The Background
FIO Crypto Handles (formerly known as FIO Addresses) were first constructed with a format of username.domain (much like the website’s format of domain.tld). This is the same format picked by other wallet naming solutions — the dot is simple, easy to say, familiar, and seemed to fit the bill. Frankly, it was the obvious choice.
But as time went on, cracks began to form. First off, FIO Crypto Handles, in their current iteration, cannot act as website domains. Many other wallet naming solutions combined wallet names WITH website addresses, which we intentionally wanted to avoid for a multitude of privacy and design reasons.
More importantly, from a long-term perspective, we had a concern that ICANN would eventually adopt FIO Crypto Handle domains as TLDs, which would further the confusion.
Here’s an example — say someone purchased the FIO Crypto Handle domain of “.acme” and registered a username on it like “orders”. The full FIO Crypto Handle would be “orders.acme”.
If ICANN eventually added the .acme TLD (and they are adding new TLDs every day) — then someone could go to any domain registrar (like GoDaddy) and register orders.acme as a web address. Now, there’s a website called orders.acme AND a FIO Crypto Handle called orders.acme, owned by two separate entities.
Problematic? Yep.
This is one of the many reasons why we believe that a wallet name and domain name should not be the same — it has too many long-term ramifications that are not beneficial to the user and compounds confusion.
The Fix
So the dot turned out to be a problem. The simple solution was to swap out the delimiter symbol to something else. We debated through a list of options (honestly, we just looked at every symbol on the keyboard).
Frankly, none of them seemed like the obvious choice. Ultimately, the : and the @ symbol were the leading contenders. Both had positives and negatives.
Pros for the : symbol
- Looks pretty clean (bob:edge)
- Doesn’t overlap with any other naming system we know of (emails, web addresses, other wallet naming solutions)
Cons for the : symbol
- People hated saying the word “colon”, including us
- Not a very conventional piece of punctuation in other languages
Pros for the @ symbol
- Very familiar symbol, straightforward to say
- Universally known across multiple languages at this point due to email addresses
- Avoids the apparent problem with web domain conflicts
Cons for the @ symbol
- Can get confused with email addresses (but would be missing the TLD like .com at the end of it)
The Debate
Considering the long-term ramifications of this decision, we carefully evaluated all options and gathered feedback from as many parties as possible. We talked amongst ourselves, asked our FIO Members, asked board members, and ran some informal user surveys on Twitter.
What it came down to was this:
- The FIO Members themselves unanimously preferred the @ symbol
- Twitter surveys seemed to show a slight preference for the : symbol but ultimately seemed neutral on the issue
The Decision (for now)
While we ran to the FIO Presale with the assumption of keeping the : symbol, we have decided to switch to the @ symbol for mainnet launch.
The decision came down to the fact that, while it was unclear which symbol users would ultimately want, our FIO Members clearly thought the @ symbol would be better received. As companies and individuals who have spent years designing products for crypto end users, their opinion held substantial weight to us.
Ultimately, as a decentralized, community-governed protocol, the users can choose to switch the delimiter again in the future (or add support for more delimiters). For mainnet launch, however, we believe that this is the best decision given the limited data we have to work off.
Is this How Decisions Will Always be Made?
No, and that’s what made this topic particularly annoying. The initial developers of the FIO Protocol won’t be dictating what the FIO Protocol does long-term. However, before mainnet launch, it is still within our responsibility to steward design decisions. In an ideal world, we would’ve had a community governance proposal to hash this out with on-chain governance voting — but alas, we’re not quite there yet (though we will be eventually).
We will be talking more about governance in the future, and our Managing Director, Luke Stokes’, vision for operating a community-led protocol as an on-chain Decentralized Autonomous Consortium (DAC). This will include member registration, voting for board members, worker proposals, and transparent multisig financial decisions made by the board — visible to all.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask during one of our AMAs, or drop us a line at one of the links below.
Way to connect with us:
Website: https://fio.foundation
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@joinFIO
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialFIO
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/officialFIO
Discord: https://discord.gg/pHBmJCc
Telegram: https://t.me/joinFIO
