Jamie Thingelstad

Now that I have ENS setup as well as SNS setup, I ran across Namebase (HNS) recently and found it intriguing. Namebase does something that I think is really weird, it allows reservations of names at the root of the namespace. So, instead of thingelstad.com, thingelstad.eth, or thingelstad.sol you can just get plain thingelstad. They claim to say this allows it to interoperate with traditional DNS, which it sort of does, but it collapses namespace in a way that I don’t think is workable. Anyway, I decided to poke around and was really surprised.

It turns out that thingelstad was already purchased! Now, my last name is pretty uncommon so this seemed odd to me. Even stranger, it was purchased on June 29, 2020. The buy paid 0.40 HNS which is about $0.10 USD today, and only about $0.07 USD at the time of purchase. But, perhaps this is a valid purchaser. Some other Thingelstad playing around in crypto.

I decided to look for jamiethingelstad, surely that would be available. Nope! Someone just purchased jamiethingelstad as well. The auction ended on Nov 29, 2021, for 120 HNS. $30 USD! Someone seemed to think that it was worth $30 USD to buy my name?

Confused, I looked for the one other domain I typically buy, weeklything. And sure enough, someone bought weeklything on April 29, 2021 for 7 HNS. A measly $1.75 USD for that one. This one though is actively for sale, for the low price of 395 HNS, just under $100 USD. You gotta be kidding me.

These seem too focused and I wonder how these squatters identify their list of domains. I thought perhaps people watched ENS registrations and then bought available HNS tokens, but the HNS purchase of thingelstad was a full 10 months before I bought thingelstad.eth.

I’m dissapointed with Handshake/HNS because I think it sets up a bad system when you allow people to register a name for such low prices. But even with that, the person that bought my name paid a reasonable price of $30 USD for the pleasure.

I’m skeptical of this service, so I don’t plan to attempt to get any of these names. I think the way they structured the namespace is too flat to work well. But it is still annoying. 😤

I have been using Solana a good amount lately, namely for Angry Bunny Club (have 19 bunnies now). I decided to see if there was an equivalent of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) but for Solana and found the Solana Name Service (SNS) from Bonfida. SNS is not nearly as mature as ENS, and has a whole different process for buying. You cannot just buy your preferred name, but instead have to start a 3-day auction that anyone can bid on and the winner gets it. So, I started auctions for thingelstad.sol, jamiethingelstad.sol, and weeklything.sol.

To bid on the domains you have to use FIDA tokens, not regular SOL. The minimum bid is about 2.75 FIDA, or about $20 USD. The SNS tokens are permanent so you do not have to pay a fee once you own them. And similar to ENS, they are implemented as tokens that you can send to another wallet if you want.

Getting FIDA in my wallet was much harder than I expected. There was a utility on the site that claimed to do it easily but it didn’t work. I found two exchanges that had it but they didn’t allow US citizens. Finally I found Gate.io which is a pure crypto exchange that I was able to setup an account on, transfer SOL in, buy FIDA, and get it out. Very, very painfully though.

Today the auctions ended and my 3 FIDA bids were not challenged. So, I now have three SNS tokens. The specification is still very vague on what you can do with it. When you claim the auction you have to specify how much space you want for the token. I decided to buy 7 kb of data that can be stored with each. The minimum was 1 kb and maximum was 10 kb. No idea how much I will really want. Essentially, I’m assuming my “zone file” for Solana will be smaller than 7 kb. Seems like a safe assumption. Solscan has a special tab to show my domains.

These Angry Bunnies keep multiplying. 🤩 Had six, now eleven. My Minnesota is showing with all the plaid. Details on each NFT. Saving the last spot for a special one.