Web3 and blockchain technology have revolutionized digital identity and asset management. As these innovations mature, the challenge is helping mainstream users experience the benefits without technical barriers.
Sandy Carter, Chief Business Officer at Unstoppable Domains, has been at the forefront of this evolution, leading the company through history-making transitions. BeInCrypto interviewed Sandy Carter live in sunny Cannes to explore how Unstoppable Domains merges traditional domains and blockchain, opening the door for future-proof digital assets.
Sandy Carter shared insights on Unstoppable’s journey from pioneering on-chain domains to becoming one of the first ICANN-accredited registrars with on-chain capabilities. She detailed partnerships, simplicity in user experience, and the broader implications for identity in an increasingly digital world.
As the lines between Web2 and Web3 blur, Carter’s vision spotlights a future where domains are not just addresses but core building blocks for businesses, individuals, and even AI agents. This conversation reveals why the next chapter for domains—and digital identity—is already unfolding.
Unstoppable Domains’ Evolution and the Power of On-Chain Assets
It’s been really fascinating being in this space because we started being an on-chain domain provider. That’s a great business. But we really had big dreams of going to the entire world.
So we kept waiting for Web2 users to come to us to see the power of being able to use your domain as a crypto address or being able to chat in an encrypted fashion, all of which are very powerful features of the on-chain domain.
But what we found is the Web2 guys weren’t coming to us, the normies, as we like to call them. So we decided to go to them. We did that by tokenizing .com to start with.
And what that means is you place your .com on chain. So not only is sandy.com a DNS domain, but it’s also an on-chain domain. So the real power is that we believe that domains now will be the first asset that is not Web2 or Web3, but is both. It’s just an asset that exists on chain and in the Web2 world.
Very, very powerful. We did that to help bring Web3 to them, versus the other way around.
Shaping the Future of Domaining for Mainstream and Web3 Users
It’s quite fascinating. The typical domain of today, a lot of them are coming to us because we do place their domain on-chain. They might not even know what that means, but they know it’s free and they know, wow, it’s future-proofing.
Maybe one day I’ll need that, or one day I can use that. Or they heard a podcast, and they’re like, that’s something that I really need to take a look at.
Now, on the opposite side are Web3 folks who have been using Web3 domains or on-chain domains, who are also pretty excited because one of the things that Web3 has always wanted to do is have a searchable, taggable website.
Because today you can do a website in Opera or Chrome with an extension, but who knows how to add an extension if you don’t know Web3? So you don’t have taggability, searchability, which is so powerful. So now, bringing in Web2 to them really brings that capability.
New Waves in Domain Trading: From Dot Com to Dot Crypto
So I would say, you know, dot com is the power horse, has been, always will be. The next wave actually is dot AI.
That was actually first a country code that was brought over for use with artificial intelligence. We believe that when ICANN opens up in April of 2026 and they accept the next wave in, we will see a lot of potential for something like dot crypto. Sandy dot crypto as a way to pay, or Sandy dot wallet, for example.
Those will be really, I think, important domains to hold and to host. And I don’t know about the speculation because I’m not a financial advisor.
But I do think there’ll be some real powerhouses in there, just like you saw during the dot-com or the dot-AI era. Like someone bought openai.com for like a bazillion dollars. They first paid probably $11 for it. They got a bazillion dollars for it. I think we’re going to see some of the same thing.
Partner Branded TLDs and the Power of Collaboration
So we’ve done 90 partner-branded TLDs or top-level domains. And that just means it’s a naming service. It’s the extension piece like a dot com.
We’ve been wanting to partner with Brave. Brave is known for security, privacy, and upholding those standards of decentralization. We were really excited when they decided to launch dot Brave with us because what this now does is you can use sandy dot Brave in the Brave browser.
You can use Sandy.Brave in the Brave wallet. It just brings so much power to existing users. But Brave went even further, and they said, We’re going to ICANN. So in April, we’ll be partnering with them to bring the application forward to take dot Brave not just as an on-chain domain, but also as an ICANN domain. I think that makes that partnership especially special because of their foresight, their long-term thinking about what the power of that means, not just for them, but more importantly for their users as well.
Yeah. And they’re doing very well right now. They have a strong community, and that community really has some very common beliefs. This is just a cool name, right? Like Dot Brave. Who doesn’t want to be Sandy Dot Brave, right? And so it just has a cool name to it as well.
Technological Breakthroughs for Simplicity and User Experience
One of the coolest things we’ve done is we’ve kind of hidden the fact that you get a wallet. I teach classes, and you know, trying to get someone set up on a wallet is quite hard, right? Use any exchange, try to figure out all your passwords, your private keys, all of that is just hard. So we’ve made it super simple. We have an MPC wallet that is behind the scenes.
And I don’t know if you know, but we’ve worked with farmers, for example, we have a .grow. That’s in particular for the company called FarmScent, which works to connect farmers who are growing coffee or oranges to buyers of that. And the power of that is that they don’t have to pay a third party, they don’t have to wait 120 days, and farmers have very low margins. So this is really crucial for them. But think about a farmer, probably not the most technical crowd of people.
So we had to make this very easy for them.
And so that was one of the things that we were looking for when we created this way for you to store your on-chain domain without the complexity of that wallet. It’s really not shared with you.
Because it’s just there automatically, so you don’t have to educate on it. It just works, right?
It’s just like trying to explain AI to someone, it’s hard, right? But then you go on Amazon, you’re using it, but you don’t know it’s under the covers. That was kind of like our model.
We wanted to make sure that people had the power of on-chain, but you really don’t know you’re using it. You just get the power, there is something bigger.
The Expanding Role of Domains in Identity and Real-World Assets
I think one of the trends that is out there today is real-world assets, and a real-world asset is something that exists but also has a digital format. I think that’s what a domain is. It’s really an RWA for real estate, for example, or for someone’s identity or for someone’s passport, the information that they have. And it’s a trusted, verified form of that too, not just anything. Right.
So if you think about LinkedIn, for example, 30 % of people who put on LinkedIn that they went to a particular school never went to that school. Why is that? No one verifies that.
So I think it’s important that you have that real-world asset kind of vision and perspective of where you’re going. And I think that’s part of what domains will be. I mean, as people invest in them today, and they really call it investing in a domain, it represents your identity, your company, and your real estate.
And the coolest new thing that we’ve done is that we recently partnered up to launch dot twin, and dot twin is a domain set aside for AI agents, which I think is super cool. So these guys, the company we partner with, is Synergistics. What they do is create AI agents for banks and AI agents for retailers. And those agents actually have a crypto wallet.
But instead of using that complexity again, we want to simplify it. So, we hide that complexity with a domain name. So you might be, you know, Mary, Bankteller1 might be your digital identity, which is a domain.
So now you have an opportunity for a domain to represent a company, to represent a person like us, or an AI agent. Studies show that every person in the world will have three to five agents in the long term. So that’s a huge opportunity as well.
The Next Chapter for Unstoppable Domains: Aspirations and Innovations
There are 450,000 companies and 7 billion people. And then if you have three to five agents per person, that’s just a huge responsibility, providing all of those people with their own real-world asset. I think that’s one of the big visions that we have for this as well.
I think the second is making sure that we approach ICANN in the right way with these partners. Many of these partners are really passionate about having not just an on-chain domain or TLD for themselves, but also having the capabilities of DNS that come with ICANN. And so that’s a big part of our future as well is leveraging our knowledge of ICANN, working with ICANN, being a ICANN accredited registrar.
That sort of thing is really important to us.
And then I think the final thing is just the simplicity. Constantly innovating, we innovate at a rate and pace that I haven’t seen at any other company.
Just making sure that we can keep up with our users and do that in a way that really delights them. So, for example, we launched a marketplace so that they can buy and sell their own domains. Remember you said you did that segment, and people were like, oh, you want to buy this domain? We actually set up a two-sided marketplace, so you can actually do that if you were looking for a name.
You could try to find it in our marketplace. Or, if you’re trying to sell a domain, you could also try to patent it. It’s those kinds of innovations that, I think, also involve listening to our users, right? When I worked at Amazon, we called it customer obsession.
Conclusion
Sandy Carter’s vision for Unstoppable Domains goes far beyond simple web addresses. With roots as an on-chain domain pioneer and now an ICANN-accredited leader, the company unites Web2 and Web3 under a seamless, future-focused user experience.
Carter’s emphasis on partnerships, real-world applications, and user simplicity highlights how domains are evolving as digital assets, identity markers, and even enablers for AI agents. As innovation accelerates and user demands grow, Unstoppable Domains is setting the pace for the future of digital identity, ensuring everyone—from farmers to fintech to AI—can thrive in this new landscape.
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