You Can Now Use Twitter to Verify an 'Unstoppable' Address

Ever try to send someone money through a payment app and get nervous? If you transpose a digit, you won’t be sending cash to your buddy Bart but instead to Gary from Dayton. Sending crypto, with its long addresses and blockchain’s immutability, feels even more fraught with peril.

Unstoppable Domains and Chainlink have been working on it, though. 

Today, the companies announced a new feature, which allows users of Unstoppable Domain’s .crypto domains to verify their address via Twitter.

Chainlink is a network for linking payments and other data to smart contracts. Unstoppable Domains, based in San Francisco, builds blockchain-based domain services in a bid to bring about an uncensorable web. It raised $4 million in a 2019 Series A led by Draper Associates and has unveiled a steady stream of integrations and products since.

In February, it introduced the .crypto domain, which is hosted on Ethereum so domain name services like GoDaddy can’t turn off URLs that use it. (That said, most browsers don’t support .crypto addresses, though Unstoppable Domains’ own browser does and users can download browser extensions.)

The .crypto domain also comes with built-in payment functionality. Owners can send Ether, Bitcoin, LINK, or other tokens to a domain name rather than to an alphanumeric address string.

But remember the whole uncensorable part? Since anyone can bid on and buy a .crypto domain name— provided it’s not a protected name such as satoshi.crypto—they may not know whether they’re sending money to the real Chef Nomi of SushiSwap fame, to Gary from Dayton, or even to Chef Gary from Applebees. 

The verification process helps with that. Before users send funds, they will know whether the address has been verified, providing an extra layer of comfort. This latest innovation may reduce stress from P2P payments while still making it possible to transact through pseudonyms.

“With traditional payments like Paypal and Venmo, you have some identifying information about who you're sending to,” Unstoppable Domains co-founder Brad Kam told Decrypt. “This is what makes you comfortable sending. Crypto is missing this. That's why we built the Twitter verification feature.”

“For the first time, our users have a way to verify the identity of someone they want to send crypto to before sending”, said Kosala Hemachandra of MyEtherWallet in a press release. MEW has been a .crypto domain reseller since April.

Given its track record of releases, this likely isn’t the last innovation from the Unstoppable Domains team. Said Kam, “We're constantly working to improve the UX of crypto. This is just one step toward that goal.”