Huh? Article predicts “Blockchain Domains” to become bigger asset class than .COM

huh

So a pretty strange article hit the news today. The article states that traditional domains have stagnated and a new class of domains, “blockchain domains” are going to take over.

Some companies in the .com era may have succeeded largely due to their domain and its primacy in search results. Today, this market has become stagnant, but innovation is popping up in a new area  — blockchain domains. (Source – InvestInBlockchain.com)

Uh…I’m not sure this guy knows that millions of dollars in domain names sell every week, and more domains sell now than did back in the “.com era” since that was referring to early Internet startups…not domains as an asset class.

The article continues by complaining that it’s impossible to get a new domain extension. This is just bizarrely misinformed since ICANN has approved over 1,000 new domain extensions, some of which are still hitting the market, like .DEV which launched last month.

It gets weirder.

The article goes on to talk about how payments aren’t native with the current domain name extensions…huh? Then soon jumps to how “blockchain domains” are going to fix everything. The first point he makes is that, poof, new domain extensions will be easier than ever to get…why?

“New blockchain domain services can just launch on a public blockchain, no ICANN approval necessary.” (Source – InvestInBlockchain.com)

Sounds simple right…err, no? Yeah, it’s not, and the author even realizes this and wrote a “now of course” paragraph below about how it’s actually probably super complex and you really can’t “just launch on a public blockchain”

“Now of course, there are many challenges with this, but getting approval from a regulator that may take years isn’t one of them. Instead you need to worry about deploying smart contracts correctly, getting apps to support your new extension, and of course getting users to buy and use the domains.” (Source – InvestInBlockchain.com)

The punchline here is .ETH domains and some stats about how they have done, which is impressive in its own right but still just a tiny sliver of the domain market. There also hasn’t been a massive proliferation of “blockchain domains” nor does this seem to be something that’s really actively being pursued by many companies…except for people like the company the author runs…who are launching blockchain domains.

And that’s when it hit me. This was just a marketing article promoting what the company is doing and positioning the market they’re trying to create as some rocket ship about to overtake the domain name industry…I’m not buying it and this is honestly one of the most poorly-researched, and just plain bizarre articles I’ve read about domain names in a long time.

That being said, I understand the concepts behind blockchain domains, heck I’ll even admit I think they could gain popularity as blockchain becomes more widely used. But to claim that the domain industry has become stagnant and blockchain domains are growing like crazy just isn’t true.

Where’s that facepalm emoji when you need it, ah – here it is:

facepalm
Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton