AZERO.ID: The first-ever privacy-enhanced domain system
Hello everyone and welcome to my 1st article on an ecosystem project in Aleph Zero's EFP, and today, I’ll be covering AZERO.ID (formerly known as AZERO Domains), the domain service building on Aleph Zero that’s been hailed to be offering the first-ever private domain-to-domain asset transfers. In this article, I’ll be going over the problems with current crypto DNS’, and the solutions that AZERO.ID is providing to the crypto space, the team behind the project, and so on.
This article will divided into 5 parts: The Problem, The Solution, The Team, The Funding, Integrations & Roadmap, and The Conclusion, so make sure to begin from the start (The Problem) before moving on to the other parts. Now let us begin, shall we?
The Problem:
From the first ever blockchain project, Namecoin, to the famous Ethereum project, ENS, DNS’ (Decentralised Name Services) has become a staple in the crypto space for users to purchase and own their domain name on their favorite blockchain network to make sending funds to other addresses easier and fluent. Without DNS’, crypto just wouldn’t be the same as it is today, because without it, it would make sending funds to addresses more prone to human error (accidentally misspelling a public address), makes alphanumerical character addresses harder to remember, and sometimes it can lead to fraud.
However, as good as these DNS's are, there is also a list of cons that users need to consider when they first buy their domain name from one of these services. Two good examples of DNS’ on Ethereum that suffer from 2 challenges are ENS and Unstoppable Domains (UD). One of these challenges is domain squatting, which is a serious issue that none of these two DNSs’ can’t seem to solve.
Domain squatting happens when domain services like ENS and UD suffer from a no. of speculators that collect a massive list of domains to sell them at a higher price in the future, depending if these domains are valuable or not. Because of domain squatters, the utility of these on-chain domains for users has sadly been reduced.
Furthermore, these said DNS’ fail to capture a relationship with their communities, as these name systems are central hubs for the community, and for the name service to see any kind of growth, they need value creation and revenues to be generated for the growth of the community and the ecosystem itself. Due to this failure, there’s now a lack of efficient use and allocation of these obtained funds from the community.
The Solution:
AZERO.ID is set out to be the first-ever privacy-enhanced domain system in the crypto space. To onboard the next users that decide to join the AZERO ecosystem and soon the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems, they will be introducing a couple of key innovations and use cases to make that happen:
Improvements to the user experience: On-chain domains from AZERO.ID solves the lack of quality UX by providing an easy way to transact and/or interact with applications on Aleph Zero. The user’s domain will be their starting point in creating their on-chain identity and exploring the AZERO ecosystem. And just like that, the headache of double-checking wallet addresses repeatedly before making a transaction is now a thing of the past.
First ever privacy-enhanced domain system: AZERO.ID will be the first movers in the crypto space to offer private domain-to-domain asset transfers. Because of this, this will lead to a huge leap in the user experience of on-chain domains since it’s the first time users can leverage their identity via a domain without revealing the user’s wallet balances and on-chain activities. Not to mention that all of this is being powered by Liminal, the soon-to-be-released privacy framework of Aleph Zero.
Aggregate your social identity: Users can establish their on-chain brand and identity by adding any metadata they would like to have, like social handles (Twitter, YouTube, Discord, etc.), wallet addresses, credentials, and ZK-Proof to their domain. Users can leverage it in all their on-chain activities such as payments, messaging, and governance.
Trustless subdomains: Users can issue subdomains with unique member IDs & explore limitless opportunities to manage their community, employees, or NFT collection to their liking.
Fully user-owned NFTs: All domains that users mint are represented as NFTs on the blockchain with full user custody. Soon, the team will aim to make the protocol itself completely decentralized.
Personalized website: With each domain, users can expect to receive a link to a personalized website that they can share with all their social profiles, showcase their, and more.
Trustless identity systems: Users can find that they can enable verified asset & contract identities, Sybil-protected governance, under-collateralized DeFi, or a unique identity system for their game/metaverse.
Auctions: Users can decide to bid on exclusive domain names to set themselves apart in the digital world. This feature will be available soon, as this is still in development as part of their native domain marketplace. For trading domains right from the beginning, AZERO.ID has officially partnered with ArtZero, which is currently the central marketplace to buy, sell, and trade NFTs on Aleph Zero.
Multiple AI-powered categories: To increase the adoption of on-chain domains further, the team at Scio Labs has introduced multiple AI-powered categories for AZERO.ID's domain search, allows users to select a category of their choice (Music, Business, NFT, etc.) and type in their idea into the input field aka the domain search bar. When a user does this, the AI will automatically come up with suggestions that relate to the user's idea based on which category they've chosen!
Referral System: AZERO.ID introduces an on-chain referral system for users to refer others into buying their first domain by using their referral code. In return, the referrer gets a 5% bonus on the registration fee (the user can even save 10% on their second domain purchase by using their first domain as the referrer), and the other user gets a 5% discount when inputting their referral code at the registration checkout! Not only this, but AZERO.ID has also added a referral dashboard, which gives you the ability to easily track your latest and overall referral history, quickly get your referral link, and see where you rank in our global leaderboard! To give an example about the referral system - if the registration fee for your domain is $10, you'll get a $0.50 discount and only pay $9.50 by using someone's referral code, and the person who referred you will also receive a $0.50 credit.
Now you might ask: how much is the domain going to cost and what’s the yearly renewal fee? AZERO.ID have stated in their FAQ (found on their website and in their documentation) that the base fee for a 5+ character domain is 6 AZERO per year. However, longer, upfront registrations require paying a premium (2 years = 18 $AZERO and 3 years = 36 $AZERO).
Due to this, the team is dedicated to achieving fair yearly domain renewal fees by introducing a demand-based pricing mechanism soon. But what is a demand-based pricing mechanism, you might ask? Well before AZERO.ID proposed this idea for the platform, Vitalik Buterin spoke about a demand-based renewal fee for on-chain domains back in September 2022 in a blog post.
In simple terms, a demand-based pricing mechanism will make several improvements for on-chain domain systems:
Prevention of domain squatting: By tying renewal fees to demand, the system can minimize the unproductive hoarding of desirable domain names.
Reduction of value extraction: The proposed fees are intended to decrease the profit that can be obtained by those who manipulate the scarcity of popular domains, benefiting projects and communities instead.
Increased utility for users: Implementing this fee structure could free up a greater number of blocked and unused domains, expanding opportunities for legitimate use.
For that reason, a domain registration period is not extendable after purchase right now, but if you would like to learn more about the pricing models for AZERO.ID, you can find them here.
How about adding different types of characters and languages to our domain name? Well as of writing and publishing this article, users can only register 5+ character domains with lowercase Latin letters, numbers, and hyphens in between. But don’t be disgruntled by this, as the team will be continuously adding more characters and languages to the supported character set.
The Team:
AZERO.ID is being developed by Scio Labs (located in Berlin, Germany) which is building the platform on Aleph Zero and soon expand its services to Polkadot and Kusama via XCM. They’re passionate about everything web3 and crypto, and this is all driven by the spirit of decentralization. The team started AZERO.ID with a successful participation at the ETHWarsaw hackathon back in September 2022, where they won first prize from the Aleph Zero Foundation and today, the primary goal was and still is to improve the overall Aleph Zero user experience with the simplicity of on-chain domains.
They chose to build on Aleph Zero because they’ve been very active in the community ever since day 1 and as a result of this, the team was the first successful applicant in the Aleph Zero Ecosystem Funding Program (EFP).
Before starting AZERO.ID, the team has had initial success building previous projects on Ethereum and Polkadot like stablecoins.wtf, a Data Dashboard and education platform about Stablecoins and Stake for Earth, a project coming soon that enables users to compound yield for Climate Action at 0 cost. They also act as an advisory across other ecosystem projects outside Aleph Zero, like BrilliantBlocks and Narratic.
In this section, I'll list both of the co-founders of Scio Labs and AZERO.ID below, but if you would like to see who else is on the team (including myself), make sure to look in AZERO.ID's Discord server for a user that has a little AZERO.ID logo next to their name (if you hover over it, it'll say 'Core team') and that their profile name is colored yellow. You can just also visit Scio Labs' and AZERO.ID's LinkedIn account and see who else is on the team.
Mike Schneider (Co-founder):
Mike is one of the two co-founders of both Scio Labs and AZERO.ID, and has worked for some of the most prestigious companies known in Germany, such as being an Intern in Deal Advisory / TS for KPMG, an Analyst for EBS Invest, a Consultant for James Consulting, and many more.
In terms of education, Mike graduated from the University of Hong Kong in Business and Finance in 2018 and has also graduated from the EBS University of Economics and Law in General Management in 2019 and in Masters of Science in 2021.
Dennis Zollmann (Co-founder):
Dennis is the 2nd co-founder of Scio Labs and AZERO.ID, and he's also worked for some well-known companies in Germany, working as an Entrepreneur in Residence at soonami.io GmbH, and working at zollsoft GmbH for more than 10 years as a Designer and full-stack Developer, Project Manager, and Advisor.
When it comes to Dennis' education, he graduated from the University of Jena in Computer Science in 2018.
The Funding, Integrations & Roadmap:
With the rebranding from AZERO Domains to AZERO.ID and the launch of its mainnet on the 22nd of August 2023, the team behind the project has successfully secured funding in a pre-seed round, which will provide them more manpower and resources to develop the project for the long term. They’ve been lucky to attract and connect to so many well-minded individuals from Aleph Zero and some AZERO ecosystem projects and were proud to participate in the pre-seed funding round.
Because of this, AZERO.ID is proudly backed by Aleph Zero, Parity Technologies, the Web3 Foundation (W3F), Block54, Nxgen, Rana Capital & WWVentures. Not only was the funding fundamental to the growth of this project but AZERO.ID also has an abundance of technical expertise among this group of investors, with the most important areas being ink!, Substrate, Aleph Zero, and the Dotsama ecosystem.
In terms of grants, Scio Labs was successfully rewarded with a research grant from the Web3 Foundation (W3F) to explore the architecture of an XCM-based Cross-Parachain domain system. If you didn't know, the Web3 Foundation is one of the core contributors to the Polkadot SDK and its ecosystem, including the cross-chain messaging protocol XCM, and the Rust-based smart contract language ink!.
So far, AZERO.ID has an impressive list of partners and projects they plan to integrate their technology with (and some of these are from the funding round too). Here’s the list of the partnerships and integrations so far:
Aleph Zero
SubWallet
azero.dev Wallet
Common
Signer
Abax Finance
Ink Whale
Parity Technologies
Cardinal Cryptography
PanoramaSwap
Gatenox
Kudelski Security
Subsquid
Subscan
Syncra
ArtZero
DRKVRS
Just Ape
Nightly Wallet
C14
Swiss Staking AG
Kintsu
To further increase the decentralization of the Aleph Zero blockchain, AZERO.ID has set up a community validator/node that allows users to stake on their validator to secure the network in exchange for around 11% APY (this will decrease over time, though).
As of writing this article, the AZERO.ID Validator already has 7.99M $AZERO staked with them, 305 nominators, 100% uptime, and it only charges a 5% commission fee! When it comes to the industrial-grade security of this node, AZERO.ID decided to partner with Swiss Staking AG, so they can operate the node in a specialized data center located in a former military bunker in the Swiss Alps. Here are the specifications of the AZERO.ID Validator:
Location: Former military bunker in Switzerland. Protected against natural or human-caused catastrophes.
Failover: Active and passive redundancy with manual initialization.
Core: AMD CPU Ryzen 7 5800X 8x3.8 GHz, 128 GB DDR4 RAM.
24 / 7 Monitoring: State-of-the-art Prometheus & Grafana monitoring stack.
Model: Dedicated Bare-Metal-Server.
Storage: 2 TB NVMe SSD with RAID-10 fault tolerance.
If you would like to know how to stake with AZERO.ID's validator, I've linked the site that takes you to AZERO.ID's page guides you through the staking process for multiple supported wallets in the References section of this article.
Finally, AZERO.ID has also laid out a well-planned roadmap for their future developments. The roadmap includes points that have been COMPLETED and some that are to be completed SOON, like:
Hackathon winner at ETHWarsaw 2022 - COMPLETED in Q3 2022
100K+ registrations on the testnet - COMPLETED in Q3 2022
Accepted to the Aleph Zero EFP - COMPLETED in Q4 2022
Launch on the Aleph Zero mainnet - COMPLETED in Q3 2023
Expansion to the Dotsama ecosystem - SOON
Native domain marketplace - SOON
Private domain-to-domain transfers - SOON
Token & DAO governance - SOON
The Conclusion:
In conclusion, AZERO.ID is poised to disrupt the DNS space with its amazing technological innovations, like its variable demand-based pricing mechanism, private domain-to-domain asset transfers, trustless identity systems, and so on. The team behind AZERO.ID has a lot to accomplish in the future to make this DNS the best it can offer to users, so if you would like to, you can also subscribe to their newsletter on their website (found in the References section below) to get the latest news about development, integrations, achievements, etc. Don’t forget to join their socials if you haven’t as well, which are all also found in the References section below and on their website.
References:
AZERO.ID Website - https://azero.id/
Scio Labs Website - https://scio.xyz/
Documentation - https://docs.azero.id/
Staking with AZERO.ID's Validator - https://azero.id/staking
Twitter / X - https://twitter.com/AZERO_ID
Discord - https://discord.com/invite/azero-id
Telegram - https://t.me/azero_id
GitHub - https://github.com/azero-id
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