Team SuiNS realized this roughly 1 year ago, following Solana’s gain in popularity. Solana was the first future-proof blockchain with the technology to compete and best existing web2 companies in terms of scalability, speed, and transaction cost. Yet, they were disheartened to discover that Solana’s most popular projects were simply copies of their ETH equivalents and did not use its tech advantages whatsoever. And the few projects that did had NO traction. At the time, they designed an instant on-chain messaging protocol, but when it came to actually releasing it, they realized there would be no demand without necessary social infrastructure. This is how they were introduced to the idea of a name service.
Solana’s premiere name-service is run by Bonfida, yet it is simply a static copy of $ENS. Everything you can do with $ENS, you can do on Bonfida. The only difference is the “.sol” ending and that Bonfida simply charges a fixed higher-cost price than $ENS’s yearly pricing. This model makes the project unsustainable long-term and unfortunately, it did not take advantage of Solana’s tech — no new products, no future vision, no social integrations, no game partnerships, etc. SNS.DOMAINS was going to change this by competing on future vision and ease-of-use. So, they spent the next 6 months studying name services, building their product and getting ready to launch… but then they found out about Sui.