IMPORTANT: This post contains ideas intended to spark discussion and gather feedback. These are not final concepts and must not be interpreted as implementation details. For official information about how XMTP works, see the XMTP technical documentation. Have questions about this post? We’d love to hear from you—post a reply.
Hi, I was quite excited to find out that you can link web3 domains under Unstoppable Domains with xmtp apps. Surely the same should be possible with web2 domains right? It should be possible for me to have joshlim.xyz (and other domains I own) as my chat ID right?
Use case: This is a good way of proving the ownership of a domain, useful for transactions and domain sales. Ideally, domains connected to xmtp are then automatically listed at xmtp.domains - making it a vibrant marketplace of sorts where you discover new names and can talk directly to the verified owner without needing a broker. I also envision xmtp.domains to be a hosting service where people can easily set their DNS to ns1.xmtp.domains, ns2.xmtp.domains, so that they can easily have landing pages with their chat ID.
My questions are:
Is there an easy way to link one’s web2 domain to XMTP currently?
Can one person have multiple identities (ie, one identity per domain) - or do we have to tie ownership of domains to a singular party.
Hello, thanks for the questions. I agree connecting web2 domains to an XMTP inbox_id is a cool idea.
Is there an easy way to link one’s web2 domain to XMTP currently?
Though the XMTP protocol itself doesn’t have functions for linking a web2 domain to your XMTP inboxID, one relatively easy way to do this currently would be to use Ethereum Naming Service, or ENS, for either onchain or offchain linking a DNS name to a ENS name, and then having your ENS name point to your main Ethereum address which controls your XMTP inbox.
With that setup, it should be possible to create an API for looking up if there is a given XMTP user associated with a provided domain name.
Can one person have multiple identities (ie, one identity per domain) - or do we have to tie ownership of domains to a singular party.
We currently support associating multiple ethereum addresses to you XMTP inboxID. See manage xmtp inboxes for more details. Each of those ethereum addresses could be associated to a different ENS or DNS name. In other words, you should definitely be able to link multiple domains to a single identity. But I don’t think there is a good way that makes sense to link a single domain name to multiple XMTP identities.
From what I know, linking a domain name that’s not a .ETH one requires very high gas fees right? Read about it here, maybe it was 3 years ago, hopefully things have changed.
You’re right, it doesn’t make sense to link a single domain name to multiple XMTP identities. However it does make a lot of sense to link several domains to one XMTP identity - it’s conclusive proof that the person owning those domains is the verified owner that they can talk to.