You can now buy .crypto domain names from MyEtherWallet

Yesterday popular Ethereum Wallet MyEtherWallet announced that it’s users can now purchase .crypto domain names directly from them. Just to avoid some initial confusion, MyEtherWallet doesn’t own the domain extension itself, Unstoppable Domains is the owner of the extension, but until yesterday they were the only game in town when it came to buying .crypto names.

MyEtherWallet is officially the first company besides Unstoppable Domains to offer .crypto domains for sale and it makes sense, these are special purpose domain names which does make them pretty different from any domain you’re familiar with to-date.

So what are the differences between a .crypto and a .com? Well for starters, you can only view .crypto sites on specific browsers using specific plugins. Right now it looks like the Opera Browser is first mainstream web browser to add support for .crypto and that support just started in March.

The idea behind .crypto is to use them instead of long hard to remember addresses that you deal with when you’re sending and receiving crypto. Here’s a deeper dive on how .crypto works:

Regular .com domains are sanctioned by the UN body, ICANN, which it then provides to private registries, like Verisign, who in turn sell them to resellers like GoDaddy. But, explains Brad Kam, co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, any of these centralized institutions can take your .com domain away from you.

But if you have a blockchain domain, “you store it yourself inside of your wallet,” Kam told Decrypt. “Whoever controls the private key is the only person that can move it around; this is the foundation for user control and censorship resistance.”

Ethereum web addresses are really just strings of text registered on the blockchain. Unstoppable Domains turns them into readable addresses and sells them for a profit. Now, it’s selling them to MyEtherWallet.(Source – Decrypt.co)

I’m personally not planning on making any big purchases in the .crypto space but I do often find myself buying a handful of domains in interesting extensions like this. Seeing it get a bit more exposure and more of a use-case carved out does mean I’ll probably spent a few minutes this weekend poking around and maybe buying a few.

That being said, I don’t think I’ll be buying more than a few since my guess is they will not sell and I’ll either just let them expire next year or hang onto them and look back at this as money wasted a few years down the road when I remember, oh hey, I still have those .crypto domains!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton