The company — best known for offering .crypto and .nft extensions — had failed to realize that a rival had begun offering .coin domains all the way back in 2014.
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Unstoppable Domains has stopped offering .coin domains after a rather unfortunate (and comedic) error.
The company — best known for offering .crypto and .nft extensions — had failed to realize that a rival had begun offering .coin domains all the way back in 2014.
In a new blog post, it admitted the decision to discontinue this product had been "painful," and vowed to make consumers whole.
Unstoppable executives didn't know that a company called Emercoin had started offering human-readable .coin addresses eight years ago.
They explained that Emercoin's offering hadn't been widely publicized — meaning that when Unstoppable's domains launched last year, they genuinely thought they were first to market.
And they apologized to the Emercoin team — describing them as "pioneers" of the industry. Setting out the dangers if .coin domains hadn't been discontinued, it said:
"Naming collisions are dangerous for the Unstoppable community and for Web3 as a whole. Multiple versions of a top-level domain could cause chaos. Imagine sending Bitcoin to the wrong nora.nft, or connecting your wallet to uniswap.crypto and getting a scammer’s website instead of the real one."
Acknowledging how much inconvenience all of this could cause, Unstoppable said those who have purchased .coin domains will be compensated with credits — and they'll be worth three times more than what they initially paid.
"We believe the platform with the first commercial use should have the rights to that domain ending, and in this case, we believe Emercoin is that platform. Simply put, it’s the right thing to do."
It's hoped .coin owners will be able to put these funds to a brand-new domain with a different extension instead.
Effectively, those who own the .coin domain will still be in control of the NFT, but a lack of support from Unstoppable means it won't do all that much.
Could This Happen Again?
Given how Unstoppable Domains had failed to discover Emercoin's offering after all this time, it's perfectly valid to wonder whether this could happen again with a different extension. The blog post sought to reassure users by saying:
"We've thoroughly researched each of our other top-level domains, and we're highly confident that Unstoppable has the right to offer and operate all of them. 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."
Overall, it's a lesson learned — but it just goes to show that Unstoppable Domains might not be as unstoppable as it would like to think.
The company says that more than 2.7 million domains have been registered through its platform so far — with these usernames becoming increasingly popular as Web3 gains traction. Given how crypto wallets used to consist of long strings of random letters and numbers, these human-readable addresses are much more practical for transfers.
