Unstoppable Domains – Alternative DNS

The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.

Root DNS is one of the central points of the Internet. You can’t just make up a domain name for yourself, you have to register it according to certain rules. A regular person deals with intermediaries of intermediaries, but the pyramid has a top. Somewhere up high above the clouds, the non-profit corporation ICANN, the rulers of the domain realm sit. They decide whether or not new domain zones should be and by what rules it all should function. They were the ones who discussed in early March, whether it made sense to shut down all Russian websites. They didn’t shut them down.

The system has been working for dozens of years, it seems natural and the only one possible. But it actually isn’t that difficult to build a new one next to it. All you need to do is support an alternative DNS in several main browsers and Google’s search engine, – and ‘other domains’ are no worse than the real ones in 98% of instances. And in a couple of years, the popularity of the new approach will force other developers to take notice. Everything will start working in other apps, emails will get sent and delivered, and the second DNS will become really real.

Without even beginning to talk of power, purely financial interest is great. Hundreds of millions of domains get renewed every year – there are billions of dollars of someone’s revenue at minimal spending for supporting the databases. And Unstoppable Domains, the American startup of the day, wants to claim a share of this market.

They came up with several new top-level domains that are absent in the standard selection, and are selling domain names within it as NFTs. The user gets a cool name and pays for it only once, then it’s in his purse, nobody can take it away, no need to renew it every day. The price depends on the name itself – the longer the cheaper. Gornal.nft costs 100 dollars, and gornalbest.nft – already $20. To compare, an annual renewal of a .com at a regular registrar costs the same twenty.

The startup’s concept is neat, trendy, web3-esque, and there is a hope that Chrome and Safari developers will buy it. They haven’t so far. There are separate extensions to make everything work for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge – but naturally, a domain that’s only visible to users with specific extensions isn’t justified commercially. Unstoppable Domains’ landing reads that it’s already fully supported in Opera, – but this is also an exaggeration so far.

It was easier to convince the investors than the browser developers – the startup already costs one billion, it brought in USD 65M in its latest round.

https://unstoppabledomains.com/