Blockchain.com will allow people to use human-readable usernames in blockchain transactions thanks to a partnership with Unstoppable Domains.

San Francisco-based Blockchain.com now supports Unstoppable Domains, a provider of domain names for blockchains, which are the secure and transparent digital ledgers behind cryptocurrencies. That’s a big deal because Blockchain.com is the largest crypto wallet provider in the world, and people have been tripping over scrambled names that are impossible to remember.

When people lose these names for their wallets or the accompanying passwords, they are often unable to recover their assets. This particular deal won’t help you with your passwords, but it will help you with usernames. And that helps people send money to each other more easily and with fewer errors.

A Wide Reach

Blockchain.com has 32 million verified users in 200 countries, and they can now send crypto to simple, human-readable usernames instead of full wallet addresses.

Through this integration, Unstoppable Domains and Blockchain.com hope to make cryptocurrencies more attractive by reducing the risk of human error when sending funds, dramatically simplifying transactions between Blockchain.com users and more than 50 supported wallets and exchanges. by Unstoppable Domains.

Traditionally, sending Bitcoin, Ethereum, Doge, and other cryptocurrencies requires entering the recipient’s 25- to 42-digit alphanumeric wallet address, said Matthew Gould, CEO of Unstoppable Domains, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Mistypes or copies a wallet address, those funds can be lost forever. That’s scary, and I remember him stopping me from sending someone a payment that way.

“If you have a typo in a blockchain transaction, the money is gone forever,” Gould said. “It’s emotionally scary, which is not good because your first experience as a consumer is fear the first time you send crypto. And I don’t know if you’ve ever sent a payment in Bitcoin or anything else, but you’re going to be nervous about it. This is a bad emotional experience.”

It’s also just bad user experience design, Gould said.

“If you get a group of 10 crypto people in a room and ask them about barriers to adoption, better cryptocurrency UX will be one of the top three things they will mention,” he said.

The simple analogy here is your Internet Protocol (IP) address. For normal Internet, it is much easier to remember google.com than it is to remember the IP address of the company. It is much easier to remember your name than your hexadecimal address for cryptocurrencies.

“The funny thing is that this is a case of history repeating itself because we did the exact same thing with computer networks in the ’90s, where the first way to look up websites was actually using IP addresses,” Gould said. “You actually had to remember long strings of numbers to find the first content on the internet. And then they invented a naming service so you could use .com names. It’s very similar.” (See more: How To Mine Bitcoin)

Solving the Problem

Unstoppable Domains solves this by introducing human-readable .crypto usernames compatible with over 50 wallets and exchanges, including Blockchain.com. Now, instead of “156i6HJfMWb1h2BEsKpfvZ2tQugqo4vs2w”, users can simply type “[Your name].crypto” to send money to others or transfer money between accounts.

Gould said the solution is similar to payment systems like Venmo, which make it easy to send money to a friend because you can simply open an app and tap the person’s face to send them money.

And by reducing the emotional fear and friction around sending money to an unknown address, Unstoppable Domains can make crypto more accessible to mainstream users. It gives you the freedom to send money to whomever you want.

Gould said it’s hard to believe it’s taking a while to resolve the issue.

“It’s crazy for me,” he said. “You have a trillion-dollar asset class. And people are sending it to these really long bank account numbers. And visually, it’s kind of ridiculous that people are doing it. And I think that just shows how early we are. It’s really big, but the technology is still very raw. And these things are important. We need to make this easier for normal people, and we need to make it so that you can feel comfortable sending these transactions without that fear, or else adoption will be slow.”

Amadeo Pellicce, product manager of Blockchain.com, said that the company has worked hard to make cryptocurrencies more user-friendly in order to build a new financial system for the internet. The first step here is to make it easy to send crypto to friends and family using usernames that look more familiar. This dramatically reduces the chance of errors without compromising user safety. Making crypto payments as easy as sending an email helps pave the way for broader adoption of cryptocurrencies, Pellicce said.

A Huge Opportunity

Unstoppable Domains has registered over a million domain names, each minted as a non-fungible token (NFT) on the Ethereum blockchain. In addition to sending and receiving funds, these NFT domains are used to create decentralized websites for posting content and accessing Web3. Blockchain domains have already become the standard for crypto wallets, and interoperability is at the forefront of Unstoppable Domains’ mission.

Blockchain.com recently raised $300 million at a post-money valuation of $5.2 billion, led by partners at DST Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and VY Capital. Since 2012, 76 million wallets have made $800 billion in transactions using Blockchain.com. To date, Blockchain.com has raised $490 million to date.

Launched in 2018, Unstoppable Domains is a blockchain domain name provider and gateway to the decentralized web. Unstoppable Domains allows anyone to purchase a decentralized domain name that is minted as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, giving the owner full ownership and control. Domain names can be used for payments in more than 50 wallets and exchanges. The company is backed by Draper Associates and Boost VC and is supported by grants from the Ethereum Foundation and the Zilliqa Foundation.

Privacy challenges

There are future issues to address, such as ensuring that transactions on the blockchain can remain private. As it stands now, many people can see the transactions on the blockchain, although the details of the transaction are often unclear. Over time, this will be resolved as people figure out how to properly set up payments, Gould said.

“Privacy technology is a few years behind the rest of blockchain technology,” Gould said. “In fact, we have worked with a couple of teams to demonstrate sending cryptocurrency to a blockchain domain name and doing it privately. So it is technically feasible. And I think it is. But it’s not a core product for us right now.”