Decent.land Airdrops 500+ Arweave Name Service (ANS) Domains

Web3 social protocol decent.land has airdropped 513 Arweave Name Service (ANS) domains to the Arweave community. Among those eligible include both users of Verto ID and alpha testers of the original decent.land protocol.

The snapshot for the airdrop was taken on March 11:

Snapshot taken. A spaceship looms over the land, bearing items most rare. 👀

— decent.land (@decentdotland) March 11, 2022

ANS is a decentralized identity protocol built atop Arweave, containing references to a user’s other addresses on EVM-compatible chains. The decent.land team built a new Arweave primitive both for the reason that a standard identity layer didn’t exist on Arweave, and for their own purposes of linking Arweave identities cross-chain.

“ANS aims to be the permaweb’s identity layer. We already have partnership integrations with Verto and Viewblock, and plan to expand this to the Ethereum ecosystem and EVM-compatible chains” – Darwin, founder of decent.land

What is ANS?

ANS is the permaweb’s identity layer. It started life as the username protocol for decent.land – a way to assign a human readable name to Arweave addresses and be integrated into Arweave dApps. An ANS domain can be associated with a bio, username and social links. It’s accessible via the ar.page domain with the airdropped label as a subdomain, e.g. caoyin.ar.page.

The team is working on integrations with Verto and ViewBlock.

Who’s eligible?

All users of the alpha iteration of decent.land are eligible for the ANS airdrop and have already been distributed their usernames as ANS domains. The same goes for early adopters of the Verto ID system. Assuming you fill either of these conditions, check if your address is present in the list decent.land published to their GitHub here.

ANS domains will generate passive income

Just as is the case with any username system, no user can occupy the same namespace. This makes domains, especially 2-3 character ones, very scarce.

(Source)

ANS incentivizes label owners through a mechanism called Proof of Radical (PoR) – when a new username is minted (“justin”), a portion of its minting fee is split between users who hold names with overlapping characters (“just”, “tin”, “justi”, etc.) – how large of a percent is determined by how strong the overlap is.

As well as the PoR incentives, it will be possible to buy, sell and trade ANS domains like any other NFT.

What’s next for ANS?

The decent.land team behind ANS stated that the next steps for the protocol are to gain adoption across other permaweb applications. ANS will replace Verto’s VertoID protocol in a future version of Verto’s tooling, and also display as a human-readable handle on ViewBlock next to addresses, where possible.

“This airdrop was just the first step. The launch of our mainnet DLT token is scheduled for Q2/Q3 this year, and along with that we will make it possible for any user to spend DLT to mint an ANS domain”, – Darwin, decent.land founder

The upcoming mainnet UI release will introduce profile customization for holders, multi-chain linking, and the ability for anyone to mint domains.