Interoperability across Web 3.0 domains is now a priority for a cross-chain coalition of leading blockchain and Web 3.0 players that has formed the Web3 Domains Alliance, announced on November 2 at the Lisbon Web Summit.
Sandy Carter, Senior Vice President and Channel Head of Unstoppable Domains told Cointelegraph that the group will work together to protect the namespace in Web3:
“There is no ICANN [Corporación de Asignación de Nombres y Números de Internet] for Web3. We don’t think there should be. We believe that there should be some kind of self-regulation in the spirit and ethics of Web 3.0. We think there should be a group like that, to help discuss and talk about it. That’s the group we just announced today.”
The alliance aims to prevent malicious phishing attacks, spoofing of Web3 “top level domains” (W3TLDs) by bad actors, cybersquatting, and Web 3.0 domain collisions. Other participants include Bonfida, Tezos Domains, Polkadot Name System, Hedera, Syscoin, and klaytn.domains. “We’ve invited all the naming services to join us,” Carter said.
The self-regulatory agenda also pushed Unstoppable Domains to join the Open Metaverse Alliance (OMA3)a group of blockchain-based metaverses and Web 3.0 platforms that have been working since July to overcome interoperability challenges in the industry, specifically on digital identity and avatar standards across the metaverses.
“We joined it because we think we should self-regulate boards, and we think more of them will come out, so you can self-regulate versus force regulation from a central organization,” Carter noted.
Self-described as an evangelist educating people on the value proposition of data ownership, Carter believes that the relationship between users and digital privacy will change dramatically for future generations, and data ownership education remains a major challenge in the space.
“The oldest [reto] today is that people understand what it is. I often tell people that I’m actually an educator, that’s what I do, I’m an evangelist explaining the value proposition and why it’s so important. Because a lot of people don’t understand it nowadays.”
Decentralized websites and avatars of the metaverse are some of the trends he thinks will be pushed forward as the concept of data ownership becomes more mainstream.
“I was talking to a group of small businesses and a woman stood up and said her website had been taken down for 30 days. She couldn’t get anyone to explain why […] And then 30 days later, it was back up and running, but it lost 30 days of online sales. […] She was like a perfect use case. So if you have a decentralized website that is not going to happen to you, because there is no one to bring it down. It’s your website.”
Unstoppable raised $65 million in a Series A funding round this year, raising its valuation to $1 billion, following the rise of NFTs and the popularity of digital identity profiles. A competitor of Unstoppable, Ethereum Naming Services, has also seen a spike in demand, with nearly 2 million domain registrations as of August.
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