The State of Blockchain Domain Name Services

Domain Name Services, also called Domain Name Systems (DNS), have been integral to web technology since 1985. The most commonly used analogy is that DNS is the equivalent of the phonebook for the internet. These human-readable addresses help people to quickly identify addresses that are originally a string of random numbers. As Wikipedia states, “www.example.com translates to the addresses 93.184.216.34 (IPv4) and 2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946 (IPv6).”

DNS isn’t just an established technology that is important in today’s internet of Web 2.0 sites like Google or Facebook. It is constantly evolving and beginning to play an important role in the emergence of Web 3.0 technology. Blockchain projects have created hexadecimal address systems to identify public keys of cryptocurrency wallets. These 0x addresses composed of 16 random characters are difficult for people to read. Thus, the need to build a better system for communicating address information to others has led to the creation of several blockchain-based DNS projects. Essentially, they all aim to bring solutions that provide the same simplicity to identifying an individual user’s crypto wallet and website domain as we currently have with example.com and all other domains in Web 2.0.

In 2019, there has been a lot of progress made in the development of blockchain-powered DNS. Both small…