Unstoppable Domains – a firm backed in May to the tune of $4 million by Draper Associates and Boost VC – said Friday that the new .crypto extension can be connected to users’ public cryptocurrency address, allowing third-parties to more easily send funds.
A startup building domains on blockchains has just launched a .crypto name registry on ethereum.
Doing away with long, complex crypto address (for example, a bitcoin address will look something like “1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7xJaNVN2”) in favor of a more memorable and less mistake-prone domain will “simplify cryptocurrency payments and lead to mainstream adoption”, Unstoppable Domains claimed.
The firms indicated it’s already seen a high level of interest in its first domain extension, .zil, with over 100,000 having been sold.
The original service was built on the Zilliqa blockchain (hence the .zil domain) and the website content was stored on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) or other decentralized storage networks, the company said at the time.
While the new registry is built on ethereum, it isn’t restricted to payments in ether.
Co-founder and CEO Matthew Gould commented:
“We believe that tribalism in the crypto community is slowing down adoption of the technology. .Crypto is a domain name system meant to be used for any cryptocurrency payment and with any cryptocurrency wallet. Sending money to a .crypto domain is a way simpler user experience for the millions of cryptocurrency users that currently have to copy/paste and type in long addresses in order to transact.”
The firm’s blockchain domains can also be used to provide “uncensorable” websites, it says on its website. Linking the domain to content on a decentralized storage network results in pages that “no one” can take down.
Using an immutable blockchain for web domains can have its downside, however.
As reported last week, a hacker exploited a bug in an auction run by OpenSea for the Ethereum Naming Service (ENS) resulting in a number of top level names – including apple.eth, defi.eth, wallet.eth, and pay.eth. – being nabbed with no way to retrieve them.
After OpenSea appealed to the hacker and offered a reward, the domains were handed back.
Enjin Launches Game Development Platform on Ethereum
Enjin has announced the launch of its game development platform on ethereum, enabling potentially millions of developers to integrate crypto assets into games and apps with no knowledge of writing blockchain code.
The company announced the news Tuesday, saying the Enjin Platform allows game engineers to take advantage of decentralized inventory, to integrate blockchain-based gaming and non-gaming assets, and to manage economic game play mechanics.
“Our platform is designed to integrate seamlessly into new and existing games alike, providing a competitive edge to studios of all sizes and across all genres”, said Enjin CEO Maxim Blagov in a press release.
The Enjin Platform is a suite of tools and services based on a web interface that natively supports ethereum’s ERC-1155 token standard, which developers can use to integrate both fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in a single smart contract. NFTs, often used for so called crypto collectibles, are tokens that are able to have different and unique characteristics.
The platform also utilities the firm’s own token, Enjin coin (ENJ), which is used as a «minting resource» to back the value of of in-game assets.
More than 2,500 projects making use of ERC-1155 have already been created on the testnet version of the Enjin Platform. The standard is the same technology behind Microsoft’s Azure Heroes blockchain-based contributor rewards program.
The blockchain gaming company has more in the works too, with Enjin confirming that its development roadmap for Q2 2020 includes the public release of the blockchain software development kit (SDK) for Godot, its open-source game engine.
“For the last 12 years, minting, deploying, and managing blockchain assets has been a challenging process that required specialized knowledge, but this all changes today”, said Enjin’s CTO, Witek Radomski.
