[테크크런치] 블록체인 스타트업들을 중심으로 한 .xyz 도메인 열풍

Image from Techcrunch

 

WTF is .xyz? – TechCrunch

 

.xyz의 기원

.xyz, released to the public in 2014, first surged in popularity one year later when Google parent Alphabet decided to use it for their rebranded website. The internet behemoth had run into an increasingly widespread problem — the .com URLs for their brand were already taken, with BMW’s fleet management division using alphabet.com and American Broadcasting Corporation at abc.com. 

So Alphabet decided to open up shop at abc.xyz, which presented an “unlimited branding opportunity” for its “futuristic company,” Daniel Negari, .xyz’s 36-year-old founder and CEO, told TechCrunch in an email. Now, .xyz may be one of the top five top-level domains (TLDs) in the world by traffic, according to the company’s own DNS data.

 

.xyz was created to “provide users around the world competition and choice when it comes to their domain name,” and is “the first truly generic domain extension with no inherent meaning,” according to Negari. While .com was meant for commercial use, .net for networks and .org for organizations, Negari envisioned .xyz as the TLD choice for users who felt they did not fit neatly into one of these categories or wanted to stand out. 

 

Web3.0 열풍과 함께한 .xyz

Negari is an active crypto investor with “numerous” investments in the space, including Gemini, MoonPay and BlockFi, he said. Because of his interest in crypto, he reached out to Ethereum Name Service (ENS) creator Nick Johnson to pitch him a collaboration.

 

ENS allows users to create a universal nickname for all their crypto addresses, providing a searchable database to make crypto wallets and transactions, which otherwise reside on a variety of different platforms, more easily accessible. Users can now create profiles to share their social media handles or other personal information in ENS using its native .eth domain or on a .xyz domain.

 

.xyz has continued to find ways to collaborate with ENS and work with the crypto community. It announced this week that it launched its “eth.xyz” service, allowing users to search individual ENS profiles simply by adding “.xyz” to the end of their .eth name rather than having to go to the ENS database to look them up, Negari said.