Unstoppable Domains Stops Selling .Coin Domains After Realizing They’ve Been Around For Years

Unstoppable Domains offers a variety NFT-based domain names that can point to crypto wallets, profile pages and decentralized websites that may be displayed in certain browsers. But the startup just scrapped one of its domain offerings after realizing another company had already sold similar ones Web3 domains for eight years.

The billion dollar company announced this week that it will no longer selling .coin domain names, and has discontinued services that allow existing .coin domains to function. That’s because another blockchain company, Emercoin, had previously offered its own .coin domains since 2014 – but Unstoppable Domains didn’t realize that until recently, after launching its .coin domains last year.

“Emercoin, the platform that issues .coin domains, had not marketed theirs [top-level domain] extensive, 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 firm wrote. “The Emercoin team are pioneers in our industry and we apologize for not being aware of this name collision earlier.”

Unstoppable Domains said that leaving the .coin services intact could lead to a “potential collision” between the rival offerings. It can cause users to inadvertently send crypto funds to a wrong wallet, for example, and thus lose access to those assets forever.

“Name collisions are dangerous to the unstoppable community and to Web3 as a whole,” wrote the firm. “Several versions of one [top-level domain] can cause chaos. Consider sending Bitcoin to wrong nora.nft, or connect your wallet to uniswap.crypto and get a scammer’s website instead of the real one.”

Users who purchased .coin domains from Unstoppable Domains as an NFT, or a blockchain token representing ownership of a unique commodity, will still own those NFTs – but they are functionally useless now. The company has deactivated its services related to the domains, but the NFTs themselves will still remain within the users’ self-service wallets.

As a bargain, Unstoppable Domains said it would refund buyers three times the original purchase price in credit, which users can use on other domains. The company also claimed that it has implemented more exhaustive methods to track down potential conflicts with other existing and future domain offerings.

“Many early attempts at blockchain naming systems were small and built for very specific communities,” it wrote. “It’s been a challenge to find these early projects, but we’ve looked at them in extreme detail.”

Unstoppable domains raised a $65 million Series A round in July, bringing its valuation to $1 billion. The firm claims that users have registered over 2.7 million NFT-based domains to date through the service, which is integrated with services such as Coinbase Wallet and the Brave browser. The company’s domains are currently imprinted on Polygonone Ethereum scaling network.