Unstoppable Domains goes down after domain hijack

Unstoppable Domains, operator of the blockchain-based alternative naming system, has had its domain hijacked and is warning customers to be wary of further scams and attacks.

“Unstoppabledomains.com has been subject to an attack. Do NOT open emails from @unstoppabledomains.com or use the website until further notice,” the company tweeted on Twitter.

🚨 Community and Partners take note! https://t.co/NRTKqQHYtu has been subject to an attack. Do NOT open emails from @unstoppabledomains.com or use the website until further notice. @squarespace @SquarespaceHelp pic.twitter.com/eynrlcadbR

— unstoppable.crypto (@unstoppableweb) July 12, 2024

Company founder Matthew Gould suggested in a tweet that the company’s registrar account, at SquareSpace, has been compromised. He said he suspected it may be related to SquareSpace’s acquisition of Google Domains.

He said the attackers are already sending out “fake emails” and that he expects them to set up a fake web site at the .com domain. It does not currently resolve from where I’m sitting.

The Whois record shows that the domain was updated shortly after 0200 UTC today and then again just a few minutes ago.

Unstoppable announces another new gTLD bid

In the run-up to the 2012 new gTLD application round, we were hard-pressed to find a company willing to announce an application. This time around, announcements are coming out of the blockchain world at the rate of about one a week.

Unstoppable Domains has announced that it’s working with Raiinmaker Network to operate .raiin, first as a blockchain-only namespace and later as a new gTLD hopeful.

Raiinmaker says it developers a blockchain protocol that “utilizes decentralized AI and scalable Web3 powered infrastructure to transform the distribution of value tied to authentic identity, data and behavior.”

No, me neither.

Unstoppable said it “will be planning and strategizing with Raiinmaker Network for the next ICANN gTLD application to further solidify its place in the digital landscape.”

It’s the tenth potential application the company has publicly revealed.

Unstoppable plotting manga-themed gTLDs

Another two likely new gTLD applications have emerged from the blockchain world.

Unstoppable Domains yesterday announced it’s planning to apply for ICANN for .manga and .anime Kintsugi Global, which already operates the two namespaces on a blockchain.

The two domains currently sell via Unstoppable for $80.

Secret new gTLD application revealed

Unstoppable Domains has revealed the next partner with which it intends to apply to ICANN for a new gTLD two years from now.

It’s linked up with Secret Network Foundation to apply for .secret and in the meantime to flog .secret names that only work on its Polygon blockchain naming system.

Secret is a startup that develops privacy-oriented, blockchain based applications.

It’s the sixth likely new gTLD application Unstoppable has announced this year.

First metaverse gTLD is announced

Unstoppable Domains has announced plans to apply for the first gTLD devoted to a metaverse.

The company has partnered with Metropolis, a “a 360° curated universe that blends commerce, gaming, and experiences that span both digital & physical worlds” to launch .metropolis names on Unstoppable’s blockchain.

“Metropolis plans to explore future ICANN gTLD applications in order for .Metropolis to become even more integrated in the digital landscape,” Unstoppable said.

In the meantime, Metropolis expects its users to use the blockchain version of the names to address “virtual real estate within the metaverse”.

I checked out the Metropolis web site, clicked on everything, and have to confess I don’t understand any of it. I feel about a thousand years old.

Unstoppable to apply for Women in Tech gTLD

Unstoppable Domains and Women in Tech Global have announced that they plan to apply for a new gTLD when ICANN opens the next application round.

They want .witg, which Unstoppable has already launched on its blockchain-based naming system. They cost $10 a pop.

Unstoppable says the names come with some social networking features, as well as the usual ability to address cryptocurrency wallets.

The company has also recently announced gTLD application partnerships with POG Digital for .pog, Clay Nation for .clay and Pudgy Penguin for .pudgy.

Unstoppable is mainly competing here with D3 Global, which is also recruiting blockchain businesses that want to embrace the DNS when the next round opens.

.austin names launch on blockchain

A city gTLD launching exclusively on a blockchain alternative naming system? It’s happened, with the announcement of .austin at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas.

The extension is already on sale at $10 a name via Unstoppable Domains, in partnership with the Greater Austin Asian Chamber of Commerce.

The organizations said the names will serve 2.4 million residents of the Austin area. The extension appears on the Polygon blockchain.

There are plenty of city name gTLDs in the regular DNS, but .austin is believed to be the first blockchain-exclusive (excluding perhaps Handshake, where there are no doubt a great many).

The GAACC claims, without citation, that .austin is “far more secure than the four US city traditional TLDs that exist so far”, which is probably true — domains that don’t resolve for most people can’t be as easily abused.

There’s no word in the Unstoppable or GAACC announcements whether the plan is to apply to ICANN for .austin in the proper DNS in 2026 and mirror the two namespaces, but GAACC will face some administrative hurdles if it wishes to do so.

Under the current draft of the next round’s Applicant Guidebook, applicants need formal endorsement from the local government when applying for “a city name, where the applicant declares that it intends to use the gTLD for purposes associated with the city name.”

If the City of Austin were to apply to ICANN separately, there would no doubt be friction.

First two proper registrars join Web3 Domain Alliance

Two significant ICANN-accredited registrars have signed up to a body that commits them to, among other things, endorse the position that blockchain-based alt-root TLDs have trademark rights to their strings.

United-Domains and MarkMonitor are among about 50 companies now listed as new members of the Web3 Domain Alliance, the association created late last year by well-financed alt-root registry Unstoppable Domains.

The other companies listed appear to be players in the crypto/blockchain/Web3/NFT space, rather than the traditional domain name industry.

The moves by the two registrars are significant because the Alliance’s platform stands to be a significant thorn in ICANN’s side when it finally opens up the next new gTLD application round, which could happen in the next couple years.

According to the Alliance’s web site, members have to commit not only to promote the market acceptance and interoperability of blockchain alt-root domains, but also:

To advocate for the policy position that NFT domain registry owner-operators create trademark rights in their web3 TLDs through first commercial use with market penetration.

This could be a big problem in the next new gTLD round, as current ICANN policy proposals, developed before the likes of Unstoppable became such a big deal, do not specifically account for claims by alt-root providers.

Trademark owners will be able to challenge gTLD applications if the applied-for string matches their mark, but historically it’s not really been possible for companies to obtain trademarks on TLDs.

Along with the membership announcement, Unstoppable has said that it will not enforce its patents against any Alliance member that implements its standards, provided the member agrees not to enforce its own patents.

United-Domains is part of United-Internet, the same company that runs IONOS, 1&1, Sedo and InternetX.

MarkMonitor, since November, has been part of Newfold Digital, the parent of Network Solutions, Web.com, Register.com, BigRock, SnapNames, and others.

Unstoppable offering free .nft names to Twitter users

Unstoppable Domains is enabling Twitter users to claim free “domains” in its alt-root blockchain-based TLD .nft.

The site offers users a domain that matches their Twitter handle. You only need to authorize its app to log in using Twitter credentials, much like other Twitter-connected apps.

Actually using the name seems to require you to have a cryptocurrency wallet. And of course you won’t be able to use the name to address a web site unless all your visitors use a specialist plug-in or certain browsers.

Unstoppable usually sells .nft names for $29, with no renewal fees. It says it currently has 3.1 million names across its portfolio of crypto-themed alt-root TLDs.

Stop me if you’ve heard this…

The collective noun for wildebeest is “an implausibility”.

In the incredibly unlikely event that you’re ever confronted by a large group of these majestic bovine quadrupeds, that’s how you should describe what you see.

An implausibility of wildebeest.

I tell you this not because it’s relevant to anything else that appears in this article, but because a series of unfortunate and unavoidable circumstances have kept me offline for the last few weeks, and you may find this round-up piece tells you lots of things you already know.

If that’s the case for you, I can only apologize, with the caveat that you probably didn’t know about the wildebeest thing, so at least this post has provided some value.

Let’s start with ICANN, shall we?

My ICANN announcements feed contains 20 unread articles this morning, and as far as I can tell from a cursory glance over the headlines, the Org has done almost nothing of consequence recently.

It’s mostly outreach-this, engagement-that, review-the-other. If official announcements were any guide, ICANN would look like an entity far more concerned with promoting and promulgating its own increasingly debatable legitimacy, rather than doing the stuff it was originally set up to do.

Like new gTLDs, for example…

While ICANN continues to fart around with its working groups and consultations and Dantean layers of bureaucracy, the blockchain/crypto/web3 crowd are continuing to bolster their efforts to eat the Org’s breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Most notably, blockchain-based alt-root naming services including Unstoppable have launched the Web3 Domain Alliance, which, even if it misses its goals, promises to make the next new gTLD round an even bigger litigation clusterfunge than the last.

The alliance intends to among other things “advocate for the policy position that NFT domain registry owner-operators create trademark rights in their web3 TLDs through first commercial use with market penetration.”

In other words, if some well-financed crypto bro creates .example on some obscure blockchain root and gets a little bit of traction, ICANN shouldn’t be allowed to create .example on the authoritative consensus root.

This has the potential to make Jarndyce and Jarndyce look like a parking ticket hearing and I take some comfort from the fact that I’ll most likely be long dead before the lawsuits from the next new gTLD round have all played out.

The Web3 Domain Alliance is promising imminent pledges of support from “web2” companies, and it will be interesting to see if any company in the conventional domain name industry is ready to break ranks with ICANN and sign up.

In actual gTLDs…

Another thing that will likely post-date my death is the launch of the last gTLD from the 2012 application round. Many still lie dormant, but they do still continue to trickle out of the gates.

While I’ve been offline, we’ve witnessed the general availability launch of Google’s .boo and .rsvp — the former criminally missing the increasingly lengthy and bewildering Halloween season and the latter probably a little late for the Christmas party season — while non-profit .kids went GA a couple of days ago.

In the world of ccTLDs…

GoDaddy is formally relaunching .tv, the rights to operate it won in a bidding process earlier this year after incumbent registry Verisign declined to compete.

It’s talking about a “a complete rebrand and marketing makeover”, with a new, very colorful, destination site at TurnOn.tv.

Many years ago, a senior Verisign exec described .tv to me as “better than .com”, and in a world where any shouty teenage pillock can essentially launch their own TV show for the price of an iPhone and broadband connection, that’s probably never been truer.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian ccTLD registry Hostmaster isn’t going to let the little matter of an ongoing Russian invasion interfere with its 30th birthday celebrations and the 12th annual UADOM conference.

It’s being held remotely for obvious reasons. It starts tomorrow, runs for two days, and more details can be found here and here.

In other conference news, NamesCon has also announced dates for its 2023 NamesCon Global conference. According to Domain Name Journal, it will return to Austin, Texas, from May 31 to June 3 next year.

DomainPulse, the conference serving the Germanophone region of Europe (albeit in English), has set its 2023 event for February 6 and 7 in Winterthur, Switzerland.

Scoop of the month…

By far the most interesting article I’ve read from the last month came from NameBio’s Michael Sumner, a reverse-exposé of the successful .xyz domain investor who goes by the name “Swetha”.

This area of the industry is not something I spend a lot of time tracking, but I’ll admit whenever I’ve read about this mononymed India-based domainer’s extensive, expensive .xyz sales, I’ve had a degree of skepticism.

It turns out that skepticism was shared by some fellow industry dinosaurs, so Sumner did the legwork, amazingly and ballsily obtaining Swetha’s Afternic login credentials (with her consent) and hand-verifying years of sales data.

He concluded that the sales she’s been reporting on Twitter are legit, and that she’s a pretty damn good domainer, but understandably could not fully disprove the hypothesis that some of her buyers are .xyz registry shills.

Elliot Silver later got a comment from the registry in which it denied any kind of collusion and implied skepticism was the result of sexism and/or racism, rather than the sketchiness sometimes displayed by anonymous Twitter accounts and the registry itself.

Earnings, M&A, IPOs…

• The otherwise-consolidating industry is getting its first IPO in some time, with United-Internet pitching a public markets spin-off of its IONOS group, which includes brands such as Sedo and InternetX, to potential investors. DNW pulled out some of the more interesting facts from its presentation.
• Industry consolidator CentralNic reported a strong Q3, though its growth is no longer dependent on its domain name business.
• Tucows reported modest growth (pdf) for Q3, hindered by flat-to-down results in its domain name business.
• GoDaddy, which no longer breaks out numbers for its domains business, reported a billion-dollar quarter.
• Smaller, faster-growing registrar NameSilo reported turning a loss into a profit in the quarter.
• In M&A, Namespace, owner of EuroDNS, announced it has acquired fellow German registrar Moving Internet.

And finally…

The DNS turned 35. So that’s nice.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have 600 unread emails to deal with…