If they’re not your keys, it’s not your website.
Unstoppable Domains, a San Francisco-based company that offers “uncensorable” websites through the Zilliqa blockchain, today announced a “sunrise period” lasting from now until October 15 to give trademark holders the opportunity to claim their non-custodial .zil domain.
Claiming domains now will allow businesses and trademark holders to protect their brands before these blockchain domains become available to retail customers, Unstoppable Domains co-founder Bradley Kam explained in an interview with Decrypt. The idea is to give big-name brands, such as IBM or Amazon, the chance to claim their namesakes on the “blockchain internet” before they are immutably and irreversibly snatched up.
Building an unstoppable Internet
Even some of the most tech-literate web users out there might not be aware that the .com web addresses that they know and love are all actually created and sold by a company called Verisign. The .zil domains offered by Unstoppable Domains, however, differ from those coming from Verisign in that the ownership of domains is non-custodial.
In other words, these blockchain-based web domains are not governed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and their ownership depends on control of the digital asset created when a new domain is registered. Blockchain domains do not require renewal fees or intermediaries to act as escrow agents when transferring a domain.
But hosting domains on distributed ledgers doesn’t just provide a decentralized approach to domain name registration. It also allows the websites associated with these domains to process cryptocurrency payments.
And unlike the .eth domains offered by the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), .zil domains are distributed using a process similar to traditional domains, and can receive payment in any cryptocurrency as opposed to Ether and tokens hosted on Ethereum, Kam explained.
Unstoppable Domains, which in May raised a $4 million Series A led by Draper Associates and Boost VC, aims to use its approach to domain name registration to bring the Internet one step closer to full decentralization.