6-Figure Domains sales, AI world, .com’s still king, ENS, Web3 domains & identity

Kris hey man, welcome to the show.

Thomas Clowes Hello. Hello, hello. Thank you for having

Kris how have you been, man, first of all. how's life in Manchester? Sorry for doxing you.

Thomas Clowes Everyone knows that I live in Manchester, it's fine. yeah, life is good. I'm just trying to think. When you were saying about flawed prepared questions, I was thinking to myself like, You haven't checked that I'm not a deep fake. Like how do you know that you're actually talking to me?

Kris Is it something like this? Like you have to do something like this? I saw that

Thomas Clowes To be honest, I don't know. I've been reading all this stuff about the potential for public key cryptography to be broken by AI and stuff, and at this point in time I don't think you can verify anything. so I think

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes well, let's just not talk about anything too deeply sensitive, but I assumed that we weren't gonna do that anyway.

Kris Yeah. I saw that that was the post from I'm blanking on a guy's name. the guy from

Thomas Clowes Justin Drake.

Kris It Justin Drake, yeah, from Ethereum Foundation. He wrote like a big post. And I saw it like randomly. I was at the store just doing some stuff. And I saw it, I like, hold on, like wait a so I was literally holding my like my my cart thing, like shopping cart, and I was just like standing like in in the crowd of people, little reading the post. I was like, what's happening here? I kinda vaguely kind of had the idea of this but I like, Okay, this is like at least five, ten years into the future. So I like it was just so far from my mind and then I and I wrote and I read that and I was like, Okay, ch But I was also thinking about my parents like my dad constantly yells at me because I forget his email and password, you know, he's that type of person. he just like doesn't want to do anything with technology. and I was thinking recently, I I saw some scam were on the TV. So someone called someone and they said like, hey, this guy was like it was he was in an accident, we need his information, we need this, we need that, blah blah. Can you transfer some fancy blah s something like that? And I was like, Jesus man, I should probably talk to my family about this and like have some what is it like a code word. when whenever they like s you know there's something suspicious, they can just say that code word and I and if I repeat it back, it's me. But if not, it's you know, someone else. Did you do something like

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris this with friends or family?

Thomas Clowes this is a really interesting thing because I I won't name names, not because they're mined, but just for privacy anyway. But I was chatting to an Ethereum OG a couple of it was last year when I went to Africa with ENS for their magma event

Kris yeah.

Thomas Clowes and one of the people I was chatting to, they obviously bring out like subject matter expert experts to kind of I guess act as mentors and provide education to to the local builders. And this particular person was I was having a conversation with him about his security protocols. And he was going on about these code words and things like that. Yeah, he had like a full protocol that he had in place with his family. And I can't even remember all of the details, but it wasn't quite as simple as having a code word. It was you need to ask them a question about an event where only the two people in question would have the context and things like this because I I guess it's like a security questions for website authentication where it says like what's your mother's maiden name, what's your first school?

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes Within reason, it's it's pretty easy to find out that information about someone. whereas like now that yeah, you can research and deep dive into people without the same kind of time constraints that historically were the case, you really need to be asking questions that only the two people that are parties of the conversation would ever be able to answer. and I mean he was teaching me about like entropy and the security considerations of things like if you have a what they called a padlock that has numerical digits, when you lock your padlock You shouldn't just scramble it randomly. You should reset it to zeros. again,

Kris Mm-hmm.

Thomas Clowes I can't remember all of the like sort of technical, mathematical, probabilistic reasoning behind it, but he's a he's a giga genius and it was pretty compelling. But it's kind of yeah, it's very interesting the sort of the spectrum of security consciousness from these people that are like yeah, pure experts that that know everything to your general members of the public, your parents, your family members that will easily get scammed on a phone call.

Kris for the for the padlock thing that you said, it's really interesting. So like are you saying there's like a mathematical reason to always set it to zero? Because I never do that. I just like do

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris and you know, whatever it ends up on, it ends up on.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, that that that that's what I recall and I feel like I've I've made a point and I can't even back it up with the justification or the reasoning. I myself, after this

Kris yeah.

Thomas Clowes call or I'll I'll ask AI, I'll ask Chat GPT, to explain it to me. But I just recall him telling me that and I can't remember exactly why.

Kris Yeah. Do you know like that happens to me all the time because I'll hear someone explain something and they just explain it with such clarity that if I was able to like repeat it word for word and just like parrot it back, that would be amazing. But obviously I can't do that. And then I just like I get the idea and I I understand what they were trying and what they said and what they've explained. And then when I try to explain it, it just doesn't make sense because I butcher it and then I don't have like if people have follow-up questions then I'm fucked. I I like we were talking about just AI advancing at such an incredible rate. I recent like I think even this morning I saw a guy explaining how they are trying to solve biology by reducing all of biology to numbers, like basically ones and zeros, and then just like trying to extract patterns from it. And I wanted to throw that in and now I did. And if you ask me any follow up questions, I will be like How did they do it? Well I mean, you know. I don't know. They're smart.

Thomas Clowes To be fair, I do also recall reading something that was along a similar subject matter line that was basically saying that in the very imminent future they're gonna be able to work out how animals communicate to the point where I think it was probably h a hyperbolic, exaggerated headline for clickbait, but

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes it was bas basically saying we'll be able to translate animals such that we can actually have a chat with an elephant. and like the the way that AI has developed, like I genuinely wouldn't be surprised at this point. And I think I mean that's an interesting conversation topic in itself. Like I've worked in tech for twenty odd years and seen all sorts of technical change. AI is the first time that I've actually been like, shit, like

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes like i maybe for better, maybe for worse, maybe both. in different areas of our existence, but like I think that this is game-changing technology and yeah, I think if I was gonna my o my my generalized position is a negative one, like I'm quite concerned about the development of AI and the future of humanity.

Kris Yeah. I I know you. I know you very well. So you you didn't even have to say that. This is for the audience. If someone

Thomas Clowes Well.

Kris asked me like gun to my head, like and I have to get this right, is Thomas a pessimist or an optimist when it comes to AI?

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris I would have guessed with hundred percent accuracy. But I'm leaning more like I'm leaning a little bit on the pessimistic side because I just be primarily because I think right now, as it is this world currently. The peop people who are at the at the position of power and people who are at the position of influence and people who have the the the power to move the needle one way or the other that actually impact other people are for the most part evil. and that's the reason why I think I don't I don't think the AI is necessarily like AI is neutral, you know. but I just think that the world is right now you know, run for the lack of a better world by people who are like more on the like on the scale, good or or bad, they're just like really, really bad. so that's kind of my take. yeah, I'm not sure. Do you want to say something?

Thomas Clowes Yeah, I think unfortunately there's a correlation between money and power in the modern world.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes And I think that money corrupts. like I've had conversations with you in the past, like I'm very aware of my various first world privileges, especially being like a a white male living in a a first world country. working in technology for the past twenty years, et cetera, et cetera. so like, yeah, I've I've been fortunate to not have many of the hardships that lots of people experience in their lives. And even like on the microcosm scale that is my life, I've been able to see over the years how money has changed who I am and how I live, et cetera, et cetera. I can only imagine how that scales if you've got billions of dollars. if you're running one of these large AI Bayemoffs and you're living in San Francisco where the the culture is premised around money. Like I hate to even imagine kind of how that influences your psyche. And I think that so many people kind of say all of those sentiments that are very easy to say but not necessarily easy to act upon. That's kind of like if I won the lottery, it wouldn't change me. But like, yeah, money

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes money changes you regardless of who you are. And I think it's a a relative thing. So like if you go from nothing to something, even if your quantitative purchasing power is still not massive, the the the relative increase has exponentially disproportional effects on on how you act in the world, I think. So like people like Elon Musk, for example, of everyone has opinions on him and his money and his wealth and it's very easy to hypothesise, but like I I don't know, like if you a actually had that level of wealth, like you would be a pretty weird person. Like like it it it's understandable that Elon Musk i is how Elon Musk is when you just kind of think about how much money and how many resources he has access to and what he can do and what that means for social relationships and life meaning and vel

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes values and I don't know. It's such a a wild question and I love psychology, philosophy, all these kind of things, so it's just mind

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes blowing to

Kris we can open so many topics from here about psychology and philosophy

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris and certainly Elon Musk. I was watching his Economist interview and like compared to the like the level of his wealth and influence, I really I I really love that he's able to kind of you know, 'cause just like he's able to hold his own in these interviews and like he sticks to you know, to what he truly believes. where like If I'm watching him, I'm seeing there's a guy who obviously like has a little bit of like he's a little bit of reserve, not to say absolutely like the most outrageous shit, even though she has he has done that in the past. But when I w when I watch someone like who's of equal kind of influence, same tech position, maybe same, you know, kind of companies and stuff like that, I can literally see that they are replying through like sort of like a filter of like, you know. I have to be mindful of the politics and everything that I say. Versus Elon, he just replies to what he believes and what he thinks is truth, at least. And for the most part, like he's right. Like obviously what he says is true. but it's just like funny comparison. Like I was thinking about this and was thinking whether there is like a like a measurable ratio of how willing you are to keep your mouth shut compared to the like increase in your social status and your position? Like is there some like a measurement that someone has, you know, to

Thomas Clowes No

Kris judge a peep per person by that?

Thomas Clowes I think this conversation is very easy 'cause I think we're similar people with similar interests. So it just yeah, it just spreads naturally. But the th

Kris I told you and you came here to talk about the internet and ICANN and TLDs and ENS. We'll get to that in a second.

Thomas Clowes Well to be fair, there's there's some connections there as well. but when you were saying that, the first thing I thought of, I'm trying to think of I think it's Dunbar's number, which it was research done a while ago, but I think it basically said that seventy thousand dollars per year above that your relative happiness doesn't increase. And they statistically proved that at the time that a a household income of around seventy thousand dollars I think it was. Obviously that needs to be adjusted for inflation and and things like that,

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes but and then yeah, when you're referring to Elon Musk being able to say whatever he wants to say, I think that that is fundamentally how is it always described? I think it I think it's literally just called fuck you money. It's basically like you have you

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes have so you have so much money, you have so much influence Like, yeah, you can say the wrong thing and someone won't give you the contract and or won't give you the deal or won't give you the job but like if you're a trillionaire you

Kris But how many people are actually willing to go there?

Thomas Clowes well, I mean, that maybe it's self serving of me to say, but I like pride myself on like I stand behind my opinions and my beliefs, purely on a kind of I d I I don't e I don't even know how you describe it. Like I'm very aware that I'm not always right and I often get stuff wrong. But I think that like if you're gonna have an opinion, you should have an opinion with like gusto. You should like you should always have educated opinions. You should like do your research and think things through and try and be right. But like and then once you've done that bare minimum, like you should You should stand behind your opinions, but also be prepared to concede and accept that you're wrong. and I don't think that you need vast wealth to be able to do that. It it's just a a personality trait, a values thing. It's more important to me to to be honest and true to myself than to ever be wealthy. And I I think part Part of that is literally like my life and my experiences. I think I don't know if I I post it on social media at some point or maybe wrote a blog about it at some point, but I do a lot of mountain running and a

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes couple at the start of the year I nearly fell off a cliff and everyone says it and it's quite like over said. But You don't like truly appreciate the value of life until you really nearly die. And it's like you can say that to anybody and they'll logically understand, but they will not understand until they actually nearly die. And obviously no one wants to nearly die. But it was like, yeah, that experience just changed my outlook on everything. and yeah, it happened six months ago. thirty-six years old, so like lived thirty five plus years without ever experiencing that. All of a sudden I was thinking to myself, last week

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes I was stressed out because of an argument I had with a colleague on the internet. Like, it's it's not that deep. Like it's just not that deep.

Kris Yeah. Yeah. I know we spoke about this and then I think you mentioned this and then I said like there's something like interesting and curious about people who have suffered through life in any way possible. There's like there's a little there's some kind of a depth to them. you can see that they are like just more calm. You can you you I I don't know what it is. You know, like someone says like there's an like an X factor to people. when they speak about like whether someone has like got what it need you know what what he needs to like be successful or whatever. But I find like people who have suffered whatever like the in like for every one of us like our own suffering is the biggest one that we know. So like whatever is like the biggest for me is the like I feel it with the same level of intensity as you feel your own. And like those can be like very, very different. Like so to me Like it could be that I like I don't know, like I you know, I I almost died and and you know near the cliff, right? But for someone else like who's maybe a lot younger than you, it can be like, okay, the first breakup, right? So like that's the le like the same kind of level of intensity that we feel. I mean those like are two are kind of incomparable, but like you know what I'm trying to say. So like it's it's it's cool and and it's fun. Like I I like I like talking to people who are a little bit fucked up, you know?

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris I I think people who like, you know, they You know, they get bored and they have like I I t someone was talking about this, like that all comics, like stand-up comics, have like fucked up childhood. And I think like that's almost the essence of

Thomas Clowes Okay.

Kris like you being interesting. I mean it's kinda it sounds I I sound kinda weird right now, but yeah, I just find

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris people who have suffered more interesting than those who are just like boring, you know, nothing happened to

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris them, they have a good life. Fuck these people.

Thomas Clowes I mean it's obviously not a a suffering competition, but like and I

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes th and and I think maybe I've spoken to you about this before in the past, but like when I was really young, when I was like ten, I went to boarding school and I hated boarding school and like I mean to go down that rabbit hole you'd need to talk to my therapist. But like it's i it's interest it's interesting how the world works because I hated boarding school so much that I spent my time on a computer playing online games, then I wanted to build my own online game, then I needed a domain name, then I got into domain names, which was my whole career. So it's kind of like people always ask that question, like if you could change your past, would you change your past? I I I hated that element of my childhood, but I would never change it because all of my success in inverted commas and who I am arose as a result of of that inconvenience essentially. so like the the whole cliche, like it's a it's a blessing and a curse kind of thing.

Kris Yeah, I think given the opportunity I would change stuff. Just because it's not that like I'm r there's like regrets that I have, like sh I surely do have them. But just like fuck it, why not change? You know. I feel like if someone gave me an opportunity to experience like a completely different type of life, I'd go for it, you know. You know, like obviously like I would correct some mistakes. I wouldn't do some stuff and I I'm I'm sure those would put me on a different path. But I mean, why would you live the same life, you know?

Thomas Clowes But it's it's like the but well, I mean it depends on the specifics of this hypothetical. But like but there's the butterfly effect. If you like go back and change one fundamental decision, it you could be a completely different person and that life could be worse. And yeah, the hypothetical obviously needs clarification. Like in your new life Do you still remember the old life? Et cetera, et cetera.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes but like yeah, I I think I just simplify it to if I change something, my life could be worse. So and I think that that's also a thing that people always forget is like, yes, there's lots of areas in my life that are not going particularly well at the moment. There's lots of things that are not ideal. There's also lots of things that are going really, really well. And you tend to have like a bias towards the negatives, so you focus on the negatives, but

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes again, I'm very aware of my privilege and that my life is actually very good in the grand scheme of things. I wouldn't want to risk living a a worse life.

Kris Yeah. This this technical conversation and technical podcast turned into a therapy session. Therapy session with Thomas. dude, let's let's let's let's

Thomas Clowes This is what I do this this is what this is what I do with all my friends.

Kris let's try to let's try to course correct and steer this ship back into some kind like let's at least give people some technical conversation here. but you've mentioned that you've somehow through boarding school stumble upon domains. So do you can you give me like a what like okay from there like how d how does your experience and and background look like professional one at least like the the things that touches on domains. What is the first thing in the

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris domain space that you did?

Thomas Clowes Yeah, so like I guess adding to that background a little bit, when I was like twelve, I played Neo Pets. I wanted to create my own virtual pet game. I built

Kris Mm. Nice.

Thomas Clowes a website. I called it Ruzio. R R U Z I O. I needed a domain name, so I bought Ruzio.com for eight dollars or whatever. then in the process I'm trying to think what it was. I think the name was coming up for expiry. The renewal cost was twenty dollars. But at the time all these domain name registrars had offers where new registrations cost ten dollars, but renewals cost twenty dollars. So my logic was as a as a really broke 13-year-old, I'll let this expire and then I'll just re-register it and I'll save ten dollars. I let the

Kris Ha ha ha.

Thomas Clowes I l I let the name expire and somebody caught it on the drop and then I couldn't I couldn't get the name back. I emailed the person that had registered it and said like, Hey, like that's my domain, like I w I want that back and they tried to s yeah.

Kris Give it back.

Thomas Clowes And they tried to s sell it for me. And at at that point I realized that people bought and sold domain names. Then I went down the rabbit hole, then I bought and sold some domain names. it it was a good business. I yeah, as a a a fifteen year old at school, at boarding school, my housemaster at the time would let me use his phone to phone the US to like try and buy and sell domains off people. I built up a portfolio dem it's it's

Kris Nice Wait, how much how much what's your biggest sale? You remember?

Thomas Clowes am I doxing myself it like I've had a couple of six figure sales that are are public. like

Kris What When you were fifteen?

Thomas Clowes I'm not sure where my first six figure sale was, but I did well out of domain names. that's like

Kris How could you not tell me this? I've known you for like how long? We worked on domains for years. Six figures?

Thomas Clowes Not tell you what not tell you what. Like my whole my whole career is d domain names.

Kris No, I know about that. I just didn't know that you used to sell them when you were young.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, that's that's how I got into it.

Kris That's really cool.

Thomas Clowes I like I'm trying to think. I I owned like quite a few three letter dot coms. I back in the day I owned G UA dot com and I bought that for not very much, I can't remember exactly, but sold that for six figures. I owned N Mm dot com for Ms. I sold that for six figures.

Kris Holy shit. Nice. I didn't know this,

Thomas Clowes Like

Kris honestly.

Thomas Clowes this is why I like domain names.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes it was it it was like an interesting one where it it gave me like yeah, six figures is a lot of money, but it's not enough money to live on live a whole life on. But like whilst I was young, it gave me the like working capital to try lots of different things, have a lot of flexibility, go down rabbit holes. yeah, it just gave me a bit of financial flexibility as a youngster to to try things and

Kris Yeah

Thomas Clowes lot lots of the things I tried failed, some of them succeeded.

Kris Yeah. What was the website where you were buying and selling the maze at the time? What year is this?

Thomas Clowes God. so back in the day, they they still exist, but there was a forum called namepros.com. there's a for a forum called dnforum.com. and that was where like most transactions occurred and or like were negotiated. And aftermarket platforms like Sado and Afternik existed at the time, but under different ownerships, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, there was a lot more discussion forum-based interaction and transactions. And those yeah, those forums still exist, but they have nowhere near the level of activity that they did back in the day. But like

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes I I don't know if that content is still archived somewhere, but you have legacy kind of discussion posts where someone would come on and say like, I have 50 freeletter.coms they're three hundred dollars each or five for a thousand dollars. And at the time that was like incredibly expensive and nobody would bite. I guess it's similar to like cryptocurrency investments. If you'd bought them then, they're worth like minimum twenty grand each now. you just need to to have bought them and held.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes and I mean that applies to me as well. I made good money. I made nowhere near as much money as I could have made. At one point I think I owned like 10, 15 Freeletter.coms. I sold them all because I I needed money, I needed liquidity, I needed to pay my rent, I needed to pay for food. if I'd kept them, like I I wouldn't be talking to you 'cause I'd be in the Bahamas in my beach house.

Kris Yeah. All right. Yeah. So you were you were young, you'll you're selling the mains, you're making money, experimenting with different stuff. and what's the official first role that you had, where you can say like that you've kind of learned and started programming and and started working on the mains side of things?

Thomas Clowes So like I was completely self taught building an online yeah virtual pet game and the internet back then was like yeah MSN and AIM, AOL Instant Messenger and like

Kris Yeah. Yes.

Thomas Clowes in there was like a small group of maybe ten ten or so people that I knew really well, all similar ages, that built games. And quite a few of them have gone on to be like incredibly successful. Like there was I'm trying to think what it was called. There was a website called eCritters.biz. and it was owned by a go a guy called Laith, who went on to build amigo. and there was a guy called Keith Curzon that built a game called Sabita. I know that when he was like seventeen he was making six figures a month from Sabita. and like yeah there's just like that generation of I d I don't know, it's a time and a place thing. Like I basically

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes was a young kid on the internet with ten friends. Quite a lot of them went on to be successful. and I think it's just I don't know, the kind of people that that want to build a an online game when they're four four P

Kris Yeah, well what what's the first what's the first official employment? Like where where where did you where did you work first as far as domains go?

Thomas Clowes far as d like when I was younger I had various jobs. I worked at a hospital for a bit, just making money. But in terms of domains, after university, my first job was working for domain name sales in the Cayman Islands.

Kris okay. So what were you doing there?

Thomas Clowes so the context of that was I did a degree in economics because I liked business and finance, but like an economics degree just seemed more interesting than a a purely business-based degree. When I got my degree, the like my prospects were essentially you can go and get a job for the British government as like a civil servant, working

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes in like economic policy. And it just didn't really sound particularly compelling or exciting. I knew of Frank Schilling, who was the the founder of Domain Name Sales and Uniregistry. And he's one of those OG domain investors that had a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of domain names that he registered in the nineties. he was starting a new company, domain name sales. in the Cayman Islands. I saw a job posting. I applied. I got the job. that is I guess a history of that. And I think it's

Kris What was your position there?

Thomas Clowes that's actually quite a fun one. It like I went as an engineer. I don't know exactly what the role was listed as, but it was a very small company when it first started. And I I I remember the conversation vividly where we were talking about titles and 'cause yeah, it was a small company, everyone knew everyone. Fra I I think it was Frank that said to me, It was just like, You can have literally whatever title you want. Like, what title do you want? and we we had lots of jokes and lots of conversations about it but for the same reason titles just didn't matter because like it was so small.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes it is quite like a flat hierarchy. Yes, I worked with two engineers that had lots more at least commercial or business experience than I did and were objectively better engineers than me, but like because there was only three of us on the team And we were all friends and we lived on a tiny little island and we spent all our time together. There was no like you're my boss. It was just we're the software team, we're we're friends, we respect each other, we work together, and and we build stuff. And it was very much like, I guess, startup culture where you work hard, but everybody is everybody's like working collaboratively. It's no like I hate my boss. I don't want to be here, I hate my job. Like it was yeah, a very cordial, social sociable, friendly environment to work.

Kris Yeah. can I challenge you right now? I wanna I wanna like I wanna ask you a question. I don't even know how to phrase it, but you've mentioned the main name sales, we spoke about the mains in general, you mentioned uni registry, obviously you you've you come from from that space. You work with DNS right now, you're co founder of Unruggable. so you have like a very unique insight into both web 2 domains and web 3 domains. And for now I just want to stick with web 2 domains. And if I asked you like, or not me, let's say that someone like a high school student asked you, who's like technically literate but is not like a technical, you know, high school student, if they ask you like, can you explain how does internet work? Where do you start? Where do you start and where do you finish? Because you have registrars, registries, you have the you know 13 root servers and like you have i ICANN IANA and like IETF or whatever they are called. So there's so many organizations surrounding the internet. so yeah I'm just curious like how would you that how would you break that down? How would you reply to that?

Thomas Clowes so this is meant to be like a an explain it like I'm five kind of explanation.

Kris Not five, let's say fifteen, like fifteen or like eighteen. You know, high school student who's like what smart but you know has spended their like a lot of time on the computer. They know what the domain is, but they don't know what happens when you type, you know, google dot com like in the in the background, you know?

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes what's the easiest way of starting on this explanation? So l a domain name is a human readable representation of an internet protocol, an i IP address. so a domain name fundamentally is resolved to a series of digits that represents something on the internet. oftentimes a server. the core value proposition of domain names being that it's a lot easier to remember cap.com than it is to remember one dot twelve dot fifteen dot six

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes in the same way crossing over in web three an ENS name clouds.ef is a lot easier to remember than a a long hexadecimal string. In terms of s like the sort of fundamental low level that process of a a domain name being resolved happens under the hood. Yeah, you've put me on the spot there and I'd be reticent to try

Kris I can

Thomas Clowes and like explain it in a compelling way. But like there's a lot of redundancy and and caching and networks of routes and resolution paths. So ultimately you're jumping between different levels of resolver down to root servers that are spread around the world that return the data necessary to resolve a domain name.

Kris We don't have to we like we don't have to go into the details of how the resolution works, but let's say that I'm curious, who are all organizations behind essentially, you know, air quotes controlling the internet, you know? And like what they are responsible for each of them.

Thomas Clowes Okay. so you've got ICANN

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes you've got ICANN, which is the internet corporation for assigning names and numbers. I think that that's like the core like fundamental one that's relevant here. I can't give you the exact timelines on things, but basically ICANN used to be a US organization, whereas the internet is without borders. It's not owned or controlled by any individual company. So at some point in the past, I'm gonna say twenty odd you're gonna have to fat check me on this, but basically the US relinquished control of the internet to this entity ICANN within ICANN there's a sense there's like lots of different groups and coordination bodies. So there's like bodies for coordinating like technical implementations, there's government bodies where representatives from different countries about the world around the world can kind of provide representation of their their country's individual needs in the context of the global DNS. ICANN is kind of often described as like a a multi stakeholder model. So essentially it's like a an organization that platforms stakeholders around the world. So if you are a business a government, an individual that has an opinion about the direction of the internet. in principle there is a a working group or a body or a subgroup that allows you to kind of communicate your needs and have them discussed in in the broader context.

Kris Yeah. did you did you follow there was like yesterday I know there was like a reveal day for new GTLDs. We can talk about that.

Thomas Clowes Yes.

Kris was that like a you know just hey, here's everything is revealed? Or was that was that an event that they've held or like a live stream maybe? Wha what what was that? Did they just just like publish some information and that's it? And whether maybe

Thomas Clowes Yeah. So

Kris can we can we Like talk, what are the most like interesting ones that you saw? I assume dot crypto dot delegated or maybe like dot wallet or dot something else. I saw Ethereum got Ethereum got dot dot Ethereum, ENS obviously got dot En S, and good thing it wasn't even contested. so good stuff, but I I'm interested in your takes because I didn't follow this very, very carefully, I guess.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, so it was just an announcement, at least as f as far as I'm aware. it was communicated up front that at six pm UTC on seventh of October we're gonna announce the the the strings that have been applied for. yeah, ICANN coordinates and manages the allocation and delegation of of domain extensions, amongst other things. there's been one previous round of GTLDs back in twenty twenty sorry, back in twenty twelve where companies could essentially apply for new domain extensions. Uniregistry was one of the larger applications back in twenty twelve, so I have like lots of visibility and context on that round. This is the second time it's happening 14 years later. I'm just trying to recall exactly what you said. Like whilst that original round happened in 2012, because of the sort of complexity behind the process of how these things are allocated, some strings, like dot web, for example, Technically that was applied for in twenty twelve, but it only actually got delegated in the DNS zone fairly recently. I think it was in the past six months, to Verisign. So the actual process of that GTLD being allocated was fourteen years in total. I think that like

Kris And I think they paid like north of hundred million for it, right?

Thomas Clowes Yeah, I think it was a hundred and thirty five million, in the end. And I think because we'd ha had a brief dialogue about this on X back in the day because it was th the first time new GTLDs had been allocated. They didn't have any experiences to work on, but there was a lot of kind of game playing

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes From a business perspective, whereby kind of if so the short version, if multiple entities apply for the same extension, there's a contention. ICANN needs to somehow discern how that contention is resolved and who actually gets to own and manage the TLD. back in 2012 there was a an auction process that was facilitated by ICANN to work out from an economic point of view, the Pareto optimal allocation of the extension, so essentially which entity valued the the extension the most. But as with everything economics based, it's it all rests on the assumptions of perfect information and rationality and things like this. In practice, people bent the rules to

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes financially benefit themselves. So there was lots of situations where company A would apply for ten TLDs, company B would apply for ten TLDs if company A actually wanted five and company B wanted the other five, they would basically mutually agree with one another behind the scenes. If you drop out of these five, we'll drop out of this five these five, etc., etc. this time round, a lot of effort has gone into stopping that from happening. But again, I won't name name names. I was talking to someone probably about a year ago about this GTLD process who's fairly well established within ICANN circles, and he was essentially saying that This time round they put so much effort into preventing these things from happening and they've outlined exactly how they're going to try and prevent these things from happening. But by doing it so far in advance, they've actually given everybody more than enough time to work out how to skirt the rules. and

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes yeah, I think I posted it on X earlier. It's essentially like if there's enough financial incentive to to find a way around the w rules. People will find a way around the rules. And one of the crux elements of these new rules is basically that now these GTLDs have been revealed. entities that are in contention sets basically are not allowed to talk to each other. but like how how do you police how do you police that?

Kris Yeah. Yeah.

Thomas Clowes and yeah in print in principle no one's meant to be doing backdoor deals. Right. the domain in industry is quite small. Everyone knows everybody. Like I can can't compel someone not to talk to their friends. And like I'd I it's just going to be very difficult to police. And I think what we will see is down the line there will be some I I'll refer to them as unexplainable withdrawals whereby people like withdraw from contention sets without any obvious or justifiable business reason, with the

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes the un the underlying assumption being that something not quite legitimate has happened behind the scenes.

Kris What are some of the interesting TLDs that you saw? I know the blockchain ones. obviously that East still stays kind of in this weird neutral grey area space. just like a little explanation for those who don't know, that ETH is officially like reserved for a country of Ethiopia and that ETH is also being used by ENS for Ethereum. so it's Like I don't even know what's the kind of the state of that. but dot sol I saw was was officially acquired by Solana. dot Avax, I think dot Near as well. which is kinda cool to see these blockchain platforms kind of give like value and and even more credibility to the T L D's and I'm kinda curious to see how they plan on using them. I mean in the ideal world they just import and claim the ownership of their TLDs with ENS and they kind of inherit all of the ENS features and functionality. and everything is powered through ENS. but yeah, did you see some of the interesting ones? I saw some weird ones too.

Thomas Clowes Yeah. So it's an interesting one to me. yeah, back in the day at Uniregistry Uni Registry applied for lots of TLDs back in twenty twelve. they were the original owners of dot link. they operated dot sexy. that was one of the more novel ones. And

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes at the t at the time it was all kind of very new and I guess ultimately it wasn't like my business decision to make, but like and yeah, it it was Frank's money and Frank's decision to make. But it was kind of to to apply for a TLD you have to have a business model. you have to be able to

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes sell enough registrations to cover your costs. And that's your costs of application, your your legal costs, your costs of building the software to run these registries, et cetera, et cetera. So like You inherently get economies of scale. Identity Digital, which back in twenty twelve was donuts. They were the biggest applicant back in twenty twelve, but they have scale. So they already have the software. their costs are essentially the application cost, and then everything else kind of marginally nets down to zero, yeah, because of their scale. So basically for every TLD they apply for, they have to be able to recoup two hundred and thirty grand.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes and like one assumes that they've applied for all the TLDs that they've applied for because they think that they can do that. and yeah, probably. if if you're applying for one TLD and you don't have the software and you don't have any infrastructure, Yeah, you've got a lot more upfront costs and I don't really see the business model. And yeah, some of the extensions that have been applied for, I just look at them and think to myself, like, Well, I'm not gonna register

Kris It yeah.

Thomas Clowes that and and no one's gonna register that. If you're charging ten dollars per name, hypothetically, you've gotta sell twenty three thousand registration years to to recoup your your application fee. Is that feasible? I think for a lot of the extensions, in my opinion, no. But like I haven't

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes I haven't produced a business plan, which again makes me more I don't know, call call me a cynic, but like I think that some of these I I don't think I can say this, but I think that like some of these applications are dodgy in the sense that like they they they depend on there being some backhand backdoor deals to to make them profitable. Like the money the money is not actually in operating the T L D the money is in doing a a deal behind the scenes.

Kris I think this is like the biggest, probably like the the most welcoming, like some kind of a tax write-off, like a bus like a business investment type of thing where people just like, two hundred thirds. Sure. Shh, done. I'm sure, like there's

Thomas Clowes Yeah. And

Kris there's no way. and by the way, I'm looking, there's like dot BTC, dot BMB, even.base, but I see a few companies apply for.base. But like there's some like nonsense here. I also see dot cap, by the way. So if that actually gets delegated, that would be pretty cool that. that I should I should get like maybe cap.cap or me dot cap. We'll see.

Thomas Clowes Well one one that one that I did see is Matt Mullenweg, the guy that created WordPress, the company that owns and operates WordPress Automatic. They applied for I think ten or so TLDs. But one of the TLDs that they applied for was.mat and like dot

Kris Dot what? Sorry?

Thomas Clowes mat.

Kris I I I kinda can't hear you, you're call you because you're a little bit breaking up for me. Did you say dot max?

Thomas Clowes Dot mat as in his name, Matt.

Kris okay, Matt. Yeah. I see like dot

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris Cli dot cloudflare, like there are just so many.collection.commercial.

Thomas Clowes Yeah. but like the dot mat one is very interesting to me because it's just a a vanity egotistical acquisition like I'm mats, I'm rich, I want dot mats, why not? in tur in turn

Kris Who dude, if I had a hundred million dollars, I'd buy dot Chris. Fuck it. Why not?

Thomas Clowes R I I guess. but it's like I don't know why this came to mind. We were talking about Elon Musk earlier. I was reading an article about how Elon Musk is the only centi billionaire that that doesn't like yachts. And

Kris Doesn't like yachts.

Thomas Clowes yeah, and then I thought about it and it's like yeah, you always see news articles about like Jeff Bezos is on his four hundred million dollar

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes super yacht. But you never see Elon Musk on a yacht and Elon Musk doesn't own a yacht. and I think it's maybe it comes back to the same thing. It's like once you can buy anything, you don't actually need to buy anything. Because like, yes I can buy a yacht,

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes but but I don't like yachts, so I'm not gonna buy a yacht.

Kris There's there is.yacht yacht by the way, so it's currently delegated, so you can register Thomas.yacht. But I see like

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris dot Feedbit, for example, and it's been applied for by Alphabet, which is Google, and Google just came out with their Fitbit devices, and it's just like one small shitty device that they could like discontinue if Apple, you know, releases something and or like they their sales are down or whatever. It's I mean it's fine, but it's you know, nothing special. so

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris like to apply for a TLD for it, it just doesn't make sense. And they have dot Google and they haven't even used it. And by the way, it costs I don't know, like you probably know this, but I you know, I I I wanted to apply for.self for a couple of months and I wanted to run it like as a business. So I was like doing the all the trying to come up with the with a business side of things for how this could be used, and I like .self because it's sort of on the identity side of things. And there's obviously this emerging interesting initiatives and trends around you know, agent identity in the context of web two and web three. you can use UNS as a protocol to name all of these agents on chain. You can use some other protocol to like give names to to agents, you know, like agent name service by GoDaddy or like whatever. So like I saw a bunch of different like paths for its adoption. But actually guaranteeing that you can make it popular and that you could get at least like twenty to thirty thousand per year domain registrations. So you can just break even because you have yearly ongoing costs for registries, registrars, you have to pay ICANN, I think some fixed fee was per month. sorry, per year. And obviously you have like a legal and compliance cost that you have to pay for. It it was just like so much money. And at some point, like I was thinking about all this and I started talking to investors and like sure, like you can always get investors and some people were interested, but I was feeling a little kind of I feel like I I I kind of almost felt like a scammer that I would like apply for like dot self and I would just like give at least like six, seven hundred K just to acquire something, you know? And then there's no way that I can guarantee that this can work, you know? I would like I would I'm

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris I'm a stubborn guy, so I wouldn't like make it work, I think. But it it was like a huge risk, huge gamble. there's like such a big technical overhead, legal and compliance overhead. There's just so many things. The entire process is so kind of it's so detailed, it's own j just like so painfully bureaucratic. It it took me just so much time to apply and submit like the initial application. Then I was like and then at some point they were pinging me back. hey, we need this updated, we need this, we need that. And then and at some point I decided to just like call it quits. and yeah. but yeah, but it also why why I'm mentioning this is like so yeah, we applied for dot self, or or we wanted to apply for dot self. We haven't officially gone through. this thing because and like it there's like four or five hundred up questions in the application that you have to go through. And then now I see there's dot self and I reached out to the guy because there was nothing about dot self that I could find online and I was like, hey man, like this looks looks interesting. We wanted to apply for dot self. I'm kinda glad that we didn't because we wouldn't go into the contention set, both you and I. so what's what's the plan? Like I'm I'm just curious about your vision behind it. Because I have gone through this process and I know how difficult it is. and I was like, let me know if I can help or assist. And they have like some some big vision for.self, something around making everything like what was it? I don't wanna butcher it or like I'm kinda blanking

Thomas Clowes Okay.

Kris on what was the point. But I remember like it was too sort of like a idealistic and grandiose, like a gigantic idea. but yeah, I should I should probably follow up with them and then Maybe even have them on a podcast. but yeah.

Thomas Clowes Yeah. I mean y even something like that is quite interesting, whereby you haven't gone through the bureaucratic process of applying for dot self, but that doesn't actually preclude you from owning dot self. If that's now uncontested, you could potentially let them go through the process of acquiring it and then just buy it off them. And

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes that is potentially a lot simpler than And a lot cheap arguably cheaper, than doing it yourself. And like, I suspect that that has actually happened and we just don't know about it, whereby people know that they're gonna apply for the same thing and then speak to each other before the reveal day and

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes say, Okay, we're just not gonna put in an application. Hopefully nobody else does, you get it, then we'll buy it off you. And like

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes yes, companies you're not allowed to talk to each other now if they're in a contention set. But like if a hypothetical situation, someone gets a an extension uncontested, in two years that extension gets sold. to a third party. For all we know, that deal could have already been done. Like and it's just

Kris Yeah. Do you know if sorry I cut you off, but I wanted to ask like a f like a quick follow-up question there. Like, do you know if that happened? Not necessarily like a kind of the backroom deal that kind of materialized two years after, but like someone buys a d TLD, they try to make a business out of it, they fail, and then someone comes along and says, like, hey, I like this, can I buy it off of you? Because obvious like you failed, you have to pay like fifty hundred K a year just to like maintain the the the the string, blah blah. So can I just buy it over you? Has something like this happened? And I was I remember looking through this online when I was applying, but I but I I but I couldn't find a single case. Do you know, maybe?

Thomas Clowes Yeah yeah it happens a lot. I know that so Uniregistry, for example, were the original operators of dot link. when

Kris Mm-hmm.

Thomas Clowes Frank sold Uni Registry to GoDaddy and I believe that he sold his domain name portfolio. Odadie as well. But then the registry business I believe got sold to two cows. and then I think the TLD portfolio got split up as well. I might be getting some of these entities wrong, but my point being he wanted to sell the whole business, but in practice it got sold to different entities in different parts. And I know, for example, yeah, dot link was a uniregistry TLD, which is now operated by Link Freedom Group, which is a large applicant in this new round. and up until this new round, that was the only TLD that they operated. And I assume the logic is dot link is a good TLD. We've we've looked at the numbers.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes of business here, we we want to own that one, but we don't want to own dot sexy or any of the other ones in the portfolio. So so we'll just we'll just buy the dot link TLD. And I think like some of the other TLDs were sold to XYZ group, which is Daniel Nagari and his team that operate.xyz. so yeah TLDs do get sold as a whole. And I was looking through the applicants and that's an interesting thing in itself, you'll see like a lot of kind of holding companies and things like that listed as the company that's applying for a TLD. And I think the reason for that is often because you don't sell the TLD, you sell the company. So like if you I'm trying to think of an example. Like e even I was looking at the ENS application, for example. they've set up a a separate I think it's a Delaware company to apply for dot ENS and I'm sure that there's like lots of contractual and legal and reasonable and valid reasons why why you do that. but like yeah, some T L D I suspect will get sold is the sh is the short version. I don't actually

Kris Yeah. Yeah.

Thomas Clowes know what j and just to like give full colour on that, I'm not implying that ENS is anything like that. ENS is obviously a brand application and f facilitated by the ENS Foundation with some sort of use case one would assume that's related to ENS.

Kris Do you know what their use case?

Thomas Clowes No. no. but yeah, they've applied for it as a brand. I I can Yeah, they applied

Kris Can you make a prediction? I'm not even sure.

Thomas Clowes for it as a as a brand. I did have a look through the information that was revealed and I think it somewhere it said that their intention is to essentially use it like internally. but facts check me on this. I suspect that there would be some sort of integration with the ENS smart contracts. So potentially you've I know it's still there. yeah, so I I would assume that there would be a d a DNS integration with the ENS smart contracts, but I'm not sure exactly what the o the offering would be. I think that like probably the thought process is one of brand protection more than anything. if we own dot ens, it stops anyone from anyone else from ever owning dot

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes ens.

Kris do you think there will ever be anyone who can compete with dot com? Because when I was looking into this like when I was trying to make the my business case, I don't know if you know this by the way, so new GTLDs that have been like delegated in t like t it was like Anywhere between two thousand and twelve and like the next five years, however long it take them, it took them. Like dot WTF or dot ninja or like dot like all of these new ones that came you know at a later round, not like I'm not talking about dot coms, dot org, dot whatever was like in the initial kind of release. They have been growing year over year at like I think above fifteen percent, while the dot com has been decreasing steadily, like between one to two percent every year.com registrations. So I feel like people are more and more comfortable having like dot ninja like in our case or dot you know I don't know systems or dot ID or dot sh or dot AI. I mean come on that's that's even crazier story. So people I feel like people are more comfortable having like these alternative TLDs as their official brand name now And in the last yeah few years than like it was before. Like and I speak for myself, like I would love to have namespace.com and if I had it, I would obviously use it. But I'm like totally fine because we created our entire brand around namespace ninja, so our ninja is our logo, yada yada. And I assume like there's that's the same case with a bunch of other people. So with these new ones, do you see this sort of like d even diluting the market even more? and like possibly chipping away a little bit of registrations from the existing ones like dot org dot dot com dot io dot xyz.

Thomas Clowes the short version is dot com is king. Dot com will always be king, in

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes my opinion. I have this debate with Prem regularly because like when we're putting out like a proof of concept or a demo of something, we'll we'll register at a dot xyz or a a dot id or a dot io name. and the main reason we do that is because it's available. if I could get it in dot com, I would get it in dot com. And that's kind

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes of the point. Like there is a limited supply of of words or or brandable names. and again, maybe somewhat hyperbolic to say, but basically literally everything good is registered in dot com.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes so many so many times I think of like a name, and I'm like, surely that has to be available in dot com like, yes, yes, it's it's a common two words, but like it's very niche and it's very like specific to like technology that I work on. So surely it's gonna be available. I look it up, it's been registered for a decade. and so I think that that's that's the only reason dot com has stagnated is because it's essentially sold out.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes In in t in terms of like yeah, it depends who your target audience is. If you're like a domain investor or a a businessman that wants the best domain, you you want the dot com. then it's just a business decision. Is it affordable? If it's not affordable, then yeah, you you get a a different extension. But like nine times out of ten, any company that starts off on a a dot XYZ will upgrade to the dot com. when they when they raise money down the line. so dot com always

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes is the end goal. Sometimes you see stuff where like people will propend try on at the start or something. So you'd have like try unruggable dot com and then

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes when when you get funded you'll upgrade to up r unrug unruggable dot com. But like

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes yeah dot dot com will will always win. And I think like From an investment point of view, maybe five years ago, I was thinking to myself, like, well, dot net is like the younger brother of dot com, but it's significantly cheaper. So maybe I invest vast amounts of money in.NET and then it takes off and I profit. I very fortunately didn't do that because, yeah. dot net has stagnated.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes and like yeah, I think dot com always like I own quite a few dot org names where I think it's appropriate for the business. I think that dot org is like a really good extension, but it it has to be relevant to what you're building.

Kris Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I wouldn't be surprised, let's say, that if like five or ten new g like GTLDs climb in the top fifty in the most you know registered because w when I look at ENS, like they just penetrated one specific industry. Well not specific industry, but like one specific community, which is Ethereum community, and they have a million registrations which puts them in the top like twenty, thirty, forty, right? in the number of registered domains like in the world, like out not not in web three, but in web two as well. And a million domain registered is not it's not a lot. So like look at for example like let's say that let's say that Mr. Beast for example said like hey if you register my domain with a 30% discount like you get to like you know and every single domain you can watch my episodes like early, right? He could probably get like 20 million domain registrations like in a day, you know? I would I would see that easily. So I think like cases like that could happen. but it just requires like a very specific interest from like these like highly influential individuals to actually do this. And it requires like maybe just like it's a it's a simple business decision. So I could see it happen. Like I could make a case for it, but whether it's gonna happen, I'm not really sure. But I think just out of pure kind of interest and diversification, there we're gonna have like five or ten like there are gonna be like really popular ones. You know how like dot AI

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris became like insanely popular all of a sudden? The same the same was like at some point for dot app and dot IO when like the like the the app boom was kind of going on. and then what was else? like I think the for for like for podcasts and for studios and like how like dot studio became like super popular at some point. So I I see I see these like narratives and these train trends in the world shifting so like it can like we can we can we can get some some really good contenders. But I wanna talk about web three domains. Finally, after hour and twenty minutes

Thomas Clowes I d I just I just have one quick thing to say to that. Umz is a really good example from the twenty twelve round.

Kris Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thomas Clowes they were infamous for like offering one dollar registrations and in hindsight it was genius, but basically their business model was like we get registration numbers, we get people talking about dot XYZ and then we put the price up. and like It did have some detrimental effects like because it was so cheap to get a.xyz, it often got associated with like scams and spam, etcetera,

Kris Mm.

Thomas Clowes etc. But of the operators that came out of the 2012 round, yeah, Daniel Nagari has done incredibly well and they've applied for lots more TLDs in this round.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes it's it's business, business.

Kris Yeah, it's old business baby. right, so web three domains. man, where do we start? Where do we even start? Like if if you like the if I were to boil this down like to the very basic principles of like, you know, kind of like first principles per first principles thinking, I would ask a question like, what makes web3 domains

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris worth it? Like what like what is the significant improvement of Web3 domains versus like traditional normal like DNS, you know, Icon sanctioned domains. And is it is it worth it? Like so what are the benefits, what are the pros and cons? and that like that would be my kind of sanity question. Like and I would compare them to and I s and I told you this, I would compare them to like stablecoins and how like you have dollar backed stablecoin and the it's just like the same thing, but it's different rails. and there's like a bunch of benefits that come with stablecoin, like instant transfers, like the the instant like the settlement, the cross-border type of you know payments. you can have like these micro payments as well, so you can pay like someone, you know, basically less whatever is less than pennies. and all of these things that allow like for additional use cases and and products to build on top of that. So I'm curious in in your view, what makes Web3 domains superior versus traditional domains?

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris And even if they are, like whether they are superior or not.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, I mean I think con co context for

Kris I I keep asking difficult questions.

Thomas Clowes Yeah. Con context for a potential audience is like I transitioned from purely web two domain names into working in web three and so the Ethereum name service and currently work for an ENS service provider on ruggable. So there is

Kris Feel yeah, give us a little bit of a background, sorry. An hour and twenty minutes in, I'm asking for a little bit of a background on you. Am I a great host or what?

Thomas Clowes Yeah, I mean to be fair, it was actually when I was working for Uniregistry where I stumbled upon Ethereum. I like technology, I keep up to date with these things, I went down the rabbit hole, I thought it was incredible technology. The logical next step was to with naming services and if there were any kind of similar paradigms to web two domain names within web three stumbled upon. ENS originally competitions on the Ethereum subreddit back in the day. but yeah, I have been involved and around ENS since 2017. for the past three years my company alongside Prem unruggable, we've been funded by ENS to work on ENS related tech. we predominantly do research and development So constantly looking at yeah how ENS can adapt and evolve to potential new use cases and new technologies. including I think like the the most well known piece of work is unruggable gateways, which is a gateway solution for provably reading data from L two blockchains. that's a too long didn't read version. I can my contact details will be somewhere and I can explain more.

Kris Ha ha.

Thomas Clowes But yeah I got involved in ENS because I I like naming and I like identity and I think that it's an important primitive for technical innovation. I think like everything and everybody needs an how do we achieve that? And blockchain technology, all of the kind of positives, the selling points of blockchain as a technology apply to identity if you can have immutable, uncensorable identity that's not controlled by a centralized government whereby your associated data is controlled and owned by you. you ultimately own your identity and that's where the value is. ENS is obviously like the first mover in that regard in blockchain. It has the network effect and network effect counts for everything, in my opinion, in technology. and it's also just very simple technology that does something very valuable. which is which is why I've I've stayed interested in it. That was a bit of a ramble. I'm not even sure what the original question was.

Kris No, I I asked I asked it's fine. I asked what makes Web3 domains superior over the traditional domains. Like pros and cons. I I threw a lot of a lot at you and then you started with the background, so I told you like give a little background. But yeah, that's that's good. We had Pram on, obviously. I talked to Pram last week or the week up before that.

Thomas Clowes No.

Kris and yeah, we were discussing, but we were mostly focusing on the a agent and AI related stuff. And that's actually really interesting. That ENS c like started as a simple kind of you know, service let's map, you know, Ethereum addresses to human readable names. And then it started expanding into okay, let's support like multiple addresses address standards like Bitcoin or you know whatever else at the time that was popular, maybe XRP or now Solana and all these. so it's like an extend like protocol

Thomas Clowes Well, I mean you say easily extensible. That's kind of one of the interesting things here, whereby the things that are pros are also cons. in the sense that like yeah, smart contracts generally are immutable and that gives you security and value in many respects and areas, but also constrains you in other areas. So things

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes like historical upgrade paths of ENS have been incredibly difficult and ENS V two, for example, I know that like the migration for ENS V two is gonna be the most fundamental and significant complexity of that rollout is because it's very difficult to upgrade immutable smart contracts efficiently, especially when you're fundamentally changing the architecture underlying how it works. I think that yeah, web three names have different use cases to web two domains. And I don't think that people should try and conflate the two. I think if people are like lots of people are kind of saying you can put your website on an ENS name and yeah, you absolutely can, and it is cool and you can have a decentralized website, but for me that's not the the real value. and I think the real value is in the incredibly simple use case that you have a human readable, easily shareable identifier to which you can conduct transactions. It's

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes a lot it passes the radio test, which is a similarity to domain names. If you can say it on the radio, people can instantly remember it and type it in, then you're you're doing well. If I say to someone, send money to if you say send money to cap.eth, Like it's just very difficult to get that wrong and that is the value. the world works on financial rails. If blockchain becomes a core financial rail, being e easy able to transact with people is important. And I think like this pulse going on, go on.

Kris No, I was gonna I was gonna ask or I was gonna say first. So it started with like a simple domain name service and then it started pivoting towards like a username service, sort of like universal usernames where you can map addresses to and use them like in your apps, in your wallets and all of these things. And I think kind of Coinbase kick started that whole thing with Cv dot ID. it extends the DNS world as well, so you can import any domain. And essentially turn it into an equivalent of that eth name. Same feature, same functionalities, in just inherits everything. but like from the mains, it kind of moved into the usernames, and then for a like brief period of time, like we had like a smart contracts naming being very popular with ENS Cribe guys. And now, like definitely the most interesting use case is agent identity. But I really like your framing that you just said, like it's universal identifier for anything on chain or even outside of like it doesn't have to be on chain. So like I I wanted to ask, what is how does the how does the ENS grow from right now currently has million registrations and like thirty something million, maybe forty million sub sub sub sub name registrations? How do we grow like to ten million? name registrations and maybe hundred million subdomain registrations, what do you think are is the next growth phase?

Thomas Clowes Yeah, see I think this is the interesting thing whereby draws together various parts of the conversation previously. I I always say what I think. I try to be pragmatic

Kris Ha ha ha.

Thomas Clowes and professional about it, but like I think there's definitely value in being honest because like you can only make things better if you know what the problems are. and I think that ENS has problems that it needs to fix if it's gonna be successful.

Kris Do you want to talk about them? Which the which they are?

Thomas Clowes Yeah, I'm just trying to think of like the best way of sort of phrasing my thoughts and kind of collating them. I think like ENSV two is on the horizon and the premise, as I understand it, of of that push is to have an ENS architecture that is more flexible so that people can do whatever they want and need under this yeah, flexible architecture. The problem, in my opinion, that ENS V one had is that one assumes that when the ENS smart contracts were first being written, Nick and the various actors involved in writing them thought, these are all the problems, this is the solution, problem solved. It's just a case of like the unknown unknowns. You don't know what people want and need in advance. And so it's difficult to prepare for something that you don't know. That can then go full circle, whereby you say rather than trying to make this as flexible as possible, why don't we just define a very small subset of functionality, build that functionality, lock it down, and leave it like that? And I know that like people that I know and respect have been of the opinion that ENS should have been a a a name value mapping, whereby you had a name, it points to an address, that's it. like the world's most simple smart contract, it does one job and that's it. And I actually think that like that would and potentially still could be great. Like you just register a name, it points to an address, you have it forever, and that's all it does. Like naming complete. If you want like it to point to an address on a different blockchain or you want it to point to text data or a website. That is a different product. That is different functionality. What ENS has chosen to do is they've gone for the like we want to do lots of things. And the risk in any industry is trying to do lots of things and doing none of them well. and the hope is, I assume, that V2 does most things. well whilst giving surface area to be more flexible where specific user needs require it.

Kris Yeah, you kind of brought it back to the ENS V2. So now I understand what you mean. You're speaking purely from from the technical perspective. And I thought you were maybe thinking that ENS tries to do like many different like things and use cases or whatever, right? But I think yeah, so I I agree from the technical perspective, but I think when you think about it, ENS does just one thing, which is naming. That's it. So it's simple, but it tries to tend to different industries, use cases, needs from the market, which I think is generally good. you know, as I said, when it started it was a domain, like you have a decentralized domain, and now it's more of a have a decentralized identity and they are just responding to the market needs and where the market is kind of growing interest from the market, I guess.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, and I mean it's an interesting one because like ENS labs, like over over the years we've had like I've had technical disagreements with members of ENS labs. There's lots of mutual respect and we try and

Kris I mean, yeah, yeah, we all have disagreements, that's fine.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, we we try and conduct things in a professional manner. Everyone wants to get to the same end goal. But I think that one thing that they they have done well is that they've just focused on building the the protocol level software. And for the most part, like if you want to use a text record to do something fun, interesting, novel, or new, like feel free to do that in your own time as your own business. Like we built the protocol. If you want to build on top of the protocol, go ahead. I think that like what's interesting is I quite regularly see like proposals or ideas being thrown about that essentially say like, well what about if we use ENS for this or this? And like I look at it and think to myself, that is a ridiculous idea. Like w like what a waste of time. No one is ever going to use that. But again, coming full circle, like I'm very often wrong. And like

Kris And AI agents are one of the things that you were wrong on, right?

Thomas Clowes Yeah. I mean yeah, I think it's not it's not so much that I was wrong. It's just not an interest of mine.

Kris Yeah, you just like you you would you didn't find it like super interesting. You still don't I mean, yeah, I'm I'm kind of exaggerating here.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, it's like a a AI is like game changing and I use it every day now and it's it's it's gonna change the world. but like I like naming things

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris Do know what what what are like when I was thinking and you know, I've like obviously we are also service providers as well with ENS we're funded by ENS and I have pitched ENS and and naming and identity and like usernames and passports. People call them so many things and s like depending on the use case, depending on the industry, depending on whether it's an app, whether it's a game, whether it's a protocol, whether it's this, whether it's that. So sometimes you have a technical conversation, sometimes you have like a super simple just like, Hey, this is so simple, like Lately I've been talking to a lot of neo banks. So that's like an entirely new conversation. And like as these new industries and use cases pop up, you have to like kind of go and venture into the unknown and figure out how do you want to talk to them and then like where do you start and like kind of feel the ground a little bit.

Thomas Clowes think with ENS it's an interesting one because it's like if, for example, a government like the British government decided and like the British government are talking about digital identity all the time at the moment, if hypothetically

Kris Mm-hmm.

Thomas Clowes the British government gave every citizen an ENS subdomain, that would make national press, it would make international press. Everyone would be talking about ENS potentially other governments would would want to do the same, et cetera, et cetera. It's like any technology. There's a certain level of like virality to it. If it if it gets into the public perception, then it proliferates. so I think like the easiest in inverted commas way of of getting millions and millions of registrations is a big consumer facing

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes use case of it in practice. So a bank, a government, et cetera, et cetera. But in the same way that people have talked about the public Ethereum blockchain versus enterprise blockchains in the past, like a bank, in my opinion, is unlikely to just use ENS one day. They're not just going to implement it one day. They're probably going to have all their own internal security procedures. They're going have their own internal blockchain or their own solution. they're going to be constrained by their legacy technology, etc. etc.

Kris Ja

Thomas Clowes So it's like it's it's easy to conceptualize but very difficult to actually execute. And my pitch having been involved in the ENS DAO for many, many years has always been like rather than having a referral program where we we try and get people to register more names by giving them financial incentives. We need to create a compelling product. Like it needs to do something and it needs to do something well such that people want to use it. And like that that's it really. Like because conceptually it's so simple, the fact

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes registration numbers are going down, honestly, it is Concerning to me. it suggests that like the product market fit isn't there, or that it's not simple enough to use. from a development point of view, I've pushed and highlighted this in the past that like the protocol is too complex in the sense that over the years more and more ENSIPs have been produced, different things have changed. There's different integrations, there's legacy integrations, there's different resolution paths. again, hopefully

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes V two is where this all gets resolved.

Kris Yeah, like we have been issuing sub names on ENS V one and then name wrapper and then you have the now ENS V two. So there's like three different levels of sub names that we're issuing from like three different like like sources where we issue sub names from. And there's like the say they're all ENS names, but they're all ENS names from different like, you know, like versions of the protocol. And we have to maintain all of them. So it's kinda like I I get what you're saying. But just going back to use cases, I think it's really interesting and how it evolves. You mentioned like banks and everything. Like we are kind of dipping our toes like pretty much everywhere and we're we're kind of like kind of feeling where we can talk and who we can talk to. And there's a little bit of I don't want to say too much, but like there's a little bit of conversations that that are happening on the government level. there's some C B D C roll outs that are gonna happen in some countries. and like nothing like you know Europe or European where it's like over regulation of everything. but someone like that are more kind of open to crypto or like alternative like I guess like things they can implement on the country level. especially like they're gonna have like a dedicated C B D C they're gonna have like a dedicated country level like a wallet. so they like I'm I'm totally fine, like whatever they choose, whatever they want to implement, whatever solution is fine. We're just like in the con like in the capacity of like, hey, Ethereum is important, Ethereum is really cool, and ENS is absolutely necessary for identity, for security, for all of these things. so there's like conversations there, but it's like so difficult because it's driven by politics, it's driven by influence, it's driven by interest, it's driven by so many different things. And it's really hard to kind of move the needle. And like just by the nature of things, on like when you're implementing something that touches like tens of millions of people, it just has to move slow. so there's that. But our mission has always been sort of like the same. Like I I I think even our X page has cover image that says name one billion people, name one billion users. and We wanna do that and sub names for us are the path to do that. and we'll see. We'll see. it's just like

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris I I mean there's so many things that I can unpack. but yeah, sorry, go ahead. Did you wanna say something?

Thomas Clowes Yeah, I think it's like when you say this, I think it's I think it's just really important to know your enemy. and like I find this day to day with my work, whereby it's things that would previously have taken me a year with AI now take me a week. And that's

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes really great for my productivity, but It's also great for everyone else's productivity. there's an element of like what's it imposter syndrome, whereby perhaps at times you don't fully appreciate like how valuable your actual deep low level understanding of technology is. Like I think that I can be incredibly efficient with AI because when it does something, I I can tell if it's done the right thing, and I can iterate. Whereas someone with a non-technical background doesn't have that ability. Like so often, yeah, the classic thing you see where vibe-coded software like it works, but it's full of security holes, like incredibly inefficient, etc. etc. But my p my point being, we're in a new era whereby like There's obviously the old adage that like you shouldn't reinvent the wheel. But now it's very easy to reinvent the wheel. So like actually you can just reinvent the wheel. so like it's even more important now than ever that like things like ENS are architected correctly. Because if there's any slight thing that doesn't work for big corporations need, they'll just reinvent the wheel.

Kris Yeah. Yeah. so I wanted to ask you something. So in the ENS's constitution, I think that it says that the ownership of the domain will never be infringed, I think is the word. so basically the domain that you buy or you rent on a per year basis will never be taken away from you as long as you just like keep renewing the domain name. and now that ENS is getting closer to the DNS space and sort of like acts as I guess as w as a bridge between web two and web three domains. there are certain things that there are certain rules that ENS has to abide by and one of which is that ENS domains like if they are displaying some I don't know some like weird content or like whatever you know that it's like forbidden. ENS has to be able to take down the domain or or do something like that. And I didn't know this, but like there's one of our clients which is PinMe. They have like they've been killing it and they they it's it's like such a unique use case. But the main industry the main sorry, the main country where they operate in is in China. And in China, there's a lot of weird stuff happening everywhere in the world, but like in China in this specific use case, they basically said like, hey, like these subdomains are built on a technology that no one can take down. So can pretty much do whatever they want. And for the most cases, for the most cases, like people are using them in a very interesting way, like to distribute like crypto articles that have been banned by the Chinese government, or they use them for like distributing some books that have been banned in some jurisdictions, or it's really interesting. Like there's even like some MP like MP3s, like some some you know, podcast episodes or songs. And I I've talked to ETH Limo guys, but like I mean just to get all of this data, but There's a lot, a lot, a lot, like and I mean millions and millions of like spam requests that I haven't asked them, like I just asked them like how they handle this and they just say like manually. So I guess pi I guess PINME guys will like report, like they will receive a report from the community and they will take a look at it and they will inform Limo guys and then Limo guys will put restrictions on what specific subdomains are not allowed to resolve. But like just what are you what's your opinion on on this whole thing? with DNS constitution and ownership of the domains and then just DNS getting closer to the DNS. Is it good, is it good, is it bad? Like what's your what's your thinking?

Thomas Clowes yeah, I mean, with the addendum that it's an opinion, and I also don't know what the the direction of the various entities involved is. Like I don't know what the ENS Foundation, what their ultimate end goal is, I don't know what ENS Labs is ultimate business approach is, etc, etc. My understanding of V two upgrade is that it's optional. so the constitution is actually quite flexible in the sense that like we, the royal we in inverted commas can can stand by the constitution Essentially ENS V one is immutable. And your rights cannot be taken from you. So if you don't upgrade, you always like the constitution has always been honored. similarly, V two at this point in time, I think, maintains all of those constitutional obligations, like your rights cannot be infringed in terms of like the ideas and discussions that are coming out of ICANN, yeah, if the the drafts were hypothetically published as is, and ENS with the dot ETH extension wanted to to fully integrate, they would they would have to abide by those rules. But like there's there's many, many hoops to jump through. So the draft as is states that the strings have to match. So given that dot ETH is not allocated in the DNS and cannot be allocated in the DNS, it's just it's not a problem at this point in time. obviously ENS have gone after dot ens. If I f if hypothetically they wanted to have an alternate namespace integration of the dot ens web two TLD, they would have to follow those rules. But

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes that's a new product. I

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes I feel like I'm I'm explaining myself badly, but what I'm basically saying is dot ETH Is the original ENS and the constitution holds. in principle, ENS can maintain that as as one product. Then they can get new TLDs that have a full DNS integration that have have different controls and constraints that abide by a different constitution, and then it just comes down to your your use case if you want

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes an e an ENS integrated name that integrates with web two, you have to use one of these TLDs that has these rules. If you want a fully decentralized, unobstructable name, you get the dot east.

Kris Do you ever see a future where Dad Ith, like the offici like the official Dadith the ICANN issue to Dadith is gets you know paired or merged with the Dadith, D N S one?

Thomas Clowes huh.

Kris Under some kind of a deal with Ethiopia, maybe?

Thomas Clowes it could happen, but not quickly. I think

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes like yeah, ICANN bureaucracy, it would take a decade and in terms of if it was merged I I can't I I I just can't see it. I c I just can't see it being realistic in any kind of short term

Kris Yeah. Yeah. Wha what do you what do you think in general

Thomas Clowes And it well.

Kris about the main tokenization and this whole movement? Because like there's this like real world asset and like get real world asset getting tokenized, like everything from like, you know, stocks and bonds and credit and like everything is it seems like everything is getting put on chain, like even the the gold and you know, whatever else. Obviously we had the stable coin are absolutely killing it, which is sort of the you know, the tokenized equivalent of a US dollar, and like other currencies. so what do you think about domains getting tokenized and like is there any value in that? just like what's your overall take?

Thomas Clowes it's not for me. That's the short version. Like

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes I d I just personally have never thought to myself like I want to own five percent of a domain name. And like John Berry Hill is one of the incredibly well

Kris No no.

Thomas Clowes reputed lawyers in the domain industry. And I know that like, yeah, when I worked for Uniregistry, he represented Frank. and and his domain portfolio. He posted a tweet a while back about domain takenization that that made the valid point. If a hundred people each own one share of a DNS name, who pays for the legal fees when there's a UDRP? Who hires the lawyer when there's a UDRP? Etc etc. Like it just it doesn't seem workable to me. And I just I don't really see product market fit in the sense that like I know lots of domain industry people and no one has ever said that this is something that they want. but I

Kris Yeah, I think

Thomas Clowes could be wrong.

Kris I think you misunderstood. So the domain tokenization doesn't necessarily mean domain fraction fractionalization or whatever the word is. Like I don't I'm not talking

Thomas Clowes yeah, yeah.

Kris about fractionalizing domains or like turning them into tradable ERC tokens or something like that. I just mean the tokenized domain with all its like ownership and information and like the kind of the who is of the blockchains. like all the information, all the like domain transfers are like painfully annoying when you have to transfer them between registrars and you have to pay the fee for some other domain and then you have like the authorization code and you cannot even transfer them within the first three months of like after like before you like when you acquire them. So there's like all of these rules and stuff. And especially like and what the most annoying one for me, and these are just like all personal use cases and maybe there's more, like the most annoying one for me is if I want to buy a domain. So I have to pay twenty-five dollars, you know, through name cheap, like it leads me to a different site, like on like name agents or whatever. And then like I hire someone for like $25 and they say like, good, we will reach out on your behalf. Like, I mean like I want to talk to the person, you know, I want to know their information. Like I want to be the one to say like, hey, like are you selling or not? First of all, just so I know whether I bother or not. And then next thing was like, okay, let's talk price. If yes and if no, like Is that a final no? You know what I mean? And it and whenever like and I've tried this like many, many times for namespace and for other domains, like they send a generic probably request, like, hey, you have an offer, you know, on your domain, and they just say, like, okay, whatever whatever, like I get like hundreds of hundreds of offers. But if I had an opportunity like I would have in in a web3 world, if the owner was actually interested in selling domains like on their profile on OpenC or like Grails or whatever else, they could have a link to their Twitter account, to their Telegram, to their whatever. I could just DM them and say, like, hey, are you open to like accepting offers on this name? Like I can make an offer, you know, but I will also want to send a message and talk to them directly. you know what I mean? even like hiring a broker in web three feels like it's a lot easier than actually like I wouldn't even know where to start to hire a broker in to for web two domain. Like, how does that even work? So like these are all the most obvious ones that I have personal experience and that I think web3 domain tokenization would fix.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, it's very interesting because one thing that I have wanted for a long time is back when I worked for Uniregistry, I bought a domain name with a colleague, a fairly high value domain name, and he had it transferred into his registrar account and as far as I'm aware, he still has control of it and I am not in contact with him anymore. purely just because our lives went in different directions. But technically I own fifty percent of that domain name. And at the time, whenever this yeah, over a decade ago, and even still now, I think to myself the solution that we need is a domain name registrar where you can have multiple owners of a domain name. So if he wants to change the name servers or he wants to transfer the name, I also have to sign off. And it's that

Kris Do you know about E and S diamonds? That's literally what we built.

Thomas Clowes Well so this is I do know about it, but this is where it's interesting because back in OG Ethereum days there were so many products being come c being released using this new blockchain technology and the the the big joke was like, But does this need a blockchain? People were building stuff using blockchain technology and it's cool, but it just doesn't need a blockchain. A domain registrar could very easily implement a system whereby two people need to click a button. And it doesn't need blockchain technology. It can just use normal authentication in a database. so it's like gotta be careful not to just try and ram blockchains into everything. and I think that that's the core value add is is something that can be done with technologies that have existed for a a long time before blockchain existed. Just trying to recall all the questions. Yeah. So in terms of if you are gonna use a blockchain, then yeah, you have this synchronization problem. And the reality is in the same way that like Java developers still get paid an absolute shitload of money, it's because lots of l legacy systems are built on Java and there's a lot less Java engineers nowadays. So if you're competent supply and demand, you get paid a lot of money. Domain name technology, like the shared registration system, how registries work, how EPP works, how registrars communicate with registries, like it's legacy. Like all of these companies that are going after new GTLDs have registry service providers who have built this technology. It's not remotely easy to replace that. So like even if you co even if you wanted to, it's just not going to get replaced. In the same vein, when I first went to work for domain name sales, it was built on a very legacy platform. And there was that classic situation whereby one engineer knew how it all worked. And you had to be very careful with changing anything because he was the only person that understood all of the like the deep interconnections of the software. So if you did something that looked harmless, you could potentially break everything. And so so many times we had the conversation, do we just start from scratch? And the answer was always no. When Uniregistry was built, that was built from scratch. but yeah, the the basic problem is even if blockchain technology is is great, the legacy technology is not going to be replaced. So you need to work with what you have and therefore the synchronization needs to go in that direction. You need to synchronize data from the legacy systems onto the blockchain and vice versa. And that's a tough problem.

Kris Yeah. it's very interesting. so I think the the domain tokenization like has certainly some use cases. I'm not saying that we all know which direction this is gonna go. but I'm saying like if everything else is getting tokenized and getting on chain, it's only logical that you put domains on chain. Even if you don't see the clear use case like ten, twenty years down the road, it's worth doing it. And people are already doing it. So I think some kind of technology should exist where you like so the problem right now is that even if I tokenize my domain, let's say I have I have Chris.cash and I tokenize, like I I literally you know minted a token for it through ENS. For someone who doesn't know, you could just go to ENS app. If you have any domain, whatever domain you have, just type that domain name, like whatever mine is Chris. and You go through like a three-step process and you tokenize the domain, you set up some records and you click mint token, and that's it. You're done. So I have an instance of Chris.cache in a like as a as a ERC 1155 token, right? And it inherits all of the properties that ENS has, right? So like I can add a description to it. I can add obviously you know, my name, my socials, my different addresses, and all of that stuff. But that information about that domain on chain is not gonna correlate with the information of that name of that domain in Namecheap where I bought it. So I think this is the kind of the issue that we're talking about. Like, how do we synchronize this so that like when you change something on chain for a domain that you tokenized, it immediately changes in whichever is your registrar provider. For me, that's namecheap. And vice versa. Like if I change something in the in in namecheap. It should reflect that state on chain. So I think this is an issue that I haven't seen anyone build or solve and I'm trying to talk Thomas into doing it. Just for fun.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, like so like I mean yeah, I think we briefly alluded to this, but like my intention is to do this. but not but the the directionality of it has to be very specific. so like blockchains for example, there's a lot of technical constraints, for example, reorganizations. What happens if I update my record on the blockchain, it gets synchronized to my registrar, but then the blockchain gets rolled back. and the these are incredibly like complicated problems which relate like the it

Kris To you found like the the father of all edge cases. Like what happens if blockchain rolls back? I mean like how

Thomas Clowes Hold on.

Kris often will that happen? But yeah, it's a really like I I would have never thought of that.

Thomas Clowes But you say this, but it's like this is basically the problem with things like bridging and L2s. Like

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes in principle it's simple, but the edge cases would like destroy it immediately.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes there's also other like interesting things like blockchains are inherently public until like ZK technology moves on appropriately. Like I can't put my name and address on a blockchain. And have it synced to my registrar without exposing that information to everybody. And like who is privacy services a big business for registrars? Like people want their information to be private. So these two things don't necessarily work very well together.

Kris Mm.

Thomas Clowes but like the other thing, and I mean probably the core constraint is I can Contractual and legal obligations like registrars and registries have legal contracts with ICANN. They have to do specific things. And as like a a registry, for example, cannot control the blockchain, but they can control their own software. So it's like

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes if I have If I have legal obligations, it's obviously very easy for me to meet my legal obligations if I have complete control over the software. so like what I envision happening is it will be essentially registry first. Like information will be propagated onto the blockchain, but it will never start on the blockchain. You won't be able to update a record on the blockchain. and have it synced to the registry,

Kris huh, huh, huh.

Thomas Clowes you will update it on the registry and it will be synced to the blockchain.

Kris I guess like I'm fine starting like that, but that's kinda that kinda you know, that kinda sucks. I wanna update it on the blockchain. But can you just like implement some kind of a delay bit like between the s like while the session like gets synced or something like that?

Thomas Clowes Yeah, so I mean e again, this is where like all of the different elements of of this come together. It's the business case. Like there's solutions to all of these problems. The question is, is the cost of implementing the solution worth the potential profit? And I'm already sceptical about some TLD's ability to be profitable if they now have to invest in additional technology as well. And they have to make sure that their blockchain implementation is always synced and there's no rollbacks and all of the data is correct. All of a sudden you need to hire more people to monitor this, you need to build more technology, and and the business case doesn't exist anymore. So like

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes with with the the technical working group, when it was announced, they basically said lots of registries and registrars have asked for this. So we're talking about it. But they didn't announce who had asked. But like in my opinion, the only people that it it it really matters to are the are the big entities that operate at scale because like any technical requirements that are too costly immediately make it a a poor business decision to actually implement.

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes I mean, personally, I wouldn't be surprised if when it all is said and done, I can basically just say like like, yeah, this is too hard. We're we're not gonna do this. and I think and and like one of the things that I always found interesting about the existence of this technical working group anyway, is they're proposing that this be implemented at the registry level. Whereas In my opinion, it should be implemented at the registrar level.

Kris What should we implement in registrar level?

Thomas Clowes the the discussion of the technical working group is essentially in regards to a potential RCP, which is a registry services evaluation program where basically a registry can say, We want to do this novel thing, can we do it? And then I can say yes or no. And if I can say yes, then it opens the door for other registries saying, Okay, we want to do the same thing. Are we allowed to do it? And if I kind of said yes to one entity, they're gonna say yes to the other entity. but like I I'm not sure what the justifications are or the reasoning, but the the implication is that I can want some level of control over integration with alternate naming services. But like if you go to n Namecheap, for example, when you register a domain name, when you check out, sometimes it says to you, Do you want web hosting? Do you want an email address? And you can just click a button and and you get that functionality. That is not controlled by any contractual agreement with ICANN. That's just a business decision made by each individual

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes registrar. And I think that that's the level where alternate namespaces should be integrated is a case by case registry level decision. If Namecheap wants to integrate its TLDs with ENS, for example, they would when you register Thomas123.com. You check out, it says,

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes Do you want this do you want this on the blockchain? If you do, you click a button, you sign a transaction, job done.

Kris That's actually a really, really, really cool use case. and a business model, I guess. I wonder if anyone has thought of that. That's really interesting too.

Thomas Clowes I mean I think the thing is like people have definitely thought about it, but like gotta be careful how to phrase it. Like ICANN in my opinion is definitely net positive. Like when you're coordinating between st like loads of stakeholders, it's a very difficult problem. So that it necessitates a certain level of bureaucracy. But like I do think that in some respects they might be overcomplicating the problem. and I think that the reason that they're potentially overcomplicating the problem is because you don't want like confusion or like you don't want the ultimate consumer to have problems as a result of decisions made by entities that you cannot control. So like When Unstoppable had dot wallets and there were lots of alternate dot wallets, yeah, that creates confusion for users. And when people see dot something, they immediately think of domain names. So there's an argument that like the things that unstoppable do make ICANN look bad. And by

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes doing this, they're stopping third parties from making them look bad.

Kris Yeah. We'll see. I just wanted to say something, like like we we would identify the problem and I guess like there's a difference between you and me in terms of like when is the right time to start pursuing something. So for me, that is like, this is fucking cool. Like this is obvious problem. Let's try to build something. So that's me. Like I'm kind of I don't think I don't think things through to the level of like d depth that you do. And I think what you're trying to try to do is fine. Like you try to minimize all the risks and remove all the like unknowns and uncertainties before you actually pursue something and you want to like know that like when you get this done, there's gonna be someone at the end waiting for you to like you know, okay, this is done, like let's implement this, let's do this. But and that's t totally fine. Like but I would love if you met me a little bit, like not halfway, but like at least like 10% be more like me. And I should be like probably 10% more like you. But that would allow you to just like build a prototype and maybe slap like X4 or 2 or something like on top of it. And then like if people just use it, like you pay like mic some microtransactions, you like you get paid in whatever, like you know, cents on on every single like whatever like verification that you do, when something changes in the whatever your registrar is, the the kind of the state synchronizes on the blockchain and you put everything on Ethereum, whatever, blah blah. So you you figure it out however you want to do it as an experiment. But I think during that process you learn a lot more that you couldn't have possibly known without actually getting started. Which is the crux of of of everything. And this is why I prefer to like just like go ahead and build stuff. And even if it like after a month I realize like, okay, it doesn't make sense. I'll put a pause on it and maybe I come back to it in three months when things get a little bit more c more clarity, or I'll stop at some point. Maybe I just like completely neglect the project. Maybe I come back to it a year later, you know, and then I redo it a little bit. But without starting it, like it's really difficult to to see the good stuff and the bad stuff. You can obviously like ba based on what kind of person you are, whether you're like more like on a like not pessimist and nothing, but like Some people like are just like too optimistic and then say like they don't see any problems and they say like, okay, we'll figure them out. But some people are more like on the cautious side of things. and they like have these like breaks in terms of like getting started. So I think like it's really, really good to start. and I think it's really cool problem.

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris I've we we all like identify them as a problem and yeah, it's not like a, you know like a new like a fintech app then you've come up with came up with something that is like super cool. But like what if what if it ends up being that, you know? What if it ends up being used? What if people just like it? And as I said, like I would do it sort of like open source right now and who knows, maybe it turns into some kind of like web three slash web two org that does like one specific thing. maybe. I I'm I'm just encouraging

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris you to to to give it a try. At least a prototype.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, I think it's it's definitely true. I am definitely an engineer. I'm very confident that I have like ten unicorns on my hard drive that I've never released. I I I I j I just I I like I hyper focus on problems and build, in my opinion, really good solutions. And then once I've built them, I'm a perfectionist. And then once I've perfected it, I just get bored. and that

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes that that is my weakness. I'm very aware of it. I think like stuff like that, yeah. Like I I love identity, I love the domain name industry, I'm active in it. I think that like I could have been significantly more successful if my brain worked in a different way to the to the way that it does work. but like I I would absolutely work on these problems and N I'm probably saying too much, but I am working on these problems.

Kris Alpha.

Thomas Clowes but purely because I find them really interesting. like yeah, and that's that's ultimately it. and

Kris Yeah.

Thomas Clowes I don't know, I guess it's like again, coming full circle to to money. I'm sure that I could make more money, but like I just I instead I just do stuff that I find interesting.

Kris I'm not I'm not like this I'm I'm not forcing you to do this because of the potential for money that I see in this. I'm just forcing you to do this because of just the potential of solving a cool thing. You know? Even if it doesn't

Thomas Clowes Yeah. Well yeah.

Kris like even if it doesn't make money, who cares? It's just like we're living in an age of AI, so you can probably piece it together in like under a month, like a functional prototype.

Thomas Clowes Yeah.

Kris And just like you obviously have the connection, so just like send it out and say, like, okay, here's a one pager. Problem description, solution description, query quickly. If you wanna dive deeper, here's follow these links down the rabbit hole. And here's a solution. Take a look. You know?

Thomas Clowes Yeah. I mean the short version is that is what I'm doing and planning on doing.

Kris Sounds good. All right. Should we wrap this up? I should probably kick click stop. Any last words for our

Thomas Clowes Ha ha ha.

Kris million listeners?

Thomas Clowes like and subscribe.

Kris Let's go. Keeping it keeping it simple, keeping it productive, I guess. All right.

Thomas Clowes Yeah, I mean this has been fun.

Kris Right, we should we'll do this again, man. We'll we'll probably do I mean, yeah. Anything any anytime anything happens with with ENS. Now I have the platform. Like the pre previously it was a problem that where I didn't have the platform. Like I wish I had this where like we we were s like I wish I w I had this when the whole few months back the ENS governance situation was happening. I would really have loved to just speak to people publicly about everything. I would have loved to have this like when I was starting. So I can look back and all the things that like I was talking about, and like what was perception of namespace and ENS like three years ago versus now and all of these things. Like I would love to I I think this is just like a really cool thing to have to document things, you know. and I'm I'm certain I'm gonna talk to you again. But thank you for coming.

Thomas Clowes No I hope so. Right, yeah. Thank you if you haven't.

Kris Alright, I'm hitting stop. Bye everyone.

Thomas Clowes Enjoy your l enjoy your lunch.