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Hey there, in this week’s Alts by Flippa newsletter I discuss:
The potential opportunity from selling Handshake domains on Namecheap
The next event in the Discord on AI content
Apecoin becomes a top #50 cryptocurrency (then falls back a little)
Remember, every heading in this newsletter is a channel in the Discord - come join over 800 of us.
Richard Patey, Director, Investor Community at Flippa
#domains
Two weeks ago I first wrote about Handshake domains, which are fully decentralized names that you own and can’t be taken away (or have websites you publish on them taken down). Since then I’ve continued to go deep into HNS and over the last week attended the Handycon Handshake Conference.
It blew my mind.
Let’s start with the emoji I used in the email subject line 🤯. This little fellow is called ‘exploding head’ and was approved for duty in 2017.
But did you know (I didn’t) that each emoji has it’s own code. Put it into Punycoder and it spits out xn--oq9h. Put that into Namebase domain search and you can see that this TLD (top level domain, i.e. the right of the dot) sold for 2 $HNS tokens in 2020.
Ok so what does that all mean?
Well when mainstream browsers adopt the decentralized root zone and can resolve handshake domains AND this TLD becomes available to buy second-level domains on (SLDs i.e. the left of the dot), a brand would be able to use this in their marketing.
So, for example, rather than Nike using nike.com/gb/w/sale-3yaep (catchy) it could simply use the domain nikesale.🤯
Wait Patey, how do you type that into a search bar on a Macbook? Well just remember that most traffic now is on mobile which has easy access to emojis.
Ok so what has this to do with alternative asset investing? Well if you’re the .🤯/ TLD owner you make money every time someone buys a domain on your name.
And you can access these future TLDs today for a lot less than at least six figures when applying to ICANN.
For example, Clay Collins (from Leadpages back in the day and now Nomics) bought .c/ (i.e. hey.c) for 55K $HNS back in April 2020 which was under $8K USD at the time. Today, he’s on a six-figure run rate of domain registration/renewal fees:
Not a bad ROI so far, but Clay actually spoke at last year’s conference about how these kind of short TLDs on HNS could become billion-dollar assets:
.c/ is already inside the (traditional) top 400 gTLDs (according to nTLDStats):
As a TLD owner, Clay doesn’t have to get involved in domain registration, he just markets his TLDs (he also owns .zen and .1), and he is actually looking for someone to take over this marketing role if anyone reading is interested/suitable.
So how are the other Handshake TLDs doing?
I personally love .degen (owned by .sats on Twitter) as so many words can naturally go left of the dot like coffee.degen.
But the very big news is that the Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall just bought the .s/ domain at auction for $750K:
And it looks to be the case that Handshake TLDs that other people own are about to be offered on Namecheap next month:
As PeepoHNS/ says:
This is huge, and I’m currently bidding on some premium names on Namebase to be able to do the same:
The current default place to sell SLDs on your TLDs is Gateway.io and the .forever TLD is competing with .c/ for sales as can be seen in this tweet. However .forever is very different to the rest.
It’s part of the Handshake decentralized root zone, however it has second-level domain registrations managed via a fork of ENS (.eth domains). They are also ERC-721 (NFT) tokens trading on Opensea.
As such, Forever Domains are decentralized second-level domain names without renewal fees.
They are co-founded by Mike Carson from park.io who originally created a similar Badass Domains project (that wasn’t an NFT) and who wrote a great article on why they didn’t try to secure .badass through ICANN. In a press release he states that:
When you register a .forever domain, you are the only person that can control it, and the domain never expires. You never have to worry about renewal fees, and you never have to worry about anyone seizing or censoring your domain.
The TLD is stored in the Handshake root zone and cannot be modified by anyone, and all SLDs are stored on the Ethereum blockchain, and managed by an ENS smart contract that also cannot be modified. So you truly own your .forever domain.
I bought never.forever, which I at least find amusing. I can use it as a secondary crypto address to my patey.eth ENS one. And talking about ENS, did you know you can actually create as many subdomains as you want with no renewal charge?
And don’t forget about Unstoppable Domains (I previously bought richardpatey.crypto) as they may be about to become a unicorn!
#contentsites
The next event on the Stage in the Discord is with Justin McGill about his AI content productized service Content at Scale, this coming Monday at 6pm UK time.
#crypto
And just briefly as this email is already at the email length limit, the Bored Ape Yacht Club launched their own token. It’s called Ape Coin and it’s indeed made ape holders happy, such as friend-of-Flippa Morgan Linton:
It’s quickly become one of the biggest cryptocurrencies, currently ranking #62 on Coingecko.
Ok that’s it for this week. If you’re reading this on the web and you’re not yet subscribed just hit the button below.
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Alts by Flippa is owned by Flippa. Nothing in this email is financial advice and we are not professional investment advisers. We send weekly updates on what we're doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only.
Smart moves by Namecheap. Are they leading the pack in keeping up with the trends right now?