Are Ethereum text NFTs, e.g. domains all in the same namespace?

Question

There are a couple of different Ethereum domain name creation services currently available:

• https://www.unstoppabledomains.com
• https://ens.domains
• https://www.decentraweb.org

They seem to be all based on NFT right?

But is it possible for their users to create the same domains in the Ethereum blockchain resulting in a collision? Are they offering the domains in the one namespace of the entire Ethereum or in their own namespace?

Is there Ethereum blockchain-wide coordination among them or are they just selling their own proprietary NFTs of domains that are not universally nor uniquely identifiable?

Answer 1

ENS, the Ethereum Name Service, is the "namespace" for .eth names.

Other projects like Unstoppable Domains (UD), can issue and sell NFTs. You are correct to be careful of the issues, which were also written about by the author of ethers.js:

I’ve always had serious reservations adding UD to ethers, they were fully aware of my concerns and have since made the problem worse by adding more TLDs.

https://blog.ricmoo.com/unstoppable-and-the-infinite-sadness-203f13e86488

For some background, the issue I was concerned with is that ENS had released an awesome DNSSEC registrar on Ropsten for .xyz and would be releasing a similar registrar for all supported TLDs. Nick gave a great demo at DevCon 3 in 2017 and it was epic; this would allow traditional web domains to interoperate seemlessly on the blockchain, a clear win for the Web3 universe! (FYI: it has since been launched on mainnet and supports over 1,300 DNS TLDs, such as .com and .org)

Once .crypto becomes a gTLD (through an ICANN auction), this would cause a name collision, since if someone tries to resolve ricmoo.crypto, should it resolve against the ENS registry (which resolves against the DNS system) or the UD registry? They would almost certainly disagree and it is likely that whoever buys the .crypto gTLD is intending for it to work correctly within the blockchain ecosystem.

Since then, they have been expanding the collection of TLDs being issued (e.g. .wallet and .nft) which exacerbates the problem, especially since these names will very likely be highly sought after by the well-funded.

This then becomes not just a nuisance, but a security concern. A malicious actor could purchase an intentionally-conflicting name, in hopes that some services rely on the service they registered on allowing them to receive ether, tokens or NFT’s intended for someone else.