Weekly Roundup 27th Jan

This is a quick weekly catch-up for your convenience. This has been one for building and all our recent developments are swiftly reaching the shipping stage.

Recent Developments

Autosuggest Feature

We’re excited about our new feature that’ll enable suggestions/keyword searches for a domain name on our website. An easy access upgrade bound to improve your browsing experience. Here’s a sneak peek below.

Pushing .sol Categories On-Chain

The Solana Name Service launched SNS Optics not too long ago, which allocates domain names to certain categories. Where each category displays its own individual statistics based on trading activity.

These categories, however, have always been an off-chain deployment. This means it limits these categories to act as separate collections under the SNS umbrella, for example.

Currently, we’re working on deploying the separate categories on-chain which will allow for cool functionalities such as collection bidding for the categorized NFT domains.

Subdomain Name Registration

We're building an entirely new smart contract for owners of parent domains to efficiently distribute and monetize their subdomains.

If you own a .sol domain, you should know that you can create an infinite number of subdomains and distribute these to different pubkeys for free. Nonetheless, parent domain name owners still have to create the subdomain names themselves and distribute these manually, without any compensation, which can be a painful process.

Our new smart contract will circumvent this by allowing the parent owner to easily distribute their subs and receivers to buy/attain these through a simple registration (almost identical to registering a parent domain).

This presents powerful opportunities for branding but also for NFT, GameFi, SocialFi & Metaverse projects looking to solidify their community. Whether this may be creating exclusive communities for Discord, DAOs and airdrops or having an in-game identity, for example, closely aligned to your project's brand.

.sol Going xChain

Using Wormhole, users will soon be able to export their domains to an alternative chain. We're first supporting an EVM-based chain. So, apps built around the EIP-137 (ENS) specification on supported chains can resolve SNS natively, with practically no change to their codebase.

Solana will remain the source of truth for all SNS domains and associated records. Our ambition is to grow SNS into a first-class DID system, where users can explore web3 & become de facto Solana ambassadors.

It's not easy to build a truly xChain app on Solana but this doesn't have to be the case, especially since the basic building blocks for such apps already exist. We intend to show it's possible to build an app on Solana w reach beyond the ecosystem itself.