Unstoppable Domains now pays users' gas fees after Polygon move, says CEO Matt Gould

Ashton Addison: What is Unstoppable Domains focused on, and how did it start?▶ 00:22

Matt Gould: We create NFT domain names, which are blockchain systems for domain registrations, and we think that's a huge step forward. The current domain system is very centralized. A lot of people don't know that .com, for instance, is owned by a single company, and all those registrations go through its process, so you don't have much control over your own domain name. The genesis of the company was making it easier for people to send and receive cryptocurrency. Once you buy your first bitcoin or ethereum and try to send it, you're hit with a really long hex address that looks like a bank number. When we started four years ago, we thought that was a terrible user experience. Wouldn't it be great if the first time you send a crypto payment, you're not afraid? So we built naming systems on different smart contract blockchains that let you map all of your cryptocurrency addresses to a single domain. I have matt.crypto, for instance. If you want to send me crypto, you type matt.crypto into a wallet that supports Unstoppable Domains. That has evolved into a full naming service that we think will ultimately compete with .com.

Ashton: How easy is it to get your own domain, and which extensions do you offer?▶ 02:50

Matt: We offer about 10 extensions, from .bitcoin to .nft to .crypto to .x. We focused first on sending and receiving crypto because there's no way three billion people will use cryptocurrency if they have to send it to complex hex addresses. We think a readable name is a requirement for adoption. That means these domain systems are going to be a lot bigger than the traditional ones, because every person with a crypto wallet will need one. For most people it will likely be their first NFT, so we think it should be part of wallet onboarding. In the past couple of months we've announced a wallet alliance with over 30 wallets that resolve Unstoppable domains. We also announced a partnership with blockchain.com, under which every new user of their wallet will get one of these domains as part of onboarding. Ask any ten people in a room what the big problems in crypto are, and UX will be in the top three.

Ashton: You started before NFTs exploded. Did you see this coming, and how has profile-picture adoption changed things?▶ 07:30

Matt: We've continued to evolve the product as the industry has evolved, and we've been working on this since 2017, right when NFTs were first invented. Our domain systems have been built as NFTs from the beginning. Back then they were called ERC-721 tokens, which is the technical standard. Now everyone refers to NFT domains and it seems obvious, but at the time it wasn't. If you'd asked me four years ago what would take crypto mainstream, I would not have picked art. It's been incredible this year to see people adopting PFP profile pictures. We recently added support so you can verify your PFP, such as a CryptoPunk, back to your blockchain domain, and that picture then shows up on your domain. That's what we mean by constructing identity from the bottom up. We worked with Chainlink to verify Twitter profiles back to domain names, and we see a future where you can verify all your social profiles. If you're sending a payment, it would be great to see the person's picture or a link to their Twitter profile so you feel more confident, the way you can look someone up on PayPal or Venmo.

Ashton: Why would someone who doesn't need a website want one of these domains?▶ 14:48

Matt: The traditional domain system is built on an older tech stack and simply hasn't evolved in 30-plus years. Point out something in tech that hasn't changed in 30 years. There aren't many, so this area is ripe for innovation. It's in my pitch deck: the domain name industry has not innovated in 25 years. It's theoretically possible to build a much more advanced naming system on top of .com, but with such an old tech stack it's going to be really hard. On smart contract platforms it's 10 times easier to build features like receiving cryptocurrency payments or digital ID. When I explain this to my dad, two things make sense to him. First, if you believe everyone on the planet will use crypto in the next 10 years, then everyone will want an NFT domain to send and receive it. Second, wouldn't it be nice not to have 50 different passwords, and instead use a single name like matt.crypto to sign in with your crypto wallet? There's a lot more depth there, including privacy, GDPR compliance for businesses and new models that let users make money from sharing their data. But those two cases are enough, and the rest comes as a bonus.

Ashton: What does the Polygon integration change for people buying domains?▶ 11:02

Matt: Anyone in crypto this year knows there was a huge increase in traffic, and that pushed fees up. On some of these blockchains fees went up 50 to 100 times, and in some cases people were paying 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, even a hundred dollars to add information about themselves to their domains. It was untenable. It ate up literally 10 months of our engineering roadmap to find alternatives that made interacting on-chain much cheaper. We ended up working with Polygon, a layer 2 solution for Ethereum, and that dropped our costs so low that we now cover all gas fees for users. We will pay 100 percent of fees. For us the cost is in the pennies. We want to own that part of the user experience, because users don't know how to write software to make it cheaper, so we internalize it. If you buy a domain from Unstoppable, you pay a one-time fee for the domain and we pay your transaction fees on Polygon.

Ashton: Your domains carry a one-time fee. Why have no renewals?▶ 13:11

Matt: Our domain names are NFTs, and just like any other NFT you buy, you own it. Ownership is a big part of the crypto ethos, and if you have renewal fees you're not being true to that model. Renewals also potentially introduce security problems, because you could revoke a domain at some point in the future by raising the fees so high. So we thought it was very important to stay true to the ownership model of the crypto economy. When we sell you a domain name, you pay once and you own it. For the long term we have a plan in place to make the business model make sense. When we were building this, we asked ourselves what we hate most about domain names, and the answer was renewals. We own domain names ourselves, and we didn't want to build a system with renewals baked in.

Ashton: Is the growth organic, and where are registrations heading?▶ 18:05

Matt: We're doing all of the above. This month is likely to be a record month for us, and we've already crossed about 140,000 registrations. Growth has been 300 to 500 percent year over year for the last three years, and we're projecting the same next year. Something like 200 million people have cryptocurrency, while only about 200,000 have an NFT domain name. The crypto market is growing about 100 percent year over year, so we have to grow three to five times faster than that just to catch up. At the beginning of this year I said I thought we would have over a million registrations by the end of the year. We blew past that and already have 1.5 million. I tell my team we're doing 140,000 a month now, but I expect to be registering at least 10 times that in the next year, so a million domains a month. Looking out to next year, I think we'll have 10 million-plus registrations. We'll see.