The rise of Web3 functionality has been a boon for decentralized domain name services over the past two years, with millions of blockchain-based domains registered to date. Challenging market conditions may have hampered exponential growth, but industry leaders believe that utility-driven adoption will continue in the future.
Cointelegraph reached out to a handful of decentralized domain name platforms to gauge the current state of the industry, who is leading registrations and what the future holds for the space.2022 proved to be a massive year for both ENS and Unstoppable Domains, with both firms highlighting some key metrics from the year in correspondence with Cointelegraph.
Nora Chan, vice president of communications at Unstoppable Domains, unpacked the premise of the blockchain-based domain name service. Unstoppable Domains offers Web3 domains on Polygon with no gas fees, providing an affordable way for users to establish a secure and portable identity for Web3. But as gas fees have slowly reduced, it is becoming more affordable to register ENS names. Inoue also noted that the growth of 2022 ENS registrations was influenced by the discovery of “categories.”
For ENS, the rise of Coinbase’s high-profile cb.id subdomain integration was the biggest third-party service integration story, according to Inoue. “2023 will see a surge of subdomain registrations. This will be driven by the release of ‘Name Wrapper,’ a feature to turn subdomains into NFTs , allowing the community to sell and transfer subdomains much more easily.”
Please explain how Unstoppable domains is decentralized when you literally link all your web3 and real world identity to their centralized system? Sounds like another centralized on top of web3 system