Registrar buys leading Handshake marketplace and reports rapid growth over the past year.
Namecheap is making an acquisition related to blockchain-based domains and reported strong growth in 2021.
The acquisition of Namebase bolsters the company’s position with Handshake, one of the competing blockchain-based domain name alternatives. Namebase is the leading marketplace and onramp for Handshake domains.
With Handshake, anyone can register a top level domain and then sell second level domains under them to other parties. For example, Namecheap offers second level Handshake domains in extensions such as .saas, .p, and .creator. At this time, Namecheap is the “owner” of each Handshake top level domain it offers at the registrar.
These domains can be used for crypto wallet addresses, Web3 identities, and technically, web presence such as websites. However, none of the most popular browsers currently resolve blockchain-based domains without using a plugin. Opera, which has about 1%-2% market share, is enabling native access to Handshake domains this year.
Separately, Namecheap revealed to Domain Name Wire that its revenue last year soared 28% over 2020, tallying $256.76 million. It ended the year with 14.62 million domains under management and 30 million active products including email subscriptions, SSL, hosting, etc. It added one million customers last year.
There is a local bank here called Crescom and their domain is haveanicebank .com
They don’t own crescom .com but the bank is owned by United Bank, which doesn’t own unitedbank .com, they use bankwithunited .com
NameCheap making a huge move and positioning with this acquisition.. Its building momentum and some of the top OG crypto people are getting involved so watch where it goes in 3-5 years when HNS does get distribution.
Smart move by namecheap and opera. Firefox, and other smaller web browsers will have no choice but to accept these names to gain market share. Opera is so smart. Google will lose around 10% of market next 5 years as young generation accepts web3 names. Your going to need about 20-30 billion wallet address over next 10 years and they will all have a name attached to it and it will not be .eth