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D3 Global, a startup working on a way to bring internet domain names onto the blockchain, said Wednesday it has raised $25 million in an early-stage financing led by venture capital firm Paradigm to make that vision a reality.
The Series A round was also joined by Coinbase Ventures, co-founder of Polygon Labs Sandeep Nailwal, HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah and Namecheap Chief Executive Richard Kirkendall.
D3 said it will use the funds to launch a new blockchain network called the Doma Protocol, which will allow it to bring existing and future internet domain names onto the blockchain. This will open up what the company calls a “DomainFi,” or domain finance, a network where internet domains can be registered, traded and even lent using blockchain infrastructure.
Doma has been purpose-built with domain name ownership and trading in mind including full compliance with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, standards and regulations. ICANN is a nonprofit organization that manages the internet’s domain names, IP addresses and root servers, including the Domain Name System that translates those names into addresses. This ensures that Doma is fully compatible with DNS and can be integrated with any domain industry tools.
“Internet domains have long been a valuable asset class,” said D3 co-founder and Chief Executive Fred Hsu. “And for the first time in nearly three decades, we have the opportunity to modernize and transform the technologies and processes currently used by the domain industry.”
D3 said using Doma, there will be an effective bridge between DNS and Web3 name systems, such as blockchain name systems. This means that domains registered using the blockchain systems for crypto communities will be able to interoperate easily with registries and registrars.
Doma works to abstract away ICANN compliance and DNS-specific actions such as management, transfer and other mechanisms. This allows domain names to be tokenized, a process by which a digital representation of the domain is represented on the blockchain by a token that can be traded between users. When the users trade that token, the domain exchanges ownership on both the blockchain and DNS terms.
Essentially, this means that any domain can be an “on-chain domain,” and become a token that holds the right to manage DNS records.
D3 is not the only company that works with blockchain-based internet domain names. Web3 startup Unstoppable Domains Inc. received its ICANN license in October 2024 and offers dozens of top-level domains on-chain.
The domain name market is a lucrative one. Some domain names have sold for millions of dollars, with notable examples being NFTs.com selling for $15 million in 2022, chat.com for $15.5 million in 2023 to OpenAI and voice.com for $30 million in 2019.
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