Renewal Fee Announcement

The Unstoppable Team

Hello Everyone,

Recently we’ve been reflecting as a team on which features are critical for blockchain domain systems to succeed and which features are legacies of the traditional DNS system.

We have decided to eliminate the .zil renewal fee entirely.

Any .zil domains registered so far and any registered going forward will have no renewal fees. It will just be owned by you forever. Any domain extension we create in the future will also not have renewal fees. We are doing this because renewal fees are unnecessary on blockchains, thus they shouldn’t exist. We have already updated the design of our smart contracts.

Why did we have an annual fee in the first place?

We were concerned about what would happen if someone had a website associated with a domain, but lost their private keys. The domain (and possibly the website) would remain live indefinitely and not even its owner could take it down. The subscription fee would have solved this case because the domain would go back to the smart contract when the owner didn’t renew.

Is there another solution to the ownerless website problem?

Yes. The owner could choose to put their domain in a smart contract which requires the domain owner to interact with it at least once per year. This way, if the key is lost, the domain could go back up for sale instead of being lost forever.

What’s the big picture?

Our goal is to make blockchains domains 10x better than traditional domains so that the whole world will want to use them. Eliminating renewal fees so you own your domain forever is one important step in this direction. More to come soon.

Thanks again for your support,

The Unstoppable Team