Unstoppable Domains kills .coin in the name of .wallet
Blockchain domain seller disables .coin domains to bolster its argument that first to market has exclusive rights.
Blockchain domain seller Unstoppable Domains has killed its .coin top level domain name after discovering a name collision. And although it doesn’t mention .wallet directly, its rationale is clearly designed to address the controversy over .wallet.
In a blog post, Unstoppable said it stopped selling .coin domain names because it discovered that another blockchain domain system began selling .coin domains before it did:
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. As soon as this collision came to our attention, we stopped selling .coin domains while we investigated the issue.
Through our investigation, we found that Emercoin registered their first .coin domains in 2014, gained some market penetration, and built an integration in a reputable application: OpenNIC. We’re committed to protecting our customers from the risk of functional collision.
So what does this have to do with .wallet?
Unstoppable is embroiled in a dispute with the .wallet extension in Handshake, a competing blockchain domain system. That .wallet top level domain was registered before Unstoppable began offering its own .wallet domains but before the owner of the Handshake name began offering second level registrations to the public.
In that case, Unstoppable Domains believes it should have exclusive rights to sell .wallet blockchain domains because it was the first to gain market penetration. That’s the rationale it’s putting forward for killing its .coin domain:
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.
If you think you own your .coin domain on Unstoppable, then you’re in for a surprise. You can still “own” them but they’ll no longer work. You can trade them in for store credit though. Unstoppable will give .coin owners 3 times their original registration fee in credit. (If you bought it on the secondary market, you’ll only get three times the original registration fee back.)
Based on Unstoppable’s line of thinking, it would behoove Handshake domain owners to immediately start offering second level domains on their domains.
Hat tip: Web3 is Going Great
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