If one Bitcoin holder wants to send crypto to another, the former would have to type in an absurdly long mix of numbers and letters to find the recipient’s crypto wallet, like: myQUWyc9A2pouMyvBafRfHcNWkVz4Fb5SK. (Don’t worry, Fortune generated a fake address.)
This is cumbersome, which is why some Web3 companies have carved out a small but profitable niche to allow users to translate their wallet address from alphanumeric garble to a username, or from 0xAA2B52A6DF7DBFD07640BDA2B373D37BACD81DF5 to simple.nft.
One of the largest of these firms is Unstoppable Domains—valued at $1 billion as of July 2022—and on Monday, the company announced that it will let users on its platform buy perhaps one of most popular domain extensions, or endings to a username, in Web3: .eth.
Currently, the platform offers a suite of domain endings for those with wallets, or addresses to send crypto, including .crypto, .nft, .polygon, .blockchain, and .bitcoin.
The .eth address is its newest addition to its list, an integration of a domain extension created by the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS. Unlike Unstoppable Domains, ENS is operated through a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO. In other words, a large group of stakeholders theoretically makes decisions, not just a CEO.
The code to create a .eth extension is open for anyone on the Ethereum blockchain to interact with, and Unstoppable Domains isn’t the first one to add it to its bucket of domains. “There are several other companies that have already done this in this space,” Matthew Gould, founder and CEO, told Fortune.
To create usernames for crypto wallets, Unstoppable Domains puts a non-fungible-token, or NFT, onto the blockchain, adding a permanent entry in a decentralized database that assigns, say, fortunereporter.eth to a jumble of letters and numbers.
Gould sees this NFT record of a username, or credential, to go beyond just a simplified means to send and receive crypto. “I think credentials are gonna plug into whatever people end up using for the digital identity,” he said.
As for next steps, he was coy, but he did say that expanding beyond Polygon, Ethereum, and Zilliqa—the blockchains that Unstoppable Domains currently supports—isn’t out of the question.
“I want to be the one place where you can go to manage all your Web3 domains,” he told Fortune. “So any Web3 domain registry that has community around it, that people are excited about, ultimately, I want to be able to support that.”
