Clarifications on Recent Dispute: Fundamental Concepts and Key Designs of DAS

General Chat
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Recently, there is a dispute in the ENS community about whether the range of available character sets is a flaw or a feature. Some ‘KOLs’ have blindly pointed the finger at the DAS team for attacking ENS. We must state sternly:

If there is any evidence to prove that those articles were written or instigated by DAS team, DAS team will offer 100,000 USDT to reward the evidence providers. DAS has its own vision and roadmap, we never proactively attack any other products.

This has also led to attacks and questions about DAS. In my opinion, these doubts basically stem from the misunderstanding of the fundamental concepts of DAS. Therefore, I think it is better to explain some of the concepts and key designs of DAS, so that we can understand DAS better and reduce the misleading effects of the ‘KOLs’ on ordinary users.

Concept 1: Web3.0 is not just blockchain, and blockchain includes more than just EVM compatible chains.

With this in mind, one of the key designs of DAS is that DAS is oriented towards Web3.0 as a whole.

It means that you can register, manage, and use a DAS account with different addresses of any public chains [1]. You can transfer a DAS account from a BTC address to an ETH address, from an ETH address to a TRON address, and then to a Doge address. In fact, DAS works with any asymmetric cryptographic public-private key systems, not just blockchains. This “cross-chain” feature is different from the usual sense of the word. However, it is more secure than the usual sense of “cross-chain”, a cryptographic level of security without trust.

Nowadays, these decentralized domain systems in blockchain are not specifically designed for whole Web 3.0. Each public chain’s domain system operates independently and does not share a unified namespace. These domain systems can only be applied to a specific public chain and are not universally applicable. This is very much like the Web 2.0 landscape, where each service has an account system and they are fragmented from each other. Your Facebook username is alice, but on Twitter alice is probably owned by someone else. I think it is difficult and unnecessary to accept a Web 3.0 that is as fragmented as Web 2.0.

Therefore, DAS can be regarded as a generic account layer for the whole Web 3.0.

For those interested in the technical principles of “cross-chain” in DAS, please refer to:

Why assets on CKB can be managed by BTC address?

Concept 2: When it comes to security, you can’t be too careful

To make DAS the entire Web 3.0 universal account layer, which is ultimately for human use, it was a necessary guideline to improve the ease of identification of DAS accounts and reduce the occurrence of frauds. For this point, DAS introduces a key design: there are strict restrictions on the characters that can be used to register a DAS account.

Specifically:

  1. Currently, only lowercase letters, numbers, and a small number of emojis are allowed to register as DAS accounts (it does not mean that DAS will not support characters in other languages; in fact, multilingual support has always been important on the DAS to-do list)

  2. Characters from a certain language can not be mixed with characters from other languages.

For more details: Charsets

Why is fraud prevention so important to DAS that it has been built into the underlying design of DAS from the beginning?

Because fraud is more likely to occur in Web 3.0, and they are more instant and more damaging than the phishing of Web 2.0. In Web 2.0, a user who visits a wrong website needs to go through some steps before the loss of information or property. But in Web 3.0 if a user can not tell the difference between satоshi.bit and satoshi.bit, he will transfer assets to the wrong person and access the wrong contract.

Can ordinary users tell the difference between satоshi.bit and satoshi.bit with the naked eyes? Obviously not, even if you look closely you can’t figure out the difference. However，in fact, the ‘о’ in the former is a Russian character, while the ‘o’ in the latter is an English character, which are two completely different account names. Without any restrictions, it would be simply too easy for someone with ulterior motives to commit fraud. But don’t worry, this kind of fraud doesn’t happen in DAS. In the DAS system, the former is not a legitimate DAS account and will not be registered successfully.

So why not just follow the IDN? The reason is simple, because DAS is not a domain name at all (we will talk about this later) and the available character specification for domain names does not apply to DAS. Here is a tweet from a community developer. https://twitter.com/paicha0530/status/1479453336038699016

（Do not apply the obsolete IDN to Web3.0. DAS is an account system instead of a domain system. If you have to find a reference standard, it’s better to use the registration limits of Twitter, Facebook, Email and other products to compare.）

DAS does not discriminate against characters in any languages. DAS is concerned with minimizing frauds and ensuring the reliability of the system. Setting up a whitelist of available characters and continuously expanding the whitelist is a comprehensive solution, which is in line with the principle of privilege minimization in the field of security.

In addition, still for security reasons, DAS’ on-chain contracts have been implementing 3/5 multi-signature since the first day.

Concept 3：Fairness is crucial, but there is no absolute outcome fairness; we should try our best to pursue process fairness.

Being the infrastructure in Web3.0, DAS accounts enjoy economic characteristics of non-exclusivity and competitiveness. Therefore, they are typical public resources, which makes fairness in their distribution a very important issue. But we should also be clear that there is no absolute outcome fairness. All we can do is to pursue process fairness, and we have taken many measures to this end.

1.Disseminate information on DAS’s launch

About a month before the official launch of DAS, we had started to announce the official launch time through media, social networks, and communities. We introduced our product as well as the public beta environment. We also joined forces with our wallet partners to introduce DAS in their channels in advance.

2. Leave no advantages for DAS development team

The biggest advantage we have as DAS development team is information: we know exactly when DAS is going to launch if the main network contract has been deployed, where it is deployed, etc. Yet to ensure a fair launch, we must give up that advantage. We promise that DAS development team cannot register meaningful DAS accounts earlier than any other users. We set a switch inside the contract to initiate registration. The switch stayed off ever after the team had made sure the mainnet contract functioned well. It will not be turned on until the agreed official time for registration (2021-07-22 20:00 UTC+8). Therefore, nobody can register DAS account before the official registration time.

In fact, this is not just a verbal promise, but an established fact. The blockchain is open and transparent, allowing anyone to verify that no meaningful DAS account was registered by the development team before 2021-07-22 20:00 (UTC+8) by tracking down the on-chain transactions. For a precise understanding of " meaningful DAS account ", please refer toWritten before the launch of DAS

3. Open up accounts for registration phase by phase

We started spreading the information on DAS’s launch a long time ago, but it’s clearly not enough. It takes more time for more people to know about DAS even after DAS’s launch. It is unwise and unfair to open up all accounts for registration at one time when DAS is not influential enough. Therefore, we decided to gradually open up DAS accounts so that those who learned about DAS later would still have a chance to compete, while those who learned about DAS earlier would not lose the opportunity to compete either. This is our value proposition. The latest progress of accounts opened up for registration can be seen at Open Registration Rules - DAS Documents.

The time when an account is available for registration depends on the value of the account, deciding by the calculation of a publicly available algorithm. You can search for an account on the registration page to see if the account is open for registration. Given the current registration rule, you may find that your preferred account is always not open for registration, which can be very annoying. We hope you will understand the original intent of this rule.

We have received the following feedback from some users: why is the registration rule so harsh, or that the development team doesn’t open up all accounts because they want to keep all the valuable accounts to themselves! Such feedback arises from the conflict between individual interest and collective interest. Everyone wants to get a quality account, but each account will ultimately belong to only one person, and there is no way to make everyone happy. In response, we need to make our position clear:

  1. As the builder and maintainer of DAS, the DAS development team’s priority is always the overall interest of the DAS ecosystem. We advocate process fairness when it comes to account registration.

  2. The accounts that are not yet open up for registration do not belong to anyone in the DAS team , and will be open up for registration for users in due course.

So when is the due course of time? This is a repeatedly discussed question. The indicator that we refer to in answering this question will most likely be the number of unique addresses—with accounts opened up gradually for registration according to the growth in the number of unique addresses, but the details have yet to be determined. If the community has better suggestions, feel free to bring them up.

Concept 4: Prioritize the general interest to individual interests.

“.bit” is the one and only suffix for DAS, and no other suffixes will be issued in the future. We believe that this is in the overall interest of the public. Issuing multiple suffixes would undoubtedly increase the number of registrations and generate revenue for DAS, but it would also cause confusion in the Web 3.0 world. That’s why DAS chooses not to do that.

DAS has set up a list of reserved accounts. A reserved account is an account reserved for a well-known organization/individual. They need to claim it within a specified period of time, otherwise it will be open up for public registration. It needs to be pointed out that these reserved accounts do not belong to anyone of the DAS team.

Why is there a list of reserved accounts? Or you may ask why should accounts be reserved for certain organizations/people? Why can’t I register twitter.bit? The answer simply lies in our value proposal: we believe that the overall interests of DAS users outweigh the interests of individual DAS users. (Obviously we didn’t set up a list of reserved accounts because other domain systems like ENS have done so.) By making it easier for some well-known organizations/individuals to own DAS accounts, we not only deprive speculators of the opportunity to snatch well-known accounts and then sell them at high prices, but also expand the DAS consensus.

Here is a little bit more about reserved accounts. Reserved accounts are reserved for a tentative period of one year at present. Whom should the accounts be reserved to is a contentious issue. To play an impartial role in solving this issue, DAS team has decided to adopt two methods: cite third-party data and open application for the public. Third-party data sources include bitclout, similarweb and block123. And the public can apply for reserved accounts by submitting PR on github. The whole process is transparent and easily verifiable.

Concept 5: Open Source.

All code of DAS must be open source.

Concept 6: DAS is an account instead of a domain.

The name of a product often reflects its product positioning. xxNS means they position their products as decentralized domain name systems. The A in DAS, on the other hand, stands for “Account,” which is fundamentally different from DNS and other decentralized domain name systems.

With different product positioning come different priorities. It’s not DAS’s goal to replace or enhance the existing DNS system. Using “.bit” to access a web page on IPFS/Arwave is only one of the many scenarios to use DAS.

With DAS, Jike (a social media app) ‘s NFT Box can display users’ NFTs according to user names; with DAS, users can have a decentralized Linktree; with DAS, users can use the same username across games/apps on different blockchains; with DAS, users can communicate with each other with end-to-end encryption; with DAS, users can transfer digital assets and interact with contracts more securely; with DAS, users can integrate their on-chain reputation across public chains, etc. These are the aspects that DAS focuses on. And these are scenarios that don’t involve domain names at all.

Why is DAS considered to be a domain? Probably because it has a suffix. All internet domains have a suffix, but having a suffix doesn’t necessarily make something a domain. “.exe,” “.rar,” and " .dmg" are all suffixes, but they are just file extensions that indicate file types.

Last but not least

The answers to some basic questions, such as whether the contract is open source, whether it is centralized, and whether the contract is multi-signed, are on Github repository and the blockchain. It’s not important what DAS team says because you can always go verify.

[1]DAS is able to support all public chains, but it takes time to cooperate with each and every public chain. DAS currently supports registration with EVM compatible chains addresses and TRON addresses, etc. Stay tuned for other public chains.

Thanks for reading.