(BlockBar) A fight for free speech is to be brought in the blockchain world by a blockchain startup to the domain level. A $4 million Series A is announced by Unstoppable Domains. Series A is a led venture capital firm Draper Associates. Boost VC led the seed of the startup and was the only other participant in the Series A.
Co-founder of Unstoppable Domain, Brad Kam told “For global free speech to work, you need to be able to say what you want and you need to be able to operate a business as you want.” The San Francisco-based company was previously funded by the Boost-led $730,000 seed round in December 2018. It also got grants from the Ethereum Foundation and the Zilliqa Foundation. Its partnership with Zilliqa led to the creation of the .zil domain extension. It is to be noted that .zil domain is all set to go live after a domain auction in June.
Unstoppable Domains claims to offer websites that can’t be taken down by government authorities or traditional domain providers by operating a decentralized domain registry. When asked if censorship-resistant websites may offer a safe haven for toxic content or illegal use cases, Kam said:
“Similar comments were made about bitcoin early on as well. The reality is the nefarious purposes are not the main purposes.”
Just like a cryptocurrency is stored in a wallet, users of the service control their own .zil domains. The service, built on the Zilliqa blockchain and the website content itself, is stored on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) or other decentralized storage networks. It is worth considering that Unstoppable’s .zil domains can also serve as human-readable addresses for accepting a variety of cryptocurrency payments.
“Unstoppable in the short term is solving the largest crypto UI problem, creating human-readable addresses, and, long-term, providing the toolset for creating and maintaining uncensorable websites,” said Boost VC partner Brayton Williams. “The way all companies have traditional website domains today, all individuals will have unique blockchain domains in the future for all info and payments.”
Managing partner of Draper Associates, Tim Draper stated: “By decentralizing domain names, Unstoppable Domains has the potential to spread free speech around the world.”
