Analysis of 3 BNS Projects — GoDID

1. The Stacks BNS

It’s a domain name service system with the suffix “.btc” that is built based on the smart contract on Stacks. And Stacks is a Bitcoin smart contract chain, which helped implement the deployment of DeFi, NFT, and various decentralized applications.

At present, users who want to register a domain name on btc.us will need to a Hiro or Xverse Wallet and use $STX as a payment method. Domains cost 2 $STX(about 1 USDT) today and renew every 5 years.

Stack BNS supports users to bind addresses on the Stacks chain and lightning network addresses to their domain names, which means users can send and receive assets in the Stacks ecosystem and lightning network through their .btc.

From this point of view, Stack BNS is generated based on the Stacks chain, its data is stored in Stacks.

2. The Text Type BNS

Project Features of Text Type BNS

Since this domain name is a text-type inscription, it complies with the rules of the inscription: any user can inscribe the domain name with any suffix through the code and it will be served on a first-come-first-served basis, Which also means anyone can deploy the domain names with any suffix, such as .uniswap, .bank, .pepe, etc.;

In addition, there is no difference between uppercase and lowercase for Text type BNS names. E.G., if someone minted SUSHI.btc, then you can not mint SUshi.BTC/sushi .btc, etc.

Please note that although Ordinals supports domain name inscriptions with any suffix, it does not mean that any suffix domain name can be a domain name and carry a certain value. If it is not integrated by the wallets or other Dapps, then it is just a textual inscription NFT without value. (could be valuable in the future)

Tools That Support Text Type BNS

3. The BTCdomain BNS

The BTCdomain BNS is built based on the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol and ZK-STARK. It is more like a domain name comprehensive service platform, not only providing domain name registration but also providing domain name resolution and other related services. It somehow works in a way similar to ENS on Ethereum.

If a user wants to obtain a domain name on BTCdomain, they first need to have an Ordinals-type wallet address. During the registration process, in addition to paying the Gas fee on the Bitcoin chain, users also need to pay an additional annual service fee(one lump sum for 5 years at most).

Pricing of BTC Domain BNS

According to the official statement, The BTCdomain BNS is in JSON format, and the design of anti-duplication and anti-tampering signature has been achieved during the initial design, so the BTCdomain BNS has been deduplicated to ensure the uniqueness of each domain name.

Compared with the Stacks BNS, the metadata of BTCdomain BNS is completely stored on the Bitcoin chain, and it allows its users to send/receive Bitcoin & inscription assets.

However, some users have criticized that due to the existence of the BTC Domain, it is not as decentralized as the text type BNS.

4. Summary

To sum up, the 3 BNS projects analyzed above are different in terms of service providers and operating systems :

(1) The Stacks BNS: Although it uses .btc as the suffix, its functions and usage scenarios are more inclined to the Stacks ecosystem itself;

(2) The Text Type BNS:

Pros: there are no renewal fees and its distribution method is relatively fair.

Cons: the application scenarios and resolution are still problems as these kinds of domain names are growing from the spontaneous organization and operation of the community members.

(3) The BTC domain BNS: Although it’s Bitcoin’s native domain name that supports multiple wallet resolutions, it is criticized by users for its service fees, domain name registration restrictions, and centralization issues.