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Unstoppable Domains stops over 116,000 domains as alt-root TLD goes dark

Kevin Murphy, October 20, 2022, 16:02:42 (UTC), Domain Registries

Blockchain alt-root provider Unstoppable Domains has taken a huge credibility hit with its decision to essentially turn off one of its TLDs, rendering over 116,000 domains pretty much useless.

Unstoppable said Tuesday that it has stopped selling .coin domains and would immediately stop supporting their resolution. The names would no longer work with the over 500 cryptocurrency wallets, apps and services that integrate with Unstoppable, the company said.

“As of today, we’ve disabled .coin resolution in our libraries and services. Unstoppable domains are self-custodied NFTs, so you still own your .coin domain, but it won’t work with our resolution services or integrations,” Unstoppable said in a blog post.

According to AltRoots.com, there were almost 117,000 .coin domains at the time they were turned off.

That’s about the same size as Identity Digital’s .email gTLD, and the shutdown is the equivalent of ID telling its registrants that they can keep their domains, but it’s deleting the .email zone file.

The decision drew immediate critical reaction on social media, with many users pointing out that the Unstoppable system doesn’t sound particularly “decentralized” or censorship-resistant any more.

“Doesn’t sound too decentralized or empowering. Hopefully this will wake people up,” one Twitter user wrote.

“So many people literally just had to change their identity due to incompetency. Basically like visa saying you can keep the card but it wont work anywhere anymore,” wrote another.

Users also criticized the company’s decision to offer compensation in the form of store credit — three times what they paid for the domains they return — instead of a cash refund.

Unstoppable said the decision was made after it discovered another blockchain project, Emercoin, has been selling .coin domains since 2014, whereas its own .coin was launched in 2021.

“We’re committed to protecting our customers from the risk of functional collision,” Unstoppable said. “The Emercoin team are pioneers in our industry and we regret that we weren’t aware of this naming collision earlier.”

Name collisions are of course a big deal in the regular DNS, but cohesion around a single consensus root allows risk to be managed and mitigated, as we saw in ICANN’s 2012 new gTLD roll-out.

And in the ICANN system, a TLD would not simply be shut off overnight. Rather, it would transition to an emergency back-end operator for three years until it is either taken over by another permanent registry or wound down in an orderly fashion.

As Domain Name Wire notes, Unstoppable is currently trying to get the operator of a competing .wallet blockchain alt-root TLD shut down in court on the basis of the name collision, and it would have been hypocritical to continue offering its own colliding TLD.

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Comments (4)

  1. tom barrett says:
    October 20, 2022 at 5:17 pm

    The correct article reference should be https://altroots.com/stats/

    And yes, the count for .COIN has been removed.

    Reply
  2. A Registrar says:
    October 21, 2022 at 11:30 pm

    It’s almost like in order for this to work on a global scale, you do actually need someone centrally managing root delegations…

    Reply
  3. Volker Greimann says:
    October 24, 2022 at 10:29 pm

    So these “Unstoppable Domains” sound very stoppable to me. Anytime the manager of such an extension may decide for whatever reason to stop it, it can do so and there is nothing anyone else can do about it.

    At least with ICANN TLDs there is a migration process. At least a ccTLD is backed by a country (usually) that can request a re-delegation.

    This is just ephmeral bull…

    Reply

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