This month alone, more than 71,000 domains have been newly minted on the Ethereum Name Service
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; When NFTs first came into the public consciousness, the whole idea behind them was a little weird. Here were these crypto certificates of ownership attached to pictures of bored apes or videos of Kevin Durant on the court, but they didn’t give anyone the copyright to those specific media. Nevertheless, they took off, with tens of thousands being traded every day. Now, there is a new object of hype in the crypto world: .
Perhaps the most notable sale in the current frenzy was that of paradigm.eth. The address would be a good landing page for Paradigm, the venture-capital fund that recently outraised rival Andreessen Horowitz for the largest crypto fund, a $2.5 billion pool of money it intends to invest in companies that use this technology. But someone else recently bought it for $1.5 million in ethereum, a cryptocurrency that trades for around $4,300.
Aside from squatting, the domains’ investors argue, there is much more value to them than just a payout from a company or celebrity. “They’re trying to use domains as a bridge between cryptocurrency wallets and the rest of the internet,” Dr. Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy and the author of Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace, told Intelligencer.