On the 22nd June 2021, Bonfida launched the Solana Naming Service! The aim of this decentralised naming service, is to help with censorship resistance, so that no person, company policy or government can block, ban or delete you. When you pair this up with decentralised backend hosting like Arweave or IPFS you will reach 100% censorship resistant and laser beams will shine out of your eyes. 🙂 Lucky you have your pit viper shades.
So How Does It Work?
The Solana Naming Service is an affordable way to to register a .SOL domain, with the minimum purchase at auction of > $20 USDC. This price barrier to entry is to stop people squatting on hundreds of domains. The money collected from the sale goes to $FIDA buy and burn.
So Why Use Solana Naming Service?
It makes it super easy to pay someone or be paid. Instead of copy / pasting a giant address string you can use the shortened human-readable name!
How to Get Starting with your .SOL Search
To get started just visit the Bonfida website and the domain registration page.
Connecting Your Wallet
You will need to connect your wallet. A great wallet option is Phantom which you can integrate as a browser extension. For getting started with the Solana ecosystem and using a wallet, check out this Solana for Beginners guide from DeFi Today. You can also check out our guide about How Good Phantom is!
Let’s Buy the .SOL Domain
Ok, so your wallet is now connected. You will need to make sure you have a little bit of $SOL to cover transaction fees (a few pennies) and then some USDC to make the bid (at least $20.01). Now it is time to setup an auction and put a bid in.
Once the auction is registered it will take a small Solana fee from your wallet. After that you will see the auction live and you can put your bid in. You can revoke your offer at any time.
Viewing the Current Auctions
You can see the recent bids for the past 6 hours or search specifically for the domain you want. Interesting to see that you can even bid for Emoji domains!
Need more info?
Check out the Official Bonfida docs
How does it compare to Ethereum Name Service?
ENS is Older
Of course, Ethereum launched their naming service first, back in May 2019.
ENS did not use a token standard until May 2019, so you can’t see the transfer history on OpenSea (in fact most OG ENS names seemingly start their history in February 2020 because we did a migration to a new NFT contract to fix a bug).
It works in a similar way
ENS also has a website, that is setup in a similar manner. You need to connect your ETH wallet to the website, then you search for a domain and register.
ENS .ETH domains expire, .SOL domains do not
ENS domains expire every year and you have to renew them. Yearly renewals cost $5/year for names that are 5 characters or longer. 4 character names cost $160/year, and 3 character names cost $640/year. Fees are paid in ETH. You can also extend the domain registration for multiple years. Also, .ETH domains are considered as NFT tokens, so a marketplace does exist. Read the official ENS FAQ here.
All the .SOL domains have an “unlimited” registration period. So you pay 20 bucks for a .SOL forever. Another cool feature is you can get content to be stored on the blockchain as a data state, however to store it costs “rent”. You can read more about this in the Official Solana Docs, but essential you pay a small fee to specify how much data store your domain content will occupy and you need to specify this upfront.
So What Domains Have Been Registered?
SEX.SOL is selling for 50,000 $SOL ! You can see great use of the Solana Naming Service content data field here 🙂
I wonder if Kermit will put this on the auction market and see what the current market price will be. But the question is in 5 years, what will this be worth? There is certainly a .SOL gold rush happening right now… Get in quick
So What Domains Are You Going to Reserve?
Register at Bonfida now!
Comment below or tell us on Twitter!
