On October 6, 2023, ownership of NFTsAreReal.com changed hands on Optimism, a layer 2 network for Ethereum. The new owner is 0xec00481D13A4028E0B76B031Cf5C863604cB2D4B, otherwise identified as dnsking.eth in blockchain records. That owner is me, and it was all made possible by 3DNS, the first on-chain web domain registrar.
Less than 3 days earlier, 3DNS deployed its domain name contract on chain and immediately launched in Beta to select users on their wait list. I was lucky to be one of them. At the time of this writing, a total of 19 DNS domains have been tokenized on their platform. Seven of them are .coms, one is a .net, and three of them are .orgs, proving that blockchain is not just an ecosystem for exotic digital assets but that it’s also entirely capable of integrating and managing basic assets that everyone understands the world over. The others on there so far end in .link, .wtf, .xyz, and .box.
But let’s review exactly what happened. To use 3DNS in the first place one has to sign in with their Ethereum crypto wallet. There’s still a wait list as of this moment. After a few searches to see what was available, I registered NFTsAreReal.com as a brand new domain on October 5 and paid with the stablecoin USDC. Once purchased, one can then set whois records and DNS records just like they would be able to at any domain name registrar. And so I set a few.
Notably, registering the domain name also minted an NFT to my address. Whoever owns the NFT controls the DNS records of the domain. I could see the NFT visualized in this screenshot of my Coinbase wallet and got the idea to send it to another address.
And so I sent the NFT to another one of my addresses, the one listed at the top of this story. Upon doing so, the original registration address no longer had access to the domain or its records. I then panicked when I realized I hadn’t done anything to prepare my other address to be ready to accept a domain name. Turns out you don’t have to do anything to prepare. The new address had the NFT in its wallet which is all it needed once I used it to sign that address up for 3DNS. Upon accessing 3DNS for the first time from that address, NFTsAreReal.com was just sitting there waiting for me. The DNS records were intact from the previous owner and all I had to do was edit the whois records. The significance of what had taken place is a testament to what NFTs and blockchain can do. Turns out, NFTs are pretty real indeed.
Rather than make a standalone website, I set an A record for the domain to point to one of my existing servers. It pulls up a landing page for another domain I own, ens.army, that contains a simple link to register .eth names. As it is , 3DNS has been working with ENS on integrations so it kind of makes sense!
The transfer process was absurdly simple when compared to the practices that currently dominate in the traditional domain name world. 3DNS says they are planning to roll out more features over time, but already the underlying infrastructure is game changing for domainers. No broker fees, proof that someone actually owns a domain, instant transfer, .com. It’s there.
The 3DNS system is entirely different from wrapping a DNS domain with the ENS NameWrapper. The ENS NameWrapper also turns domain names into NFTs but in those cases sending the NFT does not actually send authority over the domain itself at the dns level, just the authority to manage ENS records connected with the name. I anticipate that we will see the 3DNS service become popular pretty quickly.