ANS April Update
We are extremely excited to share the progress we’ve been making on the ANS DAO and ANS Domains. In this article, we will describe all the updates we’ve made during the month of March, plans for next month, and our ideas to pivot to build a slightly different project on the Algorand blockchain. We encourage users to provide feedback on our progress, as well as our ideas to pivot.
What is ANS?
Welcome! ANS — short for Algorand Name Service, is a decentralized, open-sourced, and community-driven name service on the Algorand blockchain. Users can register a .algo domain and link it with an Algorand address, resolvable by the projects that have integrated ANS domain resolution.
The smart contracts, SDKs, and REST APIs are open-sourced and can be found at: https://github.com/algonameservice.
TL;DR
#1: ANS DAO now supports delegate votes.
#2: Users are rewarded with ANS tokens (on testnet) after they vote on proposals.
#3: ANS DAO now supports updating the DAO approval and clear state contracts.
#4: ANS Domains now supports registering and managing domains with Defly Wallet.
#5: The website supports Pera Connect to interact using the Pera mobile app or Pera Web.
#6: ANS Domain analytics page has been updated to display more information
#7: ANS registry contract is updated to include a grace period of 90 days, during which users cannot register that domain, and the domain owners can only renew their domain.
Roadblocks
During the development phase of ANS DAO and from our users’ feedback, we have discovered a few challenges that restrict the project from being launched in its current state. We briefly describe the challenges and our plans on addressing them.
Challenge #1: Registry Update Proposal
To provide context, ANS DAO on testnet supports users to propose changes to the ANS domain registry contracts. If the vote passes, the domain registry contract is updated with the new approval contract and clear state contract code.
The challenge we have observed is a potential conflict between the registry update proposal and the funding proposal. If the registry contract is updated to restrict the withdrawal of funds by the ANS DAO contract, users and projects can no longer propose to receive funds to support their development.
Challenge #2: DAO Update Proposal
ANS DAO enables users to propose changes to the DAO smart contract through a DAO update proposal. If the vote passes, the DAO smart contract’s approval code and clear state code are updated with the proposed code.
Similar to challenge #1, if the DAO smart contract is updated to restrict users from adding new proposals or removing a proposal category, the users may no longer be able to add proposals in the category after the contract is updated.
We believe these two challenges could limit the potential of ANS DAO. As such, we plan on limiting only the project team to adding proposals in the initial phase of ANS DAO. We welcome any feedback that users have to share in this regard.
What is next?
First, we plan on addressing the challenges we have discovered and rolling out the next version of the DAO which limits adding proposals to only the project team.
Next, we plan on adding features to our domain registry contract to allow domain owners to add a banner to their domain profiles.
We are also planning to revamp the domain profile page to include more information.
Plans to Pivot
As many of our users already know, ANS domains is not the only name service on Algorand enabling users to register and link .algo names to their wallet addresses. Although we love building a decentralized name service governed by ANS DAO, we believe the Algorand community has already decided to support the other project and is hesitant to integrate ANS domain resolution. We recognize, admire, and appreciate all the utility provided by the other project to the Algorand community.
Our love and admiration for the Algorand community, and Algorand blockchain in general, is still solid. We believe there is more opportunity for us to serve Algorand users in other domains, such as an identity-focused social media platform. Therefore, we would like to hear your thoughts on our plans to pivot and build a social media platform on the Algorand blockchain.
If you are interested in providing feedback, please consider filling up this short, 30-second survey here: https://forms.gle/zo78JbEwQqLTxwGu5
