NFT naming services have become a hot commodity these days, with all sorts of businesses springing up to help people set up domain names ending in all sorts of .com-adjacent variants. The reason that these services are so popular is because of the convenience that they offer. Rather than sending the usual string of numbers and letters when a person wants to receive a digital asset, they can send their Name.ETH address, for example.
But one of the popular NFT domain name providers, Unstoppable Domains, has decided to suspend its services after discovering that another business was offering the same service with the same name.
Details About the Situation
Prior to this situation, Unstoppable Domains had been selling NFT domain names that all ended in .coin for over a year. Depending on the users’ preferences, these domain names could automatically link back to a crypto wallet, a website, and so on. All was find until Unstoppable Domains found out that another company, Emercoin, had been doing the same thing for eight years.
Not only was Emercoin also selling blockchain naming services but theirs ended in .coin as well. The issue with this is that two different people could potentially register the same name with the different businesses without knowing. As such, someone meaning to send an asset to one person might send it to another without knowing.
To avoid this sort of issue, Unstoppable Domains announced the closure of its NFT domain naming services in an official statement.
“Emercoin, the platform issuing .coin domains, hadn’t marketed their [top-level domain] extensively, making it difficult to find. As soon as this collision came to our attention, we stopped selling .coin domains while we investigated the issue. The Emercoin team are pioneers in our industry and we regret that we weren’t aware of this naming collision earlier,” a statement from the company read.
The Trouble with Names
The company was also quick to emphasize that this decision was taken to protect customers as there are so many ways that any potential confusion can cause loss or harm to them. Those who already purchased .coin domains from Unstoppable Domains will retain their ownership of the NFTs. However, the services attached to the domains have now been suspended by the company.
To compensate buyers, the company will be offering refunds of three times the original amount paid to the customers. This will be in the form of credits that they can use to pay for new domain names.
The company has also said that it will be looking into very advanced methods of tracking down any future similar conflicts with other businesses offering blockchain domains.
“Many early attempts at blockchain naming systems were small and built for very specific communities. Seeking out those early projects has been a challenge, but we’ve looked into them in extreme detail,” the company wrote.
As the industry matures, these sorts of incidents are inevitable to a degree. But as they are sorted out, potential problems can be avoided.
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