Unstoppable focuses on proper domains, admits crypto was “craze”

Unstoppable Domains is steering away from so-called “Web 3” blockchain-based naming to focus on the consensus DNS, according to a social media post from the company’s CEO.

Matt Gould tweeted on Twitter last week that the names were “part of the crypto craze in 2021” that “did not cross the chasm into mainstream usage”. Unstoppable will increase its focus on traditional domains, he wrote.

DNS domains now compose 90%+ of our business, and as we move to get several of our TLDs also listed in ICANN over the next few years our focus will continue to grow on the DNS and traditional internet market. We expect that 2-3 years from now DNS and the traditional web will be…

— Matthew Gould (@mattgould) March 16, 2026

The company’s web site now comes across like a traditional registrar. Blockchain names — once front-and-center — are still sold there, but as a non-default option in the storefront’s search results that describes such names as “wallet identifiers”.

Unstoppable says it has sold over four million blockchain names since it launched, in extensions such as .nft, .crypto and .wallet. Twitter users responding to Gould’s tweet wondered whether Unstoppable could now be described as a “grift”, “rug-pull” or “scam”.

The company has increasingly been moving towards real domains for some time, becoming accredited as an ICANN registrar in August 2024 and just last month receiving approval to act as a registry service provider in the new gTLD program.

Yeah, we got phished, ICANN admits after crypto hack

ICANN has confirmed that a phishing attack was responsible for the hacking of its Twitter account last night.

The Org placed this statement, which suggested that the attack may have been more sophisticated than you might have thought, on its home page earlier this evening:

On 11 February 2025, ICANN became aware of a successful phishing attack on our ICANN X [Twitter] account. We are investigating the root cause of the issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. ICANN uses multi-factor authentication on all social media platforms and has confirmed that none of our other accounts have been impacted.

The hack saw ICANN’s Twitter account tweet several messages promoting a newly created memecoin cryptocurrency called $DNS, presumably to scam would-be investors out of money.

The compromise, which seemed to be timed to close of business in ICANN’s home in California, did not last long and the tweets were swiftly deleted.

Now ICANN seems to have confirmed that one of its staffers was phished to obtain @ICANN’s login credentials, but the fact that the account was protected by multi-factor authentication creates an additional wrinkle.

Twitter offers three MFA methods — codes delivered via SMS, a mobile authenticator app, or a hardware token.

In each case, logging in requires the user to have a physical device in their hand to create the secondary login credential. The victim would have had to provide this time-limited one-time password to the attacker too.

I hope the staffer who got suckered, presumably a member of the comms team, isn’t getting too much of a bollocking today, as these kinds of attacks are increasingly sophisticated and managing online life increasingly complex.

Just a day earlier, the well-known BBC political journalist Nick Robinson, who presents the popular Today show on Radio 4, got phished in what one assumes was a very similar way and for an identical purpose.

This BBC article goes into some detail about the attack on Robinson, including screenshots of the phishing email he fell for, and goes a way to explain how even somebody trained to avoid this kind of stuff can have a moment of vulnerability.

While few of Robinson’s one million Twitter followers could have seriously believed that Today had launched a memecoin, it’s more plausible that somebody familiar with crypto and somewhat aware of ICANN could have believed that ICANN would. The two areas of tech increasingly intersect nowadays.

When the attack proved successful, the bad guy must have thought all of her Christmases had come at once.

ICANN says it is going to post more information to its cybersecurity incident log as its investigation progresses.

If it turns out the phish was successful because somebody didn’t check the domain name of the link they were clicking on, it could be fascinating reading.

ICANN hacked to promote crypto scam

ICANN’s Twitter account appeared to be hacked briefly last night, and was used to promote what looks like a pump-and-dump cryptocurrency scam.

A series of tweets from the official @ICANN account plugged a memecoin named $DNS from around 0200 UTC today, just when ICANN’s California crew would have been clocking off for the day.

“2025: The Internet Gets Its Own Currency. @icann is redefining digital ownership with $DNS – the first memecoin to merge domain governance & Web3 culture,” one of the tweets read, according to a screen capture from domain lawyer John Berryhill.

ICYMI pic.twitter.com/f8R3AzaLaO

— John Berryhill (@Berryhillj) February 12, 2025

The posts linked to dnscoin.org, which at the time was a live web site promoting “$DNS. Own the Internet Again. ICANN’s decentralized memecoin for domain governance”, according to what little remains visible in Google’s index.

The domain, which had been registered for years, has already been deleted entirely. Not suspended. It’s just gone.

ICANN seems to have restored control over its Twitter account fairly quickly, but Berryhill’s caps show the scam tweets were viewed by at least a couple thousand of @ICANN’s 104,000 followers.

The apparent scam appears to be either a modern-day pump-and-dump scheme, where investors hype up a crypto coin only to cash out when its value peaks, or what crypto investors call a “rug pull”, which is more akin to straightforward theft.

Either way, it seems possible that some people may have lost some money, and ICANN’s not-great reputation for security has certainly suffered another embarrassing setback.

It seems likely that @ICANN either had a weak password, or somebody with access to the account got their device compromised in some way.

ICANN, no doubt sifting through the evidence this morning, has yet to publish an official statement.

Is this the first Next Round new gTLD contention battle?

It had to happen sooner or later. With a few dozen would-be new gTLD applicants breaking cover over the last year or so, we seem to have our first clash and our first potential 2026-round contention set.

The sought-after contested gTLD is .chain, which now has two announced hopefuls after blockchain-based alternative naming system Freename.io yesterday revealed it wants the string.

“The company intends to apply for .chain, .token, .metaverse and a variety of other gTLDs,” Freename said. “Freename will also submit applications on behalf of third-party customers in this new gTLDs round.”

Freename, if it follows through, is likely to face competition from at least one other applicant, a company called 3DNS, which in June announced plans to apply for .chain and .super.

3DNS has Intercap as its registry partner, while Freename is partnered with registry ShortDot on a joint venture called WebUnited.

Freename already sells blockchain-based names that use .chain as an extension, while 3DNS sells third-level DNS domains under .chain.box that it hopes to upgrade to second-level names should it win the ICANN contest.

In truth, I’d be incredibly surprised if these are the only two companies to apply for .chain, which is a shortened version of “blockchain” and likely to be an attractive string with the whole crypto/”Web3″ crowd.

Under ICANN’s under-development rules, the exact process for resolving contention sets is still up in the air, with more clarity hoped for over the next few months.

ICANN has confirmed that it intends to ban private auctions in the next round, but has also come up with a new second-choice alternate string option that is already causing grumbling in the policy-making community.

D3 to get $5 million in crypto to apply for .ape gTLD

New gTLD consultancy D3 Global has inked a deal to apply for the .ape gTLD on behalf of the ApeCoin community.

The company said in a blog post that it will receive three million $APE — cryptocurrency coins currently worth about $5 million, according to Coinbase — in order to apply to ICANN for, operate and market .ape domains.

As it has with other clients, it will first launch *ape names that can only be used on the relevant blockchain to address crypto wallets and such. D3 uses an asterisk to differentiate blockchain names from real domains.

The deal came about after D3 submitted a proposal to the ApeCoin DAO. That’s a Decentralized Autonomous Organization that allows any ApeCoin holder to have a vote in the development of the ApeCoin ecosystem. They voted overwhelmingly in favor of D3’s proposal.

The DAO will receive 50% of gross revenue from *ape and .ape sales under the deal, but D3 says it will retain exclusive rights to .ape. Presumably this is because there’s no way in hell ICANN’s lawyers are going to allow it sign a registry contract with a DAO.

The business plan proposal is quite detailed for a public document, containing stuff like revenue projections that ICANN will redact from published gTLD applications. D3 reckons it could be turning over about $8 million with 90,000 registered .ape names by its fourth year.

“It’s simple, Ape Names are built by Apes, for Apes,” D3 said. As well as quite the most ludicrous quote I’ve used in a considerable while, it also happens to be Technically The Truth when said of any TLD, when you think about it.

But it’s actually a reference to the fact that a few of the D3 C-suite are owners of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs — those expensive little crypto chimp avatars that people sometimes use in their social media bios.

D3 CEO Fred Hsu apparently owns this ape picture, which is “worth” almost $37,000. Fellow co-founder Paul Stahura has a whole collection.

In other news, there’s still no cure for cancer.

D3 signs up crypto gTLD client number five

New gTLD consultancy D3 Global has signed up its fifth blockchain gTLD client since launching last September.

The company today announced a deal with Core Chain to apply for .core when ICANN next opens a new gTLD application window, currently expected mid-2026.

Core Chain makes a software platform for developers that want to building decentralized applications on blockchains. It says it has over five million connected cryptocurrency wallets.

D3 has recently announced similar partnerships with NEAR Foundation (.near), Gate.io (.gate), Viction (.vic) and Shiba Inu (.shib).

The company says its mission is to help blockchain companies operate on the traditional DNS as well as the blockchain-based alternate naming systems.

GoDaddy offers free Ethereum blockchain integration

GoDaddy has updated its domain management platform to allow users to add their Ethereum blockchain wallet addresses to their domains for free.

The registrar said it has partnered with Ethereum Name Service to offer the service, which will enable mutual customers to transact with ETH cryptocurrency using regular domain names instead of the massive gibberish strings crypto wallets usually use.

It’s free, due to ENS’s release last week of gasless DNSSEC, which links Ethereum to DNS by placing wallet addresses in the TXT records of domain names.

Before this update, ENS said the crypto transaction fees (“gas fees”) involved in validating domain ownership could reach as high as 0.5 ETH, which is over $1,100 at today’s prices.

The GoDaddy integration means the process of adding the TXT records has been simplified and can the accomplished in just a few clicks via the usual domain management interface.

Using ENS with your domain does require turning on DNSSEC, which adds some security benefits but also carries a downtime risk over the long term.

Shiba Inu outs itself as crypto new gTLD applicant

Shib, the developer behind the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency, said today that it plans to apply to ICANN for the .shib top-level domain.

The idea is to have the domain in the consensus DNS root and also in a blockchain and to make the two interoperable.

The company has partnered with D3 Global, the startup launched in September by industry veterans Fred Hsu, Paul Stahura and Shayan Rostam, to work on the application and interoperability platform.

Shib seems to be the second customer for D3. It’s also working with a blockchain company called Viction on .vic.

Perhaps erring on the side of responsibility, D3 is using an asterisk instead of a dot when offering names prior to ICANN approval, so it’s *shib and *vic instead of .shib and .vic.

The next ICANN application round is not expected to open until early-to-mid-2026.

ICANN turns down money from blockchain alt-root

It seems ICANN is turning down free money from blockchain alt-root providers, apparently as a matter of principle.

We hear one such alt-root, Freename.io, tried to sponsor the upcoming ICANN 78 meeting in Hamburg, but was rebuffed.

“At this time, ICANN is not interested in having Freename serve as a sponsor and will not be moving forward with a sponsorship agreement,” the Org told the company in an unsigned email.

Freename had offered to be a general sponsor, and not at the cheapest tier, I’m told.

ICANN sponsorship offers typically start in the low thousands but can get up to six figures at the higher tiers. Sponsorship is overall a very small part of ICANN’s revenue.

Org has become increasingly rattled in recent years with the proliferation of alt-roots, which have been gradually gaining market acceptance while ICANN’s own efforts to expand the domain universe languish in interminable policy knots.

ICANN delayed the sale of the UNR portfolio of gTLDs until buyers renounced their ownership rights to blockchain versions of their authoritative root strings.

Clearly, splashing an alt-root’s branding all over an ICANN stage would be seen as problematic.

Freename.io plans to attend the Hamburg meeting anyway.

.art links DNS and alt-root ENS

UK Creative Ideas, the .art gTLD registry, has started offering its registrants the ability to register names on the blockchain-based alt-root Ethereum Name Service that exactly match their DNS names, for a one-time fee.

CMO Jeff Sass said that for $20, paid in Ethereum coin, registrants can secure their exact-match on the ENS, with no renewal fees.

There’s an authentication system using DNS TXT records to make sure only .art DNS registrants can obtain their matching ENS names, he said.

“We’ve married the two together, so there can’t be any confusion or collisions,” he said.

The benefit of this is that registrants will be able use their .art domains to address their cryptocurrency wallets. Web browsers that support ENS obviously already support DNS, so there’s no real benefit in that context.

.ART is also selling ENS .art names without matching DNS names — and these can include ICANN-prohibited characters such as emojis — but these are priced from $5 to $650, based on character count, and have annual renewal fees.

.art current has about 230,000 registered names, a pretty respectable number for a new gTLD, and Sass said about 60% of them are in the form of firstnamelastname.art, suggesting usage by professional and amateur artists.

gTLD registries selling matches in alt-roots has been a cause of concern at ICANN over recent years, due to legal concerns. Uniregistry’s sale of its portfolio was held up for months because of this.