We would like to address some common questions from the community and try to explain some things in a more approachable way.

First of all, we would like to say that we are completely surprised by the amount of community engagement from our presale. We are very grateful for your support.

If you are interested to see which domains were already sold, you can look on Cardanoscan.

In this blog, we will address the most common questions and provide some explanations to the topics we have seen in our community and on social media.

What exactly are the NFTs from the presale?#

By purchasing a domain in our presale, you are given an NFT which has your chosen domain name as its token name. This token has no functionality attached to it yet, it just serves as a proof that you purchased this domain. When we finish building our dApp, you will be able to claim the actual domain (with the same name) by interacting with one of our smart contracts. This contract will ensure that if you present your presale NFT by sending it back to us, we will transfer the ownership of the actual domain to you.

The actual domain will also be represented as an NFT, but it will not be located in your wallet. It will reside at a different address (a script address) where a smart contract (a validator script) will control how a user can interact with it. All the information associated with this domain (your payment address, possible IPFS hash, etc.) will also be stored with it on-chain. Only the domain owner will be able to change this information.

If you send the presale NFT to someone else, you will no longer be able to claim the actual domain. Instead, the person who receives it will be able to claim the domain.

Do you own the .ada top level domain?#

No, we do not own the .ada top level domain (TLD). It does not exist in the traditional DNS (domain name system), meaning it is not like a .com or .org TLD for regular websites, for example.

What we are aiming to build is our own naming system, that will live on the Cardano blockchain. This means that each one of our domains will have some information associated with it (which will be stored on-chain) and you will be able to access this information just by knowing the domain name. For example, if you want to send an ADA payment to the owner of a particular domain, our smart contracts will look up this information for you in our system and your payment will be sent to the correct wallet address (the one associated with this domain).

Since regular Internet browsers are not aware of our new naming system, we are planning to provide two solutions to integrate our system with the traditional one. If you just typed mydomain.ada in your browser, it would not work because the browser does not know the .ada TLD.

In our first solution, you will have to enable our custom browser extension (like a Chrome plugin) which will instruct the browser to resolve .ada domains by using our own naming system. This extension will be implemented to look up the information for a specific domain on the Cardano blockchain, extract the IPFS hash associated with it and display the content to the user in the browser.

Our second approach will not require you to use any extensions, but you will have to add a .surf suffix to the end of your domain when searching for it in a browser, like mydomain.ada.surf. In this way, the browser will treat your domain as a subdomain of the ada.surf domain (this is a regular Internet domain owned by us) where we will be able to resolve your domain using our blockchain naming system.

About the distribution of domains in the presale#

We were trying to make the presale as fair for everyone as possible. That is why we did not reserve or exclude any domain names beforehand, since we did not want to impose any judgements about which domains should belong to who. Unfortunately, this means that some people did not get the domains they wanted, because someone beat them to it. We realize that some people may feel angry or disappointed about that and we are sorry for that. Please know that we were just trying to act in good faith by making everyone's chances equal.

However, if anyone has purchased a copyrighted or trademarked domain but does not have the necessary licenses or rights for the domain name, they have violated our Terms of Use (section Products and Services). In this case, we might be forced to restrict some of our services if it comes to any disputes in the future. We strongly encourage everyone to follow our Terms of Use.

Some technical issues with the presale#

1. We noticed that some of you had problems in our presale, where you could not reserve any domains and were constantly getting notifications that your desired domain name has already been taken. These issues were mostly with the Safari browser on iOS, where the presale webapp frontend was not behaving as expected. If you are experiencing any similar issues, please try using a different browser.

2. We also noticed that some tokens are not showing up properly in your wallets. We suspect the reason is because we (and some other wallets / explorers) rely on the Blockfrost's GET /assets/{asset} endpoint which states that to get information about a certain asset, the asset parameter should be constructed as concatenation of the policy_id and hex-encoded asset_name. We contacted them and we will try to resolve this issue.

   Here is the list of the affected tokens (as you can see the suffix is not hex-encoded):

   e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f60000 | 0000 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f60918 | 0918 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f61010 | 1010 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f61234 | 1234 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f61337 | 1337 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f61989 | 1989 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f64649 | 4649 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f68888 | 8888 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f688888888 | 88888888 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f6cafe | cafe e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f6dada | dada e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f6def1 | def1 e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f6face | face e2bdb31c13a57d94934d01a4ca17cf3b2cac61d055637261b089c8f6fade | fade

   Kudos to @ADAlchemist for scraping that.

3. Some buyers were also concerned about why their token is marked as COPY on pool.pm.
   
   This is because pool.pm is trying to warn you that a token with the same token name already exists in another verified NFT project. There is nothing wrong with that, our tokens might have the same name but their policy ID is different (unique to our project).

The roadmap ahead#

We have outlined some of our recent development in the previous blog post. As we already mentioned there, the roadmap schedule is still a bit uncertain since we are anticipating some software releases by IOHK (most importantly the PAB - Plutus Application Backend and a wallet connector / backend) that will allow for much easier testing of smart contracts on the public testnet (and eventually the mainnet) and enable the interaction between the contracts and the wallet. After the presale is finished, we will again be focused only on the development and will post more updates as we progress.

Stay tuned for more updates in our next blog,

your adadomains team .