Centralized blockchain domain seller Unstoppable Domains has killed its .coin domain after realizing another blockchain domain system was selling it for years.
In a recently published blog post, Unstoppable Domains said that it hadn’t realized Emercoin, a blockchain platform, registered its first .coin top-level domain (TLD) in 2014.
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“When we launched .coin in 2021, we weren’t aware of this naming collision. Emercoin, the platform issuing .coin domains, hadn’t marketed their TLD extensively, making it difficult to find. The Emercoin team are pioneers in our industry and we regret that we weren’t aware of this naming collision earlier,” the firm said.
The billion-dollar company stopped supporting .coin domains to avoid naming collision. This is a circumstance when two or more identifiers in a specific namespace resolve to the same address.
“We believe the platform with the first commercial use should have the rights to that domain ending, and in this case, we believe Emercoin is that platform,” the company said, adding that it has put systems in place to avoid similar situations going forward.
Those who purchased .coin domains will retain the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing the ownership in their wallets. However, the domains themselves won’t work. Owners of the depreciated domain will be eligible for credits of three times what they paid.
Unstoppable Domains is also involved in a legal dispute over its .wallet domain with Handshake, a competing blockchain domain system. The firm seeks to claim the rights to the domain extension, even though Handshake registered it first.
Unstoppable Domains currently offers nine TLDs, including .crypto, .nft, .x, .wallet, .bitcoin, .dao, .888, .zil, and .blockchain. It claims it has over 2.7 million domain registrations and over 503 integrations across various Web 3.0 services.
The firm is valued at $1 billion after raising $65 million in a Series A round in July.
On the Flipside
- This, and other possible incidents, have been predicted by critics who believe centralized domain systems are too heavily focused on generating profit rather than offering a quality public good.
Why You Should Care
Unstoppable Domains claims to be a Web 3.0 company that allows users to truly own their domain names. However, the .coin story shows that users are far from truly owning their domains purchased from Unstoppable Domains. Other naming systems like Ethereum Name Service (ENS) are decentralized and permissionless, offering the best of the decentralized domaining world.
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