Recently, the web3 domain race has been very hot, with various suffixes emerging endlessly. Decentralized domains are the most important track for the future of web3, compared to traditional domains that can only be used for building websites. The use cases for web3 domains are much more diverse, so what are some of these applications?
Currently, the most common use case for web3 domains is for transfers, but these demands are not very strong. The second largest scenario is resolving IPNS on IPFS, allowing you to directly access decentralized front-end pages built on IPFS like uniswap.eth/vitalik.eth on IPFS-supported browsers such as Brave.
The greatest imagination lies in the future use of web3 as an ID. In the crypto community, widely used examples include @viamirror for forwarding, the decentralized blog @PlanetableXYZ built on IPFS+ENS, the decentralized video streaming application @huddle01com using the IPFS protocol, the decentralized comment plugin @0x_ECHO built on Arweave, and the upcoming decentralized gateway Dappnet, all with numerous use cases for decentralized domains as IDs.
If web3 social media explodes in the future, the entire track of decentralized domains will undoubtedly be the first to benefit directly. In the web2 era, not everyone needed a .com domain to build a website, but in the web3 era, everyone needs a domain as an ID. Most people will not want to engage in social interactions with a long string of dozens of characters as an address, representing a huge demand from a potential 1 billion users.
Of course, the ultimate victory will come after achieving the goals of web3 domains, bringing huge traffic that forces mainstream browsers to yield to the traffic of web3 domains and start supporting IP mapping resolution for web3 domains, bypassing the centralized hierarchical resolution of root domain servers managed by ICANN. This opportunity could lead to the decentralization of the DNS protocol, realizing the vision originally proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto for BitDNS.