If you’re reading this, you may be familiar with the barriers to adoption cryptocurrency has experienced since eeking its way into mainstream news. For a developer, blockchain is very exciting right now. For your average global citizen, it’s complicated, bulky and easy to lose one’s tokens, forever.

With the introduction of domain names, these open networks can begin to elevate the user experience while simultaneously lowering the barrier to entry by allowing users to send funds to human-readable addresses instead of the long 34 character NEO address or 42 character Ethereum address. This domain name function can also reduce the probability a user makes a mistake and sends funds to the wrong address.

Before we look into .neo domains, below are a few articles I wrote covering .eth Ethereum Name Service (ENS) as it launched last year:

Trending Cryptocurrency Hub Articles:

Neo Name Service — How Do We Obtain A .neo Domain?

The above image is take directly from the Neo Name Service website about what NNS domains are intended to be used for. The domain auction will be live starting October 9th at 10:00AM (GMT+8) and will have a promotion where users are aidropped 50–70 NNC for each 1 GAS spent on .neo domains — their way of kick-starting the ecosystem.

NNS domains can only be purchased with GAS in the first auction. Once a user owns the domain name, they can only be purchased/sold for in NNC, the Neo Name Service token.

This is a bit of a twist when comparing to the Ethereum Name Service domain launch which was only able to be purchased in ETH and, to my knowledge, can only be purchased using ETH in the secondary markets.

NNS is run by NewEconoLabs (NEL) which is the China-based NEO developer community. City of Zion, to my knowledge, is the English-speaking NEO developer community and are also undertaking some interesting projects within the NEO ecosystem.

If you would like to learn about the specifics of the NNS domain name auction, I urge you to read their announcement thoroughly which can be found here.

In short, here are the auction details:

Why Might This Be Important?

In previous posts I have written about the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) launch, I was lucky enough to screenshot some of the statistics of what type of activity went on in the Ethereum network’s domain launch. Here are some of those screenshots:

ENSListing.com: An Intro to Where to Sell Ethereum Domains — June 18th, 2017

I know this data is just a tiny snapshot of the activity, but look at the amount of volume that went into these Ethereum domains. As somebody who participated in the ENS domain auction, I would assume something similar will happen to the NNS .neo domain auction.

The big difference here is that the ENS domain auction did not airdrop us tokens just for participating. Should be interesting to see where this goes.

In Closing, Ask Questions!

I am not writing this to ‘shill’ a project by any means and hold a whopping 50 NNC — I do plan to grab a few domains in the auction so I will likely get a few more, but have no vested interests otherwise. I’ve written this because it’s an important component to lowering the barrier to adoption and it is my goal to inform the community through my content.

The more we know, the stronger we become as a community. If you found this helpful, please share with your network. If you have questions, please ask in a comment below.

Otherwise, below is another infographic from the Neo Name Service website and enjoy your weekend!