The fear of losing your private keys has always seen crypto investors, especially institutional grade investors, relinquish the control to custodial services for safekeeping. Similarly, NYDFS-registered crypto exchange, Gemini will start to custody .crypto web domains, a censorship-resistant domain service from Unstoppable Domains, a blockchain firm.

These .crypto domains are self-custodial domains, meaning you are fully in charge of your website and run on the Ethereum blockchain as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs are unique collectible tokens that hold a specific value. As self-custodial domains, .crypto web domains are decentralized and resistant from any censorship.

The new product service that Gemini is offering is rather contradictory to the overall purpose of having a self-custodial domain. Imagine if the government takes over Gemini and forces the famous billionaire twins, Tyler and Cameron, to freeze your domain. This will kill off the main competitive advantage that a .crypto holds – censorship resistance.

However, the product is built for corporations mostly who have no problem with censorship resistance if they could build their decentralized website. Those non-controversial companies who want to keep their domains safe since they are not in use currently. Brad Kam, founder of the San Francisco-based decentralized domain name registrar, Unstoppable Domains said,

“These are traditional businesses. They're not the kind of people that would be building decentralized websites early. That's the reason why the custody service is more appropriate for them.”

The new .crypto custodial service will first be tested by two traditional domain naming system (DNS) firms, 101domain and EnCirca.

Unstoppable Domains launched at the tail end of 2019 after raising $4 million in a seed round from billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper’s, Draper Associates, in a bit to promote free speech across the globe. The platform has since released over 200,000 censorship-resistant .crypto domains and extended its support for Chrome and Opera browsers.

Recently, Unstoppable Domains released a decentralized chat app aiming to give users complete data privacy in their communication.

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