SpaceID — A universal name service network that connects people, information, and assets across all blockchains and apps.
BTS Labs held an AMA with Light on September 8th. The theme of this AMA is “SpaceID — A universal name service network that connects people, information, and assets across all blockchains and apps.”. The guest we had were Solo, the growth lead of Space ID. He introduced that the basis of domain and the features of Space ID.
Q1:
BTS Labs: Why did your team decide to build SPACE ID?
Solo(Growth Lead): There is no secret to the fact that social interactions have been the root cause of the latest internet boom. People want identity interactions, they want to be recognized: display their names in leaderboards, chat windows, wallet holdings, NFT listings, etc. They want to interact with people, and not addresses, to become a brand themselves.
Today, you indeed have multiple identities and multiple usernames across many different applications and blockchains. You have your legal name, email address, Twitter handle, a BNB Chain and Solana address, etc.
To make this all work efficiently though, we need a universal identifier, working across all chains. The future is multi-chain so make sure your identity is as well.
We all know ENS is a great product. They moved the DNS model to web3 and replaced complex addresses with simple and memorable domain names, accumulating a lot of users on the Ethereum chain. But we think the domain name of web3 can do much more than just replace the address with a name.
It can be bound to the addresses of different chains, the identities of users in different projects, and the information on and off the chain. This domain name is everyone’s web3 passport, it can not only represent you but also be the connector between you and the web3 world.
Q2:
BTS Labs: What is domain name？
Solo(Growth Lead): The role of a name service is to map a human-readable name like allen.bnb to a machine-readable identifier such as a BNB address with its 24 characters composed of numerical digits and letters. Using a complex address like this is not meant for human interaction, it’s just how it was designed for better randomness and hashing, we are still using it to this day because we are just rolling out solutions like name services.
You can make the parallel with website domain names, where the readable name would be something like Google.com, which replaces its machine-readable IP to access the same site. Can you imagine if websites all worked using IP addresses and you would have to copy-paste those from a registry all the time like you are currently doing when interacting other wallets when interacting with them? It’s important to assign an easily recognizable identifier to represent your identity. Or can you imagine if on Twitter or Facebook there were no names, only 24 characters addresses? Or think about all the web2 gaming platforms you currently use, is your friends list on Steam or Blizzard composed of gibberish characters, or is it a list of recognizable identifiers? Now, why would it be different in Web3? Why wouldn’t you have a friends list that is recognizable and not just addresses.
Think of all the places where you see or interact with addresses in web3, and imagine replacing all those with recognizable names:
When you look at a play-to-earn game or even a ‘traders of the week’ leaderboard, when you walk around in the Metaverse, when you interact in chat boxes, when you search around on BSCscan, when you look through holder’s NFT collections, and most importantly when you send funds via wallets.
Some of the Dapps develop their own internal naming system, because a native solution is still to come. Having a certain name just for this one application is different than having the same identity across all apps.
Imagine how everything would be more enjoyable and easy if you did not have to interact with addresses anymore, but with actual identities, a web3 ‘Gamertag’ if you will, but to represent everything that you are and everything that you own.
Q3:
BTS Labs: Why own a .bnb SPACE ID domain?
Solo(Growth Lead): One thing Ethereum did not have when launching its name service, is the strong sense of community that the BNB chain already has. GameFi (40% of users game on BNB chain) and other use-to-earn platforms were not nearly as adopted as how it currently is on BNB chain, and these types of ventures are known to spark much more community engagement.
Paired with the fact that Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, is heavily supporting projects on the BNB chain, making sure they all flourish via viable partnerships is a recipe for success.
With BNB chain pushing for having a name service on their ecosystem + having a tightly knit community wanting for this ecosystem to succeed, without the fog of competing layer2s, makes it pretty obvious that a name service adoption is inevitable and will spread like wildfire.
With SPACE ID being the first recognized .bnb domain name service, in conjunction with the fact that the adoption of a name service on Binance chain is inevitable, securing a domain name that speaks to yourself just makes sense, a no-brainer.
Maybe you would not care about having steve123@gmail.com for your email, and even then, but when a name represents your whole web3 identity: Games, NFTs, Metaverse, web3 social networks, use-to-earn, asset portfolios, then locking in a good name might be a different story. Maybe this time you’ll prefer owning steve.bnb and not steve123.bnb, or you’ll want to make sure to own one of the finite combinations of a 3-letter domain name, hence the value of the pre-registration of a SPACE ID .bnb domain.
We also have to remember that the number of daily active addresses on BNB is more than 2–3–4x that of other chains, including Ethereum. Also when charting name registrations, it’s a line that can only go up, once minted, a domain name cannot just disappear.
As current users are finally convinced to jump on board because of the adoption of Dapps and wallets all around them, or when new users will be onboarded from scratch into web3, more and more domain names will be minted.
Q4:
BTS Labs: What is the Universal domain name that you will launch after the .bnb domain?
Solo(Growth Lead): .bnb is just the first step in SPACE ID, our long-term plan is the following two things:
First, what we want to do is a universal web3 domain name, our colon domain name, which will support the resolution of all chain addresses. You can bind the address of the eth chain, the address of the bsc chain, the address of the solana chain, etc. under this domain name, you dont need to have a domain name in each chain but use a common domain name to represent yourself. A simple example is that you only need to use this domain name and the corresponding chain when transferring money.
The day a single-blockchain user wishes to secure the same identity on different blockchains where that name is already taken, they will lose on their personal brand. With SPACE ID, this will never be a problem as you will have a unique identity to all chains.
Imagine if you can send crypto through any blockchain of your choice to a friend with a single identifier.
Right now when i want to send crypto to a someone, I need to double or even triple check:
1. if I am on the right chain
2. if i pasted the correct address
3. if he gave me the correct address on the right chain.
Our Universal Domain can solve all these issues. On space id, Allen’s username, :Allen, can be linked with his identity across multiple blockchains, so you can forget about all of those complex addresses and only need to ever interact with :Allen.
Second, SPACE ID will be a basic service for domain names to help project parties publish their own TLDs. First example, everyone knows BAYC, we can find out which address is the holder of BAYC712 through the data on the chain. If BAYC:712 itself is an interactive domain name, many things will become easier. Other users can directly interact with BAYC:712 without checking the address. The BAYC project developer can airdrop to BAYC:712 without snapshot to collection addresses.
The second, for some project parties, such as galaxy and opensea, they all have their own user profile pages similar to the user pages of different web2 products, where users can set usernames, bind emails and twitter. If all of them have access to SPACE ID, then we can provide a complete account system, such as gal:allen, allen is your username in galaxy, gal: allen is also an asset you hold, an interactive representative of your own username. We can connect all your information between these products, you don’t need to bind your Twitter, email, discord, etc. information over and over again.
It also means you get to choose which username you want for your interactions. Yes you can use your universal :allen name, but you could also use allen.bnb to receive funds on Solana, or even CAKE:allen if one day PancakeSwap decides to issue their own SPACE ID subdomains. We are opening the door for the BNB chain ecosystem to be visible in other chains, this is huge.
Q5:
BTS Labs: What is the relationship between SPACE ID and other domain name services (such as ENS) and what are the differences
Solo(Growth Lead): Although we are both domain name services like ENS and bonfida, I don’t think we are competitors. The .eth of ENS is very cool, it represents the belief in Ethereum, and it is also has a huge consensus, but the future web3 must be a multi-chain ecosystem, what we need is a more general domain name.
So we think: it is a more special and more general brand, which is also different from the world of web2. On the other hand, we also agree that everyone will have various identities in web3, so we will have a set of TLD infrastructure to allow users to have their own unique name in each project, and this name is also your asset . In our ecosystem, allen.eth=eth:allen, eth: will exist as a project party and a TLD in our ecology.
As for the adoption of SPACE ID on Ethereum, a multi-chain future means BNB chain users will get to dabble into the Ethereum ecosystem more and more. Those users will already have SPACE ID domains. It only makes sense that protocols and Dapps will want to capture new users and want to ensure they can use their app fully and have their domain name represented, they will want to capitalize on this new inflow.
As for the BNB chain, since SPACE ID already resolves ENS and other name services, there is no more work to do. Meaning capturing other blockchain users will be easier, and Ethereum will have to compete with this。
Free questions
Q1:
BTS Labs Community: Where will we see web3 domain addresses used in the future? Can the usage areas be expanded? Is there any work done for integration? And I think most importantly, what are the precautions taken for security?
Solo(Growth Lead): It will be very interesting to see how Dapps will expand the use of domain names. As of right now it’s pretty rare that you see wallet addresses being listed. You see it a lot on marketplaces, who is holding, selling, buying NFTs. Sometimes on a GameFi platform you will see a leaderboard of players where it whos their address. All this will be replaces by the user’s domain name, and because this will be now possible, Dapps will develop much more features around this. Chat boards, more leaderboards, discussion forums, user profile pages, etc.
Security is obviously very important and we implemented enhancements from what ENS did, for example you cannot register names with hidden characters, which led to scamming on ENS. This is not possible with SPACE ID domains.
Q2:
BTS Labs Community: anyway i coudnt register with my unique space id names due to the lack of bnb.so what will be ther other method that i can early register with my unique name before private sale or from secondary nft domain buying??
Solo(Growth Lead): You will have to wait for our public launch on September 13th to register your domains. You can also try in our staging launch from September 7 to 11, but there will only be 300 domains per day registered in that period so we can test our new contact so it will be difficult to have a spot.
Q3:
BTS Labs Community: I may be your future investor, and my question is simple: How might early investors got benefit ? Is there any kind of advantage?
Solo(Growth Lead): The first benefit top an early adopter is getting a good domain name not taken yet, so you can resell it for higher in the future once most of these good names are all registered already. We also plan to run campaigns for early adopters, but I cannot disclose any more information on this at the moment.
Q4:
BTS Labs Community: I just got to know .BNB and I know I’m too late. Is there any chance of changing the name you want in the future? It’s available on Marketplace, but it’s not a pretty name.
Solo(Growth Lead): You can register new .bnb names at public launch, you can buy as many domains as you want and change your primary domain without restrictions so no problem with that!
Q5:
BTS Labs Community: Will your roadmap be similar to a strong structure like Ens? Or are you aiming to do different things in this field? In my personal opinion, it seemed like the biggest move after Ens, but I am unaware of where the subject will go, can you give some hints about what you want to do to improve in this field?
Solo(Growth Lead): Our current product is similar to ENS, but once we release our second product, the universal domain name, it will add a lot more over ENS. Especially the ability to initiate transactions on other chains than BNB with your domain name. As mentionned earlier, this brings enormous value.
🔗Website: http://www.bts.global
🔗Twitter: https://twitter.com/btslabs_global
🔗Twitter: https://twitter.com/BTS_Ventures
