Namecheap’s CEO appears to throw weight behind .wallet and defending the Handshake blockchain domain system.
For a day, it appeared that blockchain domain company Unstoppable Domains picked the right fight to argue its first-to-offer-a-blockchain-TLD-gets-exclusive-rights argument.
The company sued Gateway.io, a registry/registrar technology provider for Handshake domains, after Gateway.io started offering .wallet addresses. Unstoppable Domains also offers .wallet domains.
Gateway seemed to shutter its operations quickly in the face of the lawsuit.
But now Namecheap, the second largest retail operator, appears ready to take on Unstoppable. In a tweet yesterday, Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall said he was going to help protect .wallet and the Handshake system against Unstoppable Domains:
— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) August 2, 2022
Namecheap is a big supporter of the Handshake system. It owns Namebase, which competes with Gateway.io. It also registered many Handshake top level domains and is the largest registrar to offer second level Handshake registrations to customers.
Unstoppable Domains didn’t sue the registrant of the .wallet Handshake registration. Although I haven’t been able to confirm this, it’s conceivable that second level .wallet registrations will now be available through Namebase. Namecheap could also offer the domain to its millions of customers. (It already sells Handshake addresses ending in .ewallet.)
And Kirkendall is not one to stand down in a fight. He spent years and significant funds fighting back against Facebook (Meta Platforms) over disclosing the identity of domain registrants.
Grab the popcorn. This is going to be one to watch.
Loving these updates – thanks for the ring side seats.
Amazing that StoppableDomains raised a bunch of money, just to lose it all in court. Love to see it.
What will StoppableDomains do when they realize that they have no trademark rights on dictionary words just because they sell domains for them “first”? What will they do if they don’t get trademarks in Canada and Mexico either? And they can’t bid for “their” TLDs at ICANN either, because they have revealed their preferences in advance? What will they do if they lose in court and cannot keep their own promises to their customers? They admit in their own complaint:
“21.When users purchase .WALLET domain names from Unstoppable Domains, they
must agree to Unstoppable Domains’ terms and conditions. In exchange, the users receive exclusive control of the specific .WALLET domain name they have purchased.”
How can they promise their buyers exclusive control of the specific .WALLET domain name if they don’t even own the .Wallet TLD? Neither at ICANN nor an alt root zone like Handshake?
They continue to claim in their terms of use that the domain “is 100% under your own ownership and custody” once it is on the blockchain. However, their smart contracts controlling the domains are upgradable, allowing StoppableDomains as administrator to update the contract and add new functions to it, like a force transfer function which could be used to transfer already issued domains without the consent of the owners. This is what 100% ownership look like?
Their biggest problem will be lying to their own customers and not being able to keep their promises. They advertise that their domains have no renewal fees, but charge several hundred or thousand dollars for them at registration. Currently, only StoppableDomains itself sells their domains. Only a few can resell the domains purchased from StoppableDomains at low prices on the secondary market. This means that all buyers of StoppableDomains are trapped in their system by the high initial purchase price, as they do not pay renewal fees compared to other domains and thus cannot get rid of them. Unless they would defend StoppableDomains in the public and help generating hype so they can resell their previously purchased domains to someone dumber. This system would also commonly be known as Ponzi scheme (hypothetical only, everyone knows that this applies only to StoppableDomains but not to the reputable company UnstoppableDomains Inc. I have noticed that StoppableDomains is also taking legal action against public criticism, so we want to prevent any confusion here.)
I think a class action lawsuit against StoppableDomains is preprogrammed. This is the easiest way how bruised investors could get their money back.
Not to nitpick, but it 100% possible to obtain trademark rights and registrations for dictionary words: see Apple, Delta, Windows, Sprite, Ford, etc.
However, as the USPTO is unequivocal regarding trademark rights for TLDs: no. As they stated when rejecting the application for .wallet: “Registration was previously refused because the applied-for mark the applied-for mark consists of a top-level domain name (TLD) used in connection with domain registration services; it does not function as a service mark to identify and distinguish applicant’s services from those of others and to indicate the source of applicant’s services.”
Unstoppable Domains has over 300 partnerships listed, including browsers like Brave.
I’m sure they have a clause in their contract that would prevent all those apps from resolving conflicting namespace.
It’s fundamentally stupid for someone to launch a TLD that competes with the 10 that UD already has laid claim to… nothing but downside and legal costs that could be used to provide value to users instead. There’s infinite possibilities, and ultimately it’s what’s BEST for the users that counts.
Another .NFT or .crypto will never work in the blockchain.com app (80m users), brave browser (50m users), opera browser (400m users) and so on.
Why even try to launch an inferior product where usability for consumers will be hindered on day 1 due to legal contractual obligations across numerous major players in the space?
Handshake has been a bad idea from the start I’m hoping unstoppable can get a victory to be the final death blow to handshake.
this is not how justice works, but I could be wrong
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.79507/gov.uscourts.ded.79507.1.0_1.pdf
https://twitter.com/chjango/status/1554117961694072833?s=20&t=vnfM00p43CPbv7y6G3aTvQ
Richard should Focus on Fixing Namebase.io and hiring staff to support their customers. It’s a huge mess!