Hello Everyone,
I come here because this is one of the most vital topics to address. Now im trying to be objective, but 3rd party projects are not equal. There is a reason Dominic Williams uses “dom.icp” on his X account, and why half of the team does as well, as well as many pro ICP influencers. It’s because when you explain ICP to a layperson the easiest way (and we all know this) is to say “well you can host websites on it” It’s something that’s readily understandable and will 100% be the only reason that ICP gains widespread adoption.
So on that note I"d like to bring the case of ICNS up to everyone. The project was developed by Psychadelic, and gained quite a lot of traction, but then they ultimately reneged (i believe they just wanted to milk some free ICP and leave) and handed it over to a few devs who were apparently incapable of running it due to not enough ICP coming in (although I know that this is not the case). With that being said, those devs simply dropped the project, and people who have .icp domains are no longer capable of renewing them, nor buying new ones.
For those that don’t know, there are 2 naming NFT’s out there, they are the .ic crowd, and the .icp crowd. And I understand dfinity’s position that “well it’s all 3rd party so let the market sort it out” however, there’s one very important fact, and that’s visibility and marketing of ICP. If it’s absolutely obvious to us all, that the entire upper level Dfinity team uses .icp on their X accounts, wants to be associated with .icp, and prefers it as a represenation of themselves within the icp ecosystem, then it’s absolutely obvious to me which one represents ICP better, and that’s the .icp naming system.
For this reason, and considering that ICNS (those who issue .icp domains) is completely abandoned, I believe that Dfinity should take over the ICNS project, and lead it themselves. This will promote 1. A source of revenue, and 2. a safety net, because Dfinity’s enemies won’t use the failure of .icp as a very vibrat example of a absolute incompetence of the ICP team itself.
I strongly suggest that the dev and dfinity team doesn’t just treat this as “just another 3rd party app” and instead take it over and manage it because it is 100% the flagship selling point of ICP itself.
If the common man, who currently hosts websites for small business for 200-300/year via godaddy (mcap of 15b) learns of $5/yr, there will be a VIOLENT influx of people into ICP for websites, and those common middle class folks will be putting 10s of thousands of liquidity into purchasing ICP.
Please, if you’re reading this and you’re on the Dfinity team, can you get this message over to someone who can make a decision on this? I can’t post in various categories apparently other than general, but this needs to 100% be addressed, and addressed fast.
P.S.
Idea for a Dapp is a “wordpress” for .icp websites, so the common man with no programming knowledge can use that app to develop his websites seamlessly. IMO that’ll make ICP itself viral AF for all middle class working people who have smalltime websites and pay 100s of dollars per year for them.