CANTO NAME SERVICE LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT

Canto Name Service will launch on the 8th of February (🥳,🍾). We need your help to proliferate Canto.

I/WTF is Canto?

Canto is a layer 1 blockchain built to deliver on the promise of defi, as a post-traditional finance movement, Canto enables accessibility, transparency, and freedom for new systems. Canto provides a new commons powered by free public infrastructure.

II/WTF is CNS? 

CNS stands for Canto Name Service. CNS is a naming protocol that aims to empower Canto and spread the Canto culture. The CNS serves as an on-chain identity badge for all the people who share the Canto culture. Having your .Canto  attached to your web3 identity makes it clear that you belong to the “Canto internet society”. The more the CNS will expand in new apps, the more the Canto proliferation will reach places that wouldn’t even have been considered before.

III/Anti-squatting price mechanism

We learned from .COM mistakes. Fun fact: buying a .com was free before September 1995. Not so fun actually, since my first name was registered in 1994 when the Internet was barely available in the US. Then my family name was registered in 97, when my family didn’t have Internet at home yet. Digital identity ownership is a stepping stone towards becoming a crypto native.

We learned from ENS mistakes too. 

1/With CNS there is NO arbitrary price per character length 

2/With CNS there is NO mass squatting from the get-go

3/With CNS there is NO premium for registration of expired domain

4/With CNS there are short domain names. 1 and 2 domain characters will be available from launch

How?

For relevant Canto domain names to be available to newcomers in the coming years, we will price CNS with the Variable Rate Gradual Dutch Auction mechanism (VRGDA), this is a fancy word to say “if a sale happens before its schedule, the price will increase, if a sale happens after its schedule the price will decrease”. This concept has been theorized in this Paradigm blog post.

We will be the second project we know of using this pricing mechanism following the Art Gobblers NFT project which will mint on 31st of October 2022. We decided to use a 20% price variation.

This is the current release schedule and price* for Canto Domain Names (might change before launch): 

*There is a set price for Canto Domain Names for day one, after the first sale then the VRGDA kicks in at a 20% variation rate, here is what the price multiplier looks like:

If a sale happens one day earlier than the release schedule then the price is increased by 20%, if a sale happens one day later than the release schedule then the price is decreased by 20%. The blue dotted arrows show a sale that happened 2 days earlier than expected and resulted in a 44% price increase. The yellow dotted arrows show a sale that happened 4 days later than expected and resulted in a 52% price decrease.

IV/Be early and proliferate Canto

We are all about community, layer 0 is the key layer. We need to grow our community because the more the merrier. We are throwing a CT game (Canto twitter game) to reward early adopters and Canto backers. 

You can reserve your favorite 4 characters domain and get a 50% discount by following those 5 steps (edited: the reservation closed on the 30th of January 2022 - 134 names were reserved):

-Follow https://twitter.com/DNSFORCanto on Twitter

-Change your twitter handle with the word/numbers you want to reserve and apply the discount to (4 characters or more + .canto). Maintain your .canto twitter handle through launch, we will be checking periodically!

-Bridge some USDC to the Canto chain, here is a guide to do it 

-Subscribe to our substack by typing your email address below

-DM us your Canto address on twitter, you can find your Canto address here (Canto bridge page)

We will use some undisclosed bot prevention measures to check for humanity.

You can check the names already reserved in this google sheet.

Thank you for being part of the Canto journey, we are excited to build towards an inclusive domain name service and world class digital identities!