Author: Chloe, PANews

On November 16th, Nick Johnson, the chief developer of the leading Ethereum Web3 domain ENS, accused Unstoppable Domains (UD), a competitor in the domain race, on X (formerly Twitter), of lacking legal support and constraints. He claimed that UD had applied for a patent "Resolving Blockchain Domains" without consent, based on the development achievements of ENS. However, Unstoppable Domains seemed to intentionally evade ENS's accusations.

The patent dispute between the two leading domain players has attracted market attention.

ENS Accuses UD of Stealing Development Achievements, Latter Transfers Patent to Domain Alliance

This controversy can be traced back to January of this year. According to Johnson's accusation, "Unstoppable Domains obtained the first patent for resolving blockchain domains, numbered US1155834, earlier this year, but this patent is entirely based on the innovative products developed by ENS."

However, Unstoppable Domains had previously announced in a press release that they had transferred the patent to the Web3 Domain Alliance and invited ENS to join. However, the domain alliance is actually an organization founded and operated by Unstoppable Domains, and the press release has no legal effect.

In response, ENS attempted to communicate privately with Unstoppable Domains but made no progress. Furthermore, after this incident, Unstoppable Domains continued to seek more patents.

Subsequently, Johnson also presented ENS's demands: "No organization can rely on such a non-legally binding commitment when it comes to its core business. Therefore, we demand that Unstoppable Domains provide legal guarantees and make unconditional and irrevocable patent commitments."

In simple terms, ENS hopes that Unstoppable Domains will not use any potential patent rights in specific core business operations, or if they do, they will not file patent lawsuits against other organizations or individuals. This commitment should be unconditional and irrevocable.

Johnson emphasized, "ENS holds an open-source license, and the code standards are available for anyone to deploy, and we are committed to open-source values and have not applied for patents." He also admitted that if the two parties still have differences on this issue, ENS is ready to challenge this patent at any time.

In response, Unstoppable did not respond to ENS's accusation of plagiarism but instead stated that both parties should engage in "constructive dialogue," preferably within the alliance. "The demands made by ENS are unnecessary." Subsequently, Unstoppable invited ENS to join the Web3 Domain Alliance, stating, "We will continue to invite ENS to join the Web3 Domain Alliance. Although not everything will be unanimously agreed upon, being able to discuss together will be very helpful."

Some community members believe that Unstoppable Domains' behavior undoubtedly damages the spirit of Web3's permissionless and open-source innovation.

Rumors of "Integration" Between Both Parties, ENS Provides Long-Term Profit Paths for UD

Both ENS and Unstoppable Domains are leaders in the domain race and have been competitors. In July of this year, Unstoppable Domains announced that they would sell Ethereum Name Service domain names at cost on their platform, and all sales revenue would directly enter the Ethereum Name Service DAO (ENS DAO). This move attracted attention in the race, questioning whether the two were going to execute a different competition model than before and speculating whether Unstoppable Domains was about to integrate with ENS.

However, when asked if this action represented an imminent integration of the two projects, a spokesperson for Unstoppable Domains denied it, stating, "We hope to support the most important domain names and blockchains in Web3, including .eth." On the other hand, upon learning of Unstoppable Domains' plans, Johnson pointed out in an interview that Unstoppable Domains' decision did not involve direct participation from ENS and stated, "ENS is a permissionless protocol, meaning anyone can participate directly without our authorization. We are not surprised by Unstoppable Domains' choice."

Although Unstoppable Domains stated that they would not directly profit from the sale of .eth domain names, this does not mean that the company provides this service completely free of charge. In fact, Unstoppable Domains can collect renewal fees for .eth domain names through their automatic renewal service and generate profits by selling multiple domain names at once and offering domain name insurance.

In other words, although Unstoppable Domains stated that they would sell .eth domain names at cost, they have obtained long-term profit paths.

Different Emphases on Development Direction, Both Begin to Focus on Web2 User Experience

Although both belong to the domain field, they have different focuses.

ENS was initially a side project authorized by the Ethereum Foundation and later established an ENS team with the support of the Ethereum Foundation. It has never received external financing and only accepts donations from institutions such as the Ethereum Foundation. ENS focuses on Ethereum, mainly supporting ".eth" domain names, emphasizing integration with Web3.0 websites and achieving decentralized management through DAO.

In contrast, Unstoppable Domains has diversified its expansion to different blockchains, supporting over 270 currencies, including non-EVM chains. In terms of technical nature, ENS's domain names are NFTs, while Unstoppable Domains corresponds domain names to machine-readable identifiers to expand its application scope.

However, in recent years, ENS has gradually shifted towards a "user-friendly" development path. Following the collaboration with the Web3 payment company MoonPay to launch a service for purchasing ENS names with fiat currency in April of this year, ENS intends to move towards a more accessible route in the future, not only supporting .eth domains but also beginning to support ".box" domains, allowing users to route directly in the browser, similar to Web2 browsers. At the time, Johnson also stated, ".box will become the blockchain-native DNS enabled by the Ethereum Name System, serving as a bridge between Web2 and Web3, which is crucial for bringing decentralized applications to a wider audience."

On November 17th, ENS announced the launch of the EVM Gateway, an open-source repository that includes a universal CCIP-Read gateway framework and Solidity library, which enhances interoperability between L1 and L2 chains, allowing L1 smart contracts to efficiently and securely obtain and verify states from other EVM chains. The EVM Gateway is currently available on the Optimism mainnet and the Goerli testnet.

On the other hand, Unstoppable Domains also announced support for .com domain names last month, allowing users to purchase ".com" addresses through their website. ".com" is currently the most popular Web2 top-level domain (TLD) type, with a registration volume exceeding 157 million.

This makes Unstoppable Domains the first company in the industry to simultaneously provide traditional .com domain names and third-party Web3 domain names. The company plans to ensure that all the features available in Web3 domains can be used in conjunction with users' .com domains. Additionally, users can even use a Google account for credit card payments during registration and then mint NFTs on Polygon (except for .zil domains, which require minting through Zilliqa). Compared to ENS, Unstoppable Domains seems to focus more on Web2 user experience.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。