Weekly Roundup

Solana Name Service Stats

The volumes are looking up and so are the number domains. Numbers are everywhere!

Developments

Product tour

There’s a lot to navigate through on our website and we want to be sure to welcome newcomers with open arms. Now, if you visit certain parts of our website for the first time you’ll be guided with our new product tour.\

Popup view

Did you want to take a quick look at a domain’s information while you’re browsing? Then the new popup feature is just for you. Click the information tab on the domain card to see a quick view of the domain.

Korean Character Support

This week we added an additional language to the Solana Name Service. Korean domain names are available for registration and secondary sales. In the past, we had to act cautiously when considering expanding the language support of SNS domains to prevent our users from being scammed by hidden unicodes. As of now, we have found a way to do so carefully and conservatively - so you can expect more to be added in the near future.

Community-Driven Initiatives

A community member added a PR to Backpack wallet to allow them to potentially become the first domain name website resolver for Solana at the wallet level. If the PR is pushed you can look forward to both SNS & ENS domain names being supported for resolution using Backpack's extension. By using the wallet, users can resolve .sol domain names directly in their browsers. We love to see these community-driven initiatives!

Partner Spotlight: Hodlezz

Let’s look back at one of our cool partnerships within the last month. Hodlezz, a crypto asset manager, opted for efficiency for their users with .sol domain names. Type in any domain name to see data aggregated from its activity. A much simpler approach than the copy/paste method of addresses.

So, what is a domain?

Yes, it’s likely that you know how a domain name is used or its higher-level purpose but do you know how it’s developed on Solana? There are many small nuances that are often misunderstood when talking about the root domain, a TLD and all of their “children”. The crux of it all is that everything is essentially a domain. Take some time to familiarise yourself with the backend work and really understand what your domain is made up of with this article.

Restarting Unclaimed Auctions

All unclaimed initial auctions will be restarted at the end of this month. We moved to direct registration of .sols more than one year ago, which means unclaimed initial auctions have been stale for quite some time. The auction system was adopted in the beginning in an effort to ensure the domains’ fair distribution. These initial auctions required the winner themselves to claim the domain, however, many of these are still unclaimed and have been for more than a year now. We trust users who won these initial auctions have had enough time to claim their domain. If not, we urge you to do so before the 31st of May. If you leave the domain unclaimed past this date you'll be able to cancel your bid.

Bigger & Better Things to Come

We’ve officially announced that we are deprecating our staking smart contract for a more favorable system moving forward. Our learnings; the current staking model doesn't effectively encourage voting, resulting in suboptimal governance processes. We also realized the importance of attracting users who genuinely want to contribute to the network, rather than just those looking for passive rewards.

In saying this we are making some changes for the betterment of the ecosystem and these will include, (1) rerouting staking reward, (2) introducing a new governance system, (3) implementing a liquidity incentive program and lastly (4) establishing a grant program. We believe these changes will significantly improve the overall health and long-term sustainability of our project. As always, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out.

In the meantime, you can read more about the expected changes here.

Grant Program

Our old grant program has received a proper facelift. The new process is much simpler and more efficient. If you think you can contribute to the SNS community in general (anything from building to content) this is worth exploring. The process is outlined here but it mostly involves joining our Discord and participating in an active conversation. We already have four open bounties you can keep your eye out for.

We hope that funding community-driven projects will help improve the dev ecosystem & further solidify the SNS community. We want to prioritize active participation & incentivize the contributors to create an environment that fosters collaboration & innovation.