attack on dot crypto and dot e domains so can someone try to spam my address so that a real transaction can't go through to it it wouldn't it would need to be um the attack would need to be on the network you were trying to send through itself so like you would need to you would need to go and like flood the bitcoin network or float the ethereum network just for my transaction um which seems relatively unlikely um yeah so i guess not not in the same way um the in terms of like website traffic and viewing i think there's that stuff is just really uh it's just really early so it doesn't work that well i think in theory um what should happen is that it should get better the more viewers you have because then you would have more so like you know ipfs is you know distributed distributed uh peer-to-peer system where multiple people are all storing a copy of the same file um so you could imagine uh that you get a whole bunch of traffic that means you also get a whole bunch of uh people storing and sharing the file so you can actually get to better quality uptime as the website gets more traffic and so it kind of like works in the opposite way as like a traditional website would where you can get overloaded uh in fact the scale actually would would improve the performance in theory excellent excellent let's see here what else do we got um oh here this is a good one you have a favorite decentralized storage service to store your web hosting info associated with your unstoppable domain name so the uh the the the web content um in our model the web content so there's uh info which would be i don't know what you mean exactly by info but um like the hash um the point that that helps you find the content would be on like the blockchain where the domain name lives uh and then the content itself would be on decentralized storage service uh right now uh ipfs is the default platform inside of our tools um but but very open to adding more in the in the future it's just that that's what um that was that that network was the the furthest along when we got started that's what we used to build our tools and you know we also you know um of the protocol labs team and you know work closely with them yeah this person's commenting that an integration with falcon would be interesting yeah yeah now we're we're we're we're looking closely at filecoin very interested in it i think the things that um we're hoping to see soon are you know functioning marketplaces for uh for being able to uh for being able to pay for content uptime so like if you think about the way it works in like traditional like web 2 level you know you would say um okay i want to host you know this much content um charge me you know five bucks a month ten bucks a month whatever and i know that if i pay that then it's going to my content is going to stay up so i think getting to that point is going to be a huge moment for the decentralized web when you can just pay like that and feel confident that content is gonna be up so we're we're we're watching very closely if anybody has uh any new file coin related products that they're building um that they think they think could be useful to to our customers what we have is a bunch of people who have bought domain names that are looking to build websites so if you have tools that you're building that you think would be cool for them please share we've got grants program we've got an ability to share that out with uh with with these these users um so very very uh very very excited about what's going on with filecoin and uh you know excited to see some cool products that uh that people can use yeah this person is is mentioning uh a couple of uh saya and skynet yeah big fan of uh big fan of the science team let's see can crypto integrate with dynamic dns i don't know what dynamic dns is okay so sorry if you can clarify what that is i can um i can uh i can take a stab at it let's see about this one good name uh crypto names related to dogecoin as recipients there have been more doge related related domain name purchases in the past couple of weeks than we've seen in a little while um and this is also kind of the funny thing maybe about domain names in general is that um they do there's a little bit of like meme ability and so like whatever you know this also happened like right around the time that like corona started there was a bunch of corona related um related uh domain name purchases and then when there's election there's a bunch of election related things and um when there's you know elon and snoop dogg talking about dogecoin and i think that's definitely gonna generate some dogecoin related domain purchases yeah yeah let's see here that looks like about all we've got anybody else uh got some good questions for brad go ahead and uh drop them into the comments and and sorry i didn't get to the the dynamic dns question i'll just take a stab in case i'm just uh even if i'm even if i'm this is not the direction you were trying to go um the crypto domains are a separate system they're not intended to integrate with uh traditional dns um they're they're they're a wholly separate a holy separate system um this person is saying that dynamic dns is the domain name pointing to an ip address that changes i see so is there a way to do so blockchain domains will work with traditional dns so if it's possible so i i i can't answer whether or not that would work um with the the the solutions that we're building to make it so you can uh point traditional uh ip addresses to it but um definitely i'll definitely take a look at it and share with the team to see uh that seems useful and then on the ipfs side also not a don't have enough don't have enough knowledge to answer how that would work seems like a very good question and something to look at though excellent great well it looks like that uh it's about all we've got so yeah got john here cool so what's the uh is the doze craze the one that's the the trending one at the moment with all the the purchases i think if you uh i think it basically tracks to whatever's trending on twitter so so wall street bets i'm sure you got bought up yeah so that's like a good that's like a good um a good way i mean i think that might even be what people are doing they're like looking and seeing what is um like what's trending on twitter and then going and grabbing up some domain names based on that um but uh yeah we've been seeing this for a while yeah i'll bet um thanks brad thanks so much for having me yeah you're welcome we'll see ya