Content Directory:

· ENS developers accuse Unstoppable Domains of stealing their development achievements

· Two leading players in the domain race: ENS and Unstoppable Domains

· ENS launches new gateway and open sources, now live on the Optimism mainnet

Yesterday, the domain name industry experienced a major upheaval.

ENS developers accuse Unstoppable Domains of stealing their development achievements

On November 16th, Nick Johnson, the Chief Developer of ENS, the leading player in the Ethereum Web3 domain name track, posted a series of tweets on social media accusing Unstoppable Domains, a Web3 domain name provider, of lacking legal support and binding force for the Web3 Domain Name Alliance.

At the same time, Nick also accused Unstoppable Domains of applying for an innovative patent based on ENS without authorization: "In January of this year, Unstoppable Domains obtained the first patent, numbered US11558344 - resolving blockchain domain names. And this patent is entirely based on the innovation of ENS, without its own novelty innovation."

He continued to state that Unstoppable Domains is still seeking to apply for more patents. Nick then raised the demand for ENS: "No organization can rely on such a non-binding commitment when it comes to its core business. Therefore, we demand that Unstoppable Domains provide legal guarantees for its public relations commitments and make unconditional and irrevocable patent commitments."

Nick pointed out that if this cannot be achieved, ENS is ready to challenge this patent at any time.

It is reported that Nick publicly called out Unstoppable Domains because "ENS and Unstoppable Domains had attempted to communicate privately, but no progress was made."

Later, Matthew Gould, the founder of Unstoppable Domains (@matthewegould), stated that the promise made by ENS was "unnecessary" and avoided discussing the core issue with Nick, instead inviting him to join the Web3 Domain Alliance.

"We continue to extend an open invitation for you to join the Web3 Domain Alliance and promote Web3 naming, not limited to ENS. Just as ICANN is important to DNS, standard organizations are equally important to Web3. We look forward to introducing Web3 domains globally and becoming friendly competitors in this field. We may not agree on everything, but having discussions together is helpful."

Nick also responded to this, stating that he will still adhere to his own position: "I believe that our proposal is quite reasonable."

Domain Race Two Giants: ENS and Unstoppable Domains

In fact, the two core players in this incident - ENS and Unstoppable Domains - are both leaders in the domain name industry, with different focuses.

ENS is a top project in the Web3 domain name field, which focuses on public chain domain names. It was founded by Nick Johnson, a former software engineer at Google, in 2016. Initially, ENS was a side project authorized by the Ethereum Foundation, and later it was supported by the foundation to establish the ENS team. ENS has not received any external financing and only accepts donations from institutions such as the Ethereum Foundation.

而 Unstoppable Domains is a Web3 domain registrar, which typically sells multiple Web3 domain suffixes that are highly relevant to Web3 projects.

It is worth noting that the registration process of Unstoppable Domains is not fully on-chain like ENS, but rather a centralized registration management + on-chain NFT minting model: users can use Google login + credit card payment when registering, and then go to Polygon to mint NFTs (except for .zil domains, which are minted on Zilliqa).

Related reading: "Web3 Domain Race: The Ice and Fire Faced by ENS, the Leader".

"ENS's trading volume has consistently ranked in the top ten on Opensea. There were two peaks in trading volume in November 2021 and April-May 2022. As of early November 2022, ENS has registered 2.62 million domain names, 573,000 registered users, and 508 ecosystem cooperation projects."

......

Unstoppable Domains may not be particularly well-known in the Chinese community, but its overseas reputation and marketing efforts are very strong. Currently, the number of domain names registered by Unstoppable Domains has exceeded 2.7 million, and more than 500 applications have integrated Unstoppable Domains.

ENS has launched a new gateway and open-sourced it, now live on the Optimism mainnet

On the other side of the conflict, on the same day, ENS launched a new gateway and made it open source.

November 16th, ENS launched the EVM Gateway and has open-sourced it, including a universal CCIP-Read gateway framework and Solidity library. It is reported that the gateway is the basis of the next generation of L2 parsers and the first step in the L2 roadmap, allowing L1 smart contracts to efficiently and securely obtain and verify state from other L2s, aiming to improve interoperability between L1 and L2.

In addition, the EVM gateway is now live on the Optimism mainnet and Goerli. It is reported that the gateway features modular design and can help achieve simple and trustless operations. Users can operate their own gateway or use existing ones: "Changing the target (the L2 you want to read) is as simple as swapping validator contract addresses."

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