Early Bitcoin exchange and wallet provider Blockchain.com announced on Friday it will give its millions of customers a free NFT domain, a tool that will let them use a simple human-friendly username such as jeff.blockchain in place of the long string of random characters that make up a wallet address.
The giveaway is being carried out via Unstoppable Domains, a company that is doing for Web3 what the likes of domain services like GoDaddy did for the internet we are familiar with today.
Earlier this year, Blockchain.com announced it had completed an integration that would allow its customers to tie addresses purchased through Unstoppable Domains to their Blockchain.com wallets.
Unstoppable Domains says it has already assigned over 2 million NFT domains, most of them tied to the suffixes “.crypto,” “.wallet” and “.nft.” The Blockchain.com giveaway entails a new suffix—”.blockchain”—that the companies are framing as the first branded domain name in Web3, though it’s likely most people will view the .blockchain domain as referring to the common noun rather than the London-based company.
“With Unstoppable Domains, users can secure NFT domains that give them full ownership and control of their digital identity,” Unstoppable Domains said in a statement. “They also provide a user-owned, secure, and portable Web3 identifier users can use to log into and transact with more than 200 apps, wallets, exchanges, marketplaces, games and the metaverse.”
The “.blockchain” domains, like Unstoppable Domains’ other offerings, are minted on the Polygon network and inscribed on the blockchain, and can be traded and resold.
In an interview with Decrypt, Unstoppable Domains Senior Vice President Sandy Carter touted the NFT domains as not merely a simpler way to provide addresses for crypto transactions, but as an important new tool to establish identity on the web. Carter says the domains are akin to login credentials for sites like Facebook or Google, but that a single name can be used securely across a wide variety of applications.
Carter also said that Unstoppable Domains is working with other companies to offer NFT domains bearing their names. If the practice catches on, it could lead to a future where consumers interact with major companies through NFT domains such as “.apple” or “.starbucks.”
