Web3 Marketplaces for Domains, Profiles & Talent

Blockchain is becoming the foundation of the global economy, yet adoption is only at 1%. Harmony is building towards Web3 adoption for a billion people. We focus on creating Web3 versions of the most common internet products that billions of people need — with features and benefits that can only come from blockchain.

Harmony now makes it possible to not only get an Internet domain that people can visit directly from their browser (like https://s.1.country), but to also get a domain that has Web3 functionality. With your .country domain name, you also can get short crypto names like s.1, which can store wallet addresses, digital addresses, and markers of social reputation across multiple blockchains. In combination with our mobile crypto wallet, we can easily onramp users to web3 products from Web2.

In other words, Harmony now unifies Internet domains and crypto names as Web3 identities. People can purchase domains at auction, similar to GoDaddy, which will also serve as an identity profile, like Linktree, and a signifier of talent reputation, like LinkedIn. We’re building the initial demonstrations and viable products, and soon will be creating standard development kits for all developers to build upon these primitives.

Internet Domains: Introducing .country

By bringing Web2 and Web3 together, billions of people will experience the advantages of the existing Web2 infrastructure — social media profiles, accessibility, and a seamless and user-friendly experience — and enjoy the new functionality of Web3, including access to decentralized finance and other blockchain-based applications, decentralization, resistance to censorship, improved security and authentication of domain ownership, and the flexibility of creating custom rules and logic.

Previously, a Web3 domain could only be resolved to wallet addresses and records on a blockchain, over a blockchain-enabled app. Only in a few browsers like Brave can you visit a Web3 domain address without needing extensions or plug-ins that would only reach a small group of Web3 users. Harmony bridges this gap by synchronizing its Web2 registry records with Web3 smart contracts. Now, our addresses can be resolvable in the browser and readable on mobile devices, to interact with the other 99% of the Internet not on Web3.

Try out our new Web3 way of acquiring domains. Simply go to https://1.country/ for instructions: just simply choose your second-level domain, connect your Metamask, claim a domain for a number of months, paste in a Twitter URL, and you’re done.

Custodial Auctions

How can we reach a billion people with Web3? Domain registration is a concept that people understand and need, and there are many familiar players in Web2.

GoDaddy has $4.07 billion of annual revenue, 51.4 million monthly visits to their website — and claim to have over 21 million customers and to represent 84 million domains. This is far bigger than the goal of many decentralized applications who hope to capture a few thousand users or millions of dollars of TVL. As a registrar, they hold custody of the domain and rent it to “buyers.” They also are achieving momentum in other services such as offering Buy Buttons for all websites, attaching GoDaddy Payments within websites, and providing simplified domain creation for customers, driving higher publish rates. GoDaddy auctions valuable expiring domain names before they go back to the registry. Their auction business holds domains in escrow, analogous to what Uniswap would be in Web3 for your tokens. They make money from commissions, and from charging to feature your listing on their homepage and to set a reserve price.

They also have a domain broker service to try to acquire a domain that’s already registered and not expired. GoDaddy Auctions’ promotion is targeting the speculator/investor: their website includes language such as “a domain that initially cost a few bucks can be worth a lot of money to the right buyer. That’s why domain auctions exist — to give domain owners an opportunity to sell their name for a profit…” They offer an investor mobile app allowing people to watch auctions in real time and view their bidding history.

Sedo is another giant player in the domain auction space, claiming to have “the largest number of interested buyers worldwide: every second domain sale is completed using Sedo.” Sedo offers three auction formats to choose from: Direct Auction, Marketplace Auction with selling guarantee (where you set a reserve) and GreatDomains Auction (limited to short, common, SEO-valuable terms like cars.com)..

Namecheap also has a marketplace that only charges 10%; they opened the market in late 2021 after they stopped sending their expired domain names stream to GoDaddy Auctions. There are now over 300,000 active auction listings in the marketplace. They don’t require exclusivity, so you can also sell a domain on Sedo/GoDaddy, but their marketplace only works for domains that already have been transferred to namecheap.com.

Harmony’s Opportunity: Come Build With Us.

Putting domains in the web3 stack will attract more potential for the total value of all assets locked into Defi protocols (TVL). TVL includes all the coins deposited in all the functions Defi protocols offer, including staking, lending, and liquidity pools. Our advantage is that we can take people’s experience with buying Web2 domain names and improve upon it with our new RADICAL marketplace: we can sell Web2 domains and crypto names alike as NFTs, just like on Uniswap (through its acquisition of Genie) and OpenSea. There are many ways we can play together with the idea, to create a more engaging and rewarding experience for people trading domain names:

• Our .country domains will include Web3 functionality. Our top-level blockchain-based domain infrastructure will create a decentralized, accessible digital economy and identity system. People will be able to rent and use digital assets that will include new functionality, offering them a profile page with vanity metrics, crypto names under .1, and the possibility of earning revenues through payment and tips via Web3 wallets.
• Our on-chain, Web3-native domain registry and marketplace can feature auctions, trading, and analytics.
• We can afford more privacy and discretion than traditional Web2 registrars by allowing for anonymous payment with ONE tokens.
• Developers can tweak pricing and the entire structure of renewals and terms of ownership, by offering demand-based recurring pricing, perhaps with strong time-bound ownership guarantees.

Identity Profiles

Creating and maintaining digital identity profiles are a challenge and a headache for creators. They pose the following problems:

• Websites are isolated, clunky, and difficult to maintain and update.
• Many Web2 platforms (Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter) only allow one link in their profile bio.
• Web2 platforms are vulnerable to inaccessibility due to content restrictions and censorship.
• Web2 platforms leave you stuck with their style and content restrictions, their fees, their business model, and the data insecurity that comes with platform lock-in.
• Fraudulent identities

Even though you can usually only add one link to your social media bio, link-in-bio tools solve many of these problems by offering creators a landing page that can offer visitors links to videos, posts, music, recipes, podcasts, shops, and fundraisers. Instead of just housing links, link-in-bios now allow their users to embed digital content such as a Spotify song, to paywall a newsletter, and to display NFTs (non-fungible tokens). This can convert your followers into paying customers without the hassle of developing a website.

Linktree is enormously successful, boasting of over 30 million users — exponentially more than most blockchain projects. Linktree links account for nearly half of all the link-in-bio traffic on Instagram. The tool also is sticky: Linktrees get an average of 1.8 clicks per visit, and their 30 million users have generated nearly 20 million clicks per month on monetized links. Pricing ranges from free (which includes unlimited links and apps, as well as collections of payments, tips, donations, with 0% transaction fees for a limited time) all the way up to $20 (which allow for animated links, increasing amounts of customization, analytics, Mailchimp/Google Analytics integrations, and email/phone number collection).

Another sizable link-in-bio company is Koji, which highlights commerce and positions itself as “a platform tailor-made for social media sellers.” They have over 120,000 users and have raised $36M on the strength of their offering. Koji has 197 mini-apps allowing creators to sell digital products such as ebooks, presets, images, Cameos (called Shoutouts), quizzes, NFT displays, video courses, locked photos/videos, and more — directly from inside Instagram, TikTok, and other social networks.

GoDaddy Link-in-bio creator offers templates, where you can create your own link-in-bio page as well as creatively adding images/videos to social posts. Creators get a unique URL such as https://yourname.go.studio. They also have well-regarded mobile apps to make the process easy.

Y.at offers you a home on the web that serves as your identity, username, URL, and payment address, with the twist being that a Yat is a string of between one and five emojis. Pay With Yat allows you to associate your cryptocurrency address with your yat so people can send you money to your shorthand address. Your Yat is actually a subdomain of y.at, so you may end up spending $200,000 for the combination of a rocket ship and moon emoji, and if y.at shuts down, it’s gone forever. As of last year, they have sold well over 160,00 emoji combos totalling over $20 million.

The Exciting Promise of Web3 Identity Profiles on Harmony

Harmony is exploring Web3 profiles which will have many advantages that Web2 link-in-bio tools lack, such as:

• Custody over your ID and page with Harmony’s SMS wallet.
• Gating access to reveal Telegram ID as contact information, to an anonymous Telegram group, or even to Web3 fans via NFTs via Collab.Land or LitProtocol.
• Payments and tips in tokens with emoji reactions.
• Data portability, migrating a decentralized identifier and identity from one system to another.
• Security of decentralized storage, one of the core components of secure identity data management.

One primary advantage of Web3 profiles is that they can serve as a decentralized digital identity. Blockchain-based identity certificates, such as soulbound tokens and decentralized identifiers, can afford the user the possibility of monetizing their data by attributing it to a decentralized identifier. It can serve as a repository for verifiable credentials and could potentially be safer for finance, online communities and DAO participation than KYC (as otherwise, people may have provided fake documentation). It also improves voting and makes DAOs less vulnerable to Sybil attacks, as proving your reputation as a human makes it less possible for people to split their “identities” across multiple wallets to get more votes or vote for their own grant proposal.

Identity profiles can be offered in as many formats as can be imagined: They can be presented as latitude-longitude location pairs so someone could own a piece of virtual real estate or take part in local communities, voting, and discount buying; they can integrate with other top-level and vertical domains; and they can serve as a National Digital ID in many territories, offering perks and convenience such as mailing addresses, discounts, and banking.

Talent Reputation

Reputational identity relies on track records and accomplishments to represent who and how competent and trustworthy we are. Assessing reputation has always been a challenge, and before LinkedIn, many problems had bedeviled the job market:

• Databases of yellow pages and directories were limited, outdated, and ineffective.
• Existing online job markets are inefficient.
• The only means to assess candidates was through people’s claims rather than the network of relationships.
• Claims-based prioritization of candidates without being able to assess reputation cost companies needless time and money.

Many companies have sprung up to solve some of these problems. The most notable is LinkedIn, which leverages social and professional networks to connect employees with employers. They are enormously successful, boasting 875 million users and nearly 1.5 Billion quarterly visits, with 16.2% of US LinkedIn users logging in every day. Their annual $14 billion in revenue breaks down into three buckets with diverse revenue streams: talent solutions (charging recruiters to attract and hire talent; and offering online courses), marketing solutions (companies pay to advertise to LinkedIn users), and premium subscriptions (which allow members to increase their search results, contact members outside of their networks, hire freelancers, get salary insights, and to access other features).

A sizable competitor to LinkedIn is Handshake, which seized market share by directly going after GenZ college students. They have launched to great success, raising $200M on a $3.5B valuation, generating $100 million in revenue in 2022, and signing up over 14 million students and alumni with over 500,000 employer accounts. They work with over 90% of the top U.S. educational institutions, offering work-study positions and sponsoring over 2,300 virtual career fairs and connecting students to employers hiring for internship, part-time, and full-time roles. They also give employers a suite of tools to feature rich media, candidate reviews, and employee testimonials on their employer page.

Building Talent Reputation Solutions on Harmony

Such success points to a great opportunity in the space for developers. Even though LinkedIn solved many challenges employers and job candidates had been facing, there are still many problems with the solution provided by Web2 platforms:

• Walled gardens around professional profiles lead to an inefficient job market: the lack of ownership of personal identity means that there is no interoperability — which leads to much time wasted filling in forms and re-sharing personal information.
• LinkedIn and others make money by monetizing their data monopoly. This allows them to charge huge fees to recruiters to access your data, and your data is made available to people who may not have a relevant opportunity for you.
• Credentials are not the best proxy for skills, which can lead to discriminatory and inefficient recruiting processes.
• Self-reported credentials are not entirely trustworthy.
• Web2 platforms’ attempts to add in social proof and reputation with features like Linkedin’s Skill Endorsements and References section are hollow, as anyone can freely endorse anyone else without risking their own reputation.
• Current platforms don’t give people the ability to express a multifaceted professional identity, unlike in Web3 where you can show off multiple nicknames and profile pictures, and you can be known by your portfolio of work and the reputation you’ve established by creating value in different online communities.

Web3 solutions can solve these problems of reputation identity and provide additional benefits:

• With decentralized identity, the user owns their identity instead of the organization
• The identity is portable and interoperable, and can be used wherever and whenever the user wants
• With Zero-Knowledge Proofs, candidates can choose to only reveal content that matches what is looked for in a specific opportunity
• Decentralized identities can be backed by the hard evidence of on-chain transaction history — a permanent, timestamped record of a person’s accomplishments, contributions, interests, and activities.
• It can be used to display gaming accomplishments and even Web3 education (like Rabbit Hole)
• Verifiable credentials (a W3C standard) can allow credentials to be digital, interoperable, cryptographically verifiable, and tamper-proof.
• People can show off ecosystem participation to get additional privileges, such as with DegenScore and POAPs, and to give DAO governance to those with more skills, reputation and contributions.

On Harmony, one’s digital identity can start with names, a few links, and the skillset the user chooses to highlight on profiles. Users can choose the vanity metric they want to be known by, such as the numbers of code you’ve written in a programming language, the numbers of hires you’ve made, what tech you know, the amount of fundraising you’ve done, or even your desired hourly rate. Rather than just a resume, or a network of social connection, it also can feature verifiable metrics and analytics.

The blockchain can facilitate the connections and do matchmaking, just like Uniswap did for tokens and OpenSea for NFTs, making the Web2 profile (such as Harmony’s .country domain) usable in Web3, with Web3 social graphs. And now, Harmony’s new radical marketplace will serve non-fungible humans: profiles and credentials will utilize NFTs and soulbound tokens (non-transferrable NFTs as outlined by Vitalik) to ensure non-transferability, a critical component of reputation.

Curating a permanent library of NFTs is a reputation marker that you carry with you across the Internet, which will create a robust market. A form of liquid value also could be attached to reputation. For example, coins could be awarded, linked to contributions, to signal value and incentivize participation and engagement. This also could be done algorithmically, or through a governance/voting process determining point allocations. For platforms where participation functions like employment, as with gig or creator platforms, they could be distributed at specific intervals, or they could be distributed on completion of tasks, as in platforms with irregular contributions, like DAOs.

Future Work

Since 2018, Harmony has established itself as an open and fast blockchain, balancing scalability, security, and decentralization with uniform sharding. The beauty of building on Harmony is the endless scalability, and our platform can handle billions of people. Web3 developers have unlimited opportunities to play with innovation.