A company that helps Handshake domain owners sell second level domains has suspended its services.
If Unstoppable Domains was looking for an easy test case for protecting its choice of top level domain names, it might have found it.
Just days after Unstoppable sued Gateway.io, Gateway.io appears to have shut down because it is unable to pay the legal fees necessary to fight the lawsuit.
Unstoppable Domains sued Gateway.io and its owner, James Stevens, for offering second level .wallet domains under a Handshake top level domain name. Unstoppable offers a competing .wallet address on its own blockchain-based naming system. The company claims that the first company to begin offering second level domains on a blockchain top level domain should have exclusive rights to the name.
Gateway.io, operated by former .io registry CTO James Stevens, is no longer accepting registrations for second level domains under Handshake. A Twitter account associated with Stevens has been deleted and the support (at) gateway.io email address no longer works.
Separately, the registrant of .wallet on Handshake sent a plea to the Handshake community, as shown in this tweet from another person:
.@unstoppableweb is throwing its weight to bully the little guys, starting w/ @HNS TLD owners. It’s not unthinkable to extrapolate that once they’ve knocked down .wallet, that they’ll go after every valuable domain name not just in $HNS but @ensdomains as well. pic.twitter.com/6BQ1UWOL13
— Cosmos Chjango (Interchain.FM🥩)👩🚀 (@chjango) August 1, 2022
Shutting down Gateway.io’s services is a strange move. It doesn’t make the lawsuit go away and it makes it seem like an admission of guilt.
But if the company cannot mount a defense, it will help Unstoppable in its legal case, which could have ramifications for owners of any blockchain-based domain name. Unstoppable Domains might also try to use this as a precedent when ICANN releases its next round of top level domains.
RIDICULOUS ! The trouble is that the quality of Judges is about the same as the “quality” of our Governments (and that is NOT a Political statement as it applies broadly !).
I think I have one worse decision to quote than that. A Judge who ruled that simply APPLYING ,with zero more, no trading ,NOTHING, for a Trademark was “Passing Off”. Dumb !.
“Building decentralized digital identities for the world.”
Nothing says “decentralized” more than one private company trying to bully other blockchain domains and build a monopoly. Their legal case itself basically makes the argument for centralization.
They might be able to bully the little guys, but ICANN won’t give a rats ass about their claims.
If they want the real extension, on the normal DNS root, they better be prepared to win it on the open market.
Brad
They sold over $5m worth of .wallet domains to hundreds of thousands of people… them defending their customers is a good thing, from the perspective of those who spent money.
Exactly. There is no definitive naming authority on the blockchain. It’s a wide open field. By litigating this, Unstoppable Domains is going against the spirit of Web3. They must be stopped!
thanks for your coverage Andrew!
It is truly frustrating to see a member in the handshake decentralized community fold under pressure so early on when many were there to support.
made my video on this https://youtu.be/LkkBszDgEr4
Spitting in the face of satoshi
i think this second .wallet was a money grab from the start, everything they did looked like they thought unstoppable would buy them, charging $1 per name means no real business model,
then the barage of tweets and retweets constantly trying to compare themselves to the UD .wallet
so yes i think sowing customer confusion and trying to ride the coatails of another .wallet
plus they thought highlight the idea on conflicts for their own personal benefit was a good thing (for them) but really just shows the downside of multiple decentralized web 3 systems, every wants to be “the” decentralized web3 system in a market where many can be started, and its not clear if there will be just one web3 domain name system,
plus it seemed like this registry system was different than the one on namebase and namecheap , so again just didnt look right..as a poster child for handshake domains
more on Web3domains on clubhouse this friday at 3 PM ET.
Page
Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
The owner of .wallet on Handshake priced the domains at $2 to help encourage adoption. Renewals IS a business model, as seen by *waves hand* everyone on the internet. UD selling names for a ONE-TIME fee of hundreds/thousands of dollars is not a business model. It doesn’t scale.
“Sowing customer confusion” doesn’t make sense either. UD customers who don’t know much about blockchain isn’t the responsibility of anyone other than UD itself.
Handshake is a name system blockchain, not a company on a blockchain like UD is. The incentives are different. Interoperability with other blockchains versus profit.
So what will happen to .c domains of users which we bought via gateway.io
I invested around 4k with them.