Invest in Your Own (Unstoppable) Blockchain Name

“Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave In The Mind

Names can be important, powerful investments in this connected internet age, and so too in the more monetized one that’s coming.

With some spare Ethereum, you might decide to invest in your own blockchain domain and/or wallet name for web3.

Ethereum Name Service

ENS or the Ethereum Name Service app is where you can buy your very own ‘human-readable’ Ethereum name using MetaMask etc. This will give to your web3 wallets a more accessible touch. In fact, Coinbase recently integrated ENS, making it far easier to send crypto to short names rather than long addresses.

Another cool thing is that these names are trade-able just like any ‘crypto-collectible’ or rare NFT, so you can potentially make a profit by buying and speculating on highly popular names that may one day be in demand. This can be done on the Opensea marketplace.

Yes, you can also create multiple sub-domain names to one wallet address, or link them to IPFS (the decentralised web) or regular URLs.

You can also just save an address you like, if you can’t afford to purchase one right away.

Unstoppable Domains

Another exciting, related project is Unstoppable Domains. These ones won’t expire… ever.

This site is an alternative to the above, and is helping to simplify blockchain and interaction with the decentralised web. For one thing, you can log-in quickly and easily via Google, and get your own dashboard. You can also then add your MetaMask address in the Account section.

From there, you can buy a domain name that is literally unstoppable. They don’t currently offer .eth addresses, but .crypto and .zil, plus premium names. The benefit here is that .crypto is more generic and not tied to one project.