West.bit’s introduction
Good evening everyone! Welcome to our sharing session with .bit community. I’m an old friend, west.bit, and I’m excited that you are all here for our live chat.
Tonight, we have invited Tim, Founder of .bit, to share with you some latest ideas.
In the first session, Tim will share some interesting updates about .bit community, and what we might do next, including the Web3.0 industry, our progress and plans. This is also the first time this year we have Tim interacting with our community members.
In the second session, we’ll pass the mic to you guys to ask questions. In addition, we will try to keep the whole session within 1 hour, so we will not take up too much of your time.
p.s. There will be an OAT for participants of tonight’s Name DAO meeting. And we have a special incentive for all members that participated in this event, you will receive an airdrop, an exclusive sub-account. So, everyone, please make sure you fill out the appropriate form on the OAT (https://galaxy.eco/dotbit/campaign/GC9UvUtFYm/).
Okay, now we have Tim.
Tim’s Opening
Okay, thanks west.bit.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a conversation about our .bit product, and I think the last time we talked about it was last year. We started preparing in Jan 2021 and launched the product in July last year, it’s almost one year now.
I will first briefly talk about the progress we have made in the past, and then discuss what we want to do in the future. Then we will mainly discuss with the community one very important topic, and present our ideas.
Finally, we will have a freestyle Q&A session where you can ask any questions you may have, and we will do our best to answer any questions.
Review last year
Recently, the number of registered accounts for .bit has exceeded 100,000, which may not sound like a particularly impressive achievement compared to the ENS that we all know about. However, I think the biggest progress we have made in the past year is our achievement in the level of integration in our .bit ecosystem.
Today, if you look at the integrations in our ecosystem, all mainstream wallets and mainstream DApps have integrated .bit, which I think is one of our most important achievements in the past year.
Some may say, the integrations of the .bit ecosystem seem to be more Asian, and have only a few European and American partners. Well, we don’t need to worry about this. In the coming days, you will gradually read announcements about our integrations with well-known overseas DApps, and please feel free to follow our Twitter (https://twitter.com/dotbitHQ ) for more updates to come.
Also, we have completed the development of some very important features, such as sub-accounts, cross-chain to Ethereum to become ERC721 NFT, and .bit alias, and so on.
Sub-account
The sub-account feature has been discussed for a long time, and we are all looking forward to the time when it finally launches.
We are almost ready for the feature of the sub-account. We’ve finished testing, and we are fully ready for the underlying contract-level capabilities. The key point here is that it is very difficult for users to deal with the contract directly. We must provide a tool for users to manage those sub-accounts, and a UI interface so that we can provide convenience for users. And that’s exactly what we are currently working on, a tool and UI interface.
Previously, we saw a tool like SuperDID. After testing, we feel the tool itself has some problems to be solved.
So, we expect that by the end of July or early August, our .bit sub-account will be open for everyone to use, and this is one of the most important features that we are developing.
First of all, there are many application scenarios for sub-accounts. For instance, we often mention the concept of “a member of DAO”, but what exactly qualifies, or what makes someone a member of a certain DAO?
There are several solutions available on the market today.
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If you are in my community as a member, you are a member of my DAO.
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This DAO issues ERC20 tokens, and whoever has tokens will naturally become a member of this DAO.
However, not all DAOs will issue tokens, at least not from the beginning. The other problem with issuing tokens is that it makes the right to vote tradable, and it’ll create a series of very complicated problems, such as corruption, and other issues triggered by the financialization of voting rights and governance rights.
- If I own your NFT, I am a member of your DAO.
However, NFTs are often limited in number. Meanwhile, NFTs themselves are also tradable tokens, and in reality, people speculate in NFTs.
Therefore, a feature like a sub-account will ease the problem, as it’ll give an organization, not necessarily a DAO organization, even a centralized organization, a practical identity management system (IMS).
For example, how can we be regarded as members of Assange DAO? If I donated money to Assange DAO, I would have the right to mint his sub-account. When I have this sub-account, first of all, the name itself is available to use. Secondly, all the functions of the sub-account are intrinsically the same as the parent account, you can use the sub-account wherever you can use the parent account.
So, the sub-account name is useful in the first place. After you get this sub-account, you use it as a nickname, and you can directly demonstrate that you are a member of this DAO. Furthermore, you are actively promoting this DAO. This is a win-win.
And we can take celebrities as another example. We all know Jay Chou, Edison Chen, Shawn Yue have issued NFTs, but their NFTs invariably fell below the issue prices. Why?
Because people will, sooner or later, realize their NFTs have no practical value, they are just pictures at the end of the day. If their stories fail to entice, their NFTs are useless, and people are not stupid when they are required to pay.
So, let’s switch perspectives to re-think it. If someone like Jay Zhou, not necessarily Jay himself actually, could be the administrator of Jay’s Fan Community, or simply a promoter of Jay’s online fan group, he says, “Look, we now own Jay.bit, and we’ll allocate some sub-accounts of Jay.bit to you, so that in the future, whoever attends Jay’s musical concerts, or meets other fellows in offline meetings or parties, your sub-account will be your ticket, your pass.”
It sounds just right. This is a very practical scenario where sub-accounts can be popular among users.
Just imagine, as a fan of Jay Chou, if I had a web3 name that contained both my name and the name of my idol, Jay Zhou, I would be more than willing to use it. Because, this name/ID instantly makes me unique among my friends, and it allows me to stand out among Jay’s fans. This is my “social currency”.
Then, why would Jay or the Head of Jay’s fan club be willing to issue such sub-accounts?
It is important to note that sub-accounts are priced solely by the parent account. I believe that if you have been to our website, you should know that the sub-account is priced by the parent account, and the majority of the income of the sub-account also belongs to the parent account.
Therefore, for these superstars, IPs, brands, and their sub-account are regarded as a kind of accessory of their IP, a kind of “electronic accessories” that brings in annual income. As a parent account, he can decide the specific price of payment to use its sub-account.
If your IP is very popular, then perhaps you can charge $10,000 per year from the users, and if you just started to build your IP, maybe just a hobby group, then you may want to charge $1 a year. So for these scenarios, sub-accounts are also very useful.
In fact, in essence, sub-accounts are created for these existing groups with a common interest, no matter whether it is a DAO organization or a star’s fan group, they are all “a group of people with a common interest”. And we, .bit team, empower them and provide them with appropriate tools to solve their problems.
The aforementioned are some scenarios where sub-accounts can be applied in real life, which is why we have spent a lot of effort on sub-accounts.
Then, what exactly are we working on?
We are primarily working on how we can lower the cost of using sub-accounts.
You may have noticed that ENS has sub-domains recently, and no, we ARE NOT sub-domains. We have made it crystal clear from day one on our official website, ".bit is not a domain name, .bit is an account, it is your Web3.0 ID ". So, we call it a sub-account.
We focus our effort on reducing the cost of using sub-accounts. For example, if you are a parent account owner, you may want to ask, how much does it cost to create a sub-account? Our answer is 1 ckb. This is purely for avoiding dusting attacks.
And when you own this sub-account, you can also go in and add unlimited amounts of data, your address, etc, with no need to pay extra.
If we want more users to use our ID product (yes we do), we need to put ourselves in their shoes. In reality, users of this kind of identity product will consider the cost. So in this sense, .bit sub-accounts have a very solid cost advantage.
This cost advantage applies not only when you register a .bit account for the first time, but also when you use our accounts later on. It costs very little to own a .bit account/sub-account, and when you start using it, there’s no need to pay extra.
And we are also thinking, how can we appear to be not so similar to a domain? Or, how about we be more Web3.0?
You can see from our official website that our sub-accounts have two formats, # Format and Dot Format, and they are essentially the same account. You can see the examples below:
For instance, tim.qq.bit is a Dot Format, and this looks like a domain. But in the future of sub-account, we will mainly promote the format of #, in this case, qq#tim.bit.
Why?
If we look closely, every issued NFT has its unique number, its ID. You have seen numbers like punk#1988, and punk#1688 in OpenSea. And if .bit adopts this similar format with #, what does it mean for all?
For instance, if you own punk#1988, you then will get punk#1988.bit, that means your punk ID is your Web3 ID, with a simple .bit as a suffix. Simple as that.
So we believe, the # format is more in line with the mainstream preference of Web3.0 users. And of course, we also support Dot Format ;)
I want to throw these ideas of sub-account to all of you and hope this inspires your imagination, and I’m welcoming anyone to explore this concept and its possible applications with us together. You can also see many examples on our official website (Sub-account ). I truly believe we can create some miracles with the idea of sub-account, and this is a top priority in my mind.
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We have plans for the future, as you can see from our roadmap on our official website (just scroll down to the bottom). I’m attaching a screenshot of our Q2-Q4 priorities here:
The registration and transaction processes of .bit product are already very clear and mature for users. Then, how can we encourage more developers to work with us? How can we drastically reduce the cost for developers to integrate with us? The underlying cost includes a psychological barrier, technical barrier, etc. And we aim to reduce these barriers to provide easy access for more developers to integrate with us and build something wonderful together.
This is what our R&D team is working on.
NameDAO
Next, is a very important idea, something we will do our best to make happen. It is called NameDAO.
Some may think instantly, well they are doing this DAO, and I guess .bit will issue tokens?
We’ve been observing and thinking about DAO, and we believe some public property like .bit, we should let it belong to the community, where it can be directly managed. We’ve noticed that ENS or UniSwap issued “governance tokens” to tackle this problem, but is it the best way to do it? We think this is still worth exploring.
I shall dive directly into the topic of NameDAO. One question, what exactly belongs to a community? Or say, what can be truly owned by the community?
We have a better solution, and that’s NameDAO. 
Then what exactly is NameDAO? For example, people speak different languages, and there are different characters from different languages, like Russian, Japanese, Korean, etc.
And users, like myself, may want to own different .bit accounts across different languages. For instance, if someone speaks Russian and English, and wants to register an English .bit account, then he may also wants to own a Russian .bit account, like любить.bit
We certainly want to encourage people to use different languages on Web3. And there are some rules to be set for this scenario, so we will devise something like “RussianDAO” / “РусскийDAO”.
Then how can someone be a member of RussianDAO?
There may be some simple rules, e.g. you yourself register some Russian .bit accounts, or you invite someone else to register some Russian .bit accounts, then when you meet certain criteria (details to be discussed), you can apply to mint a sub-account of Ru.bit, e.g. RU#001.bit, RU#002.bit. (p.s. RU is the abbr of Russian)
So, simply put, in order to be a member of a certain NameDAO, you will need to meet certain criteria and obey some rules, and these criteria and rules are open for discussion. We are excited to share these questions and possibilities for all of you to ponder.
Perhaps the easiest idea to start with is to invite someone to register Russian .bit accounts, then that qualifies you to mint a Ru.bit sub-account. And when you own a sub-account, you can vote, and you are a member of this DAO.
As we firmly believe in the spirit of DAO, we think, the owners of RussianDAO will get 50% of all the registration fees for .bit accounts using Russian characters. Strictly speaking, the RussianDAO owns 50% of relevant income related to using Russian characters. This applies to account registration, renews, account auctions, or even official secondary market transactions, etc. This is the right owned by this RussianDAO.
This echoes back to our application scenario of sub-accounts. You can use your sub-account, initiate proposals, and vote.
As we have mentioned before, this DAO owns 50% of relevant income, so members can propose doing anything, e.g. promoting Ru.bit, encouraging more Russian-speaking people to own Web3.0 ID, to do anything beneficial to this DAO, this community. Simply put, the better you promote your DAO, the better your income will be.
And this is not only for Russian-speaking individuals, each language character will have one unique NameDAO.
When this DAO starts, perhaps every sub-account owner gets one vote. But as it progresses, this DAO can decide for its own good. For instance, how to allocate the voting rights, how to decide who gets higher weight in voting, and whether some comparatively more valuable contribution can qualify a member to get higher weight in voting power and make him a more powerful member of this DAO. These possibilities are worth exploring.
The right to use 50% of relevant income belongs to this DAO, and .bit has no right to interfere with how to use DAO’s income.
.bit has no right to interfere with how members spend their DAO funds and has no right to manage either. We are only responsible for regularly synchronizing DAO’s income, to extract from the contract address to the multi-signature account of this DAO.
Another idea we can think about is that there should be some initial members for this DAO.
For instance, in order to own a sub-account of Ru.bit, then you should invite 10 Russian account registers to qualify you as a member of the RussianDAO. When the number of DAO members is less than 100 (or a certain number), members cannot vote, considering only a few members somehow disqualify the meaning of voting. Maybe when the number exceeds 100, members can start to vote.
To kick off this NameDAO initiative, our .bit team may consider injecting a certain amount of start-up fund, like $50,000-10,000, as the initial start-up capital to make the DAO up and running.
So, one of the underlying core principles of NameDAO is authorization. We want to authorize the right of governance and management to a group of unofficial team members outside of our .bit core team to run their DAO, in a decentralized autonomous manner.
Some other core principles of the relationship between .bit and NameDAO.
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.bit makes sure 50% of the income will be transferred to the multi-signature account of this NameDAO.
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.bit responds to NameDAO’s demands for products, infrastructure and regulations. For example, this RussianDAO may want to change prices for Russian .bit accounts.
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.bit carries out executions, and NameDAO makes decisions.
And some other ideas around NameDAO.
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Every language will have its own NameDAO.
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No one can restrict a person from joining this DAO, and similarly, no one can restrict you from joining multiple DAOs.
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All of DAO’s income is determined by all members of DAO.
So, these are what we’ve been brainstorming, starting from a small character to endless future possibilities. And we are also exploring how we can better empower communities in our ecosystem, how can we set DAO communities free and running in their own directions.
Welcome to comment and share your thoughts. Thank you.