W3DNA - How Domains Without Extensions Work

[Anthony Lee]

How Domains Without Extensions Work​

W3DNA is a service that offers you NFT domains without extensions. But for some of us it is still unclear how these domains function. Today, we will uncover the technology behind domains without zones.​

Why domains used to have extensions​

A domain extension is that part of a web address that follows the domain name after the dot. Today, most of us still see the domain system this way. However, this structure was first introduced quite long ago: in 1985 when the first 6 top-level domains launched. They included:

• .COM (commercial)
• .ORG (organization)
• .NET (network)
• .EDU (education)
• .GOV (government)
• .MIL (military)

The original purpose of domain extensions was to classify websites by type and to control the traffic. Imagine a city with thousands of streets: to get from A to B, you need to cross many streets, and you should know these streets. So, domain zones were these road signs or streets names that helped you navigate to the right street and to reach the website you needed.
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has been controlling the domain namespace since 1998. It was kind of an address book for the old Web. However, the Internet was growing, and its needs have been changing, so ICANN launched the New gTLD Program in 2011 to expand the Internet namespace. This allowed companies to have their custom domain zones. It was a great step, yet domains still had extensions and some additional problems with them.
To sum up, domain extensions helped us navigate in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Nowadays, we can still see these new zones come to being, such as .eth, .crypto, or .wallet. But do we really need them today? And do we want to show that our website belongs to one or another group? And do we want others to control it? Why it is cool to have no extension, read in our previous article.

How domains with no extensions work​

In 2022, W3DNA reinvents domains. And these are not just words — the company has made some really essential changes in it.
Let’s get back to the image of the city with the streets we have just created. We still need to get from A to B to find a certain website. What is different here? W3DNA’s technical solution suggests you skip crossing all the roads, instead just teleport from A to B. This is possible due to the fact that our domains are in the form of NFTs. Now, with our new technology, all the work that in Web 2.0 was done by many employees of centralized systems such as the registry and hosting, is transferred now to the smart contracts. Thus, W3DNA domains function independently of hosting, ICANN, and registries.
Certainly, the possibility of functioning without hosting is a real game changer. But how does it actually work in browsers without hosting? For that, we have created our script library, which users can adapt in three ways:

• install our browser;
• add an extension to your browser;
• or wait a little longer until we negotiate with other browsers, so they have our script library by default.

But now you might ask what about ICANN, which controls the whole domain namespace? W3DNA domains are free of this influence too because of one essential moment: we are creating an alternative domain name registry, so we are not a subject to the ICANN rules.

*W3DNA protocol is an NFT domain, name and account in any language and without extensions. When registering an NFT domain, you receive a username for Web3 apps and an account to accept payments in a cryptocurrency and chain of your choice.

Do you want to learn more about the advantages of *W3DNA domains? Read this article.
Here you can find out why it’s better to get an infrastructural Web3 set instead of a single domain.

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