Recently, .bit, a decentralized identity protocol under d.id, announced the completion of the RGB++ upgrade! The .bit project was launched in November 2020, launched on the Nervos CKB mainnet in July 2021, and completed a $13 million Series A financing in 2022. The core team members of .bit are all from large Internet companies. Before working on the .bit project, they have been deeply involved in the blockchain industry for many years and have profound accumulation. They have successfully created a number of highly acclaimed blockchain products and have a keen insight into product details and user needs.

As a decentralized identity protocol (DID), .bit is far superior to other similar products in terms of user experience. .bit not only supports the use of Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TRON, Dogecoin and other multi-chain wallets, but also supports users to use Passkey to register and manage accounts. There is no private key, no password, and no gas fee in the whole process. It truly achieves what founder Tim Yang has always emphasized: "Shielding complex technical issues and presenting simple products to users." In addition, .bit is also the first DID to implement the sub-account function.

Currently, .bit has nearly 100,000 registered users. After completing the RGB++ upgrade, bit, with the help of CKB's isomorphic binding characteristics, officially became a Bitcoin layer-one DID asset, which can serve the user identity needs of the Bitcoin ecosystem and is expected to become the most promising DID project in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

.bit: From Bitcoin, Back to Bitcoin

.bit has a deep connection with Bitcoin. At the beginning of Bitcoin's creation, Satoshi Nakamoto had envisioned the establishment of a decentralized Bitcoin domain name system (BitDNS). The core goal of BitDNS is to establish a domain name ownership registration system based on cryptographic proof that does not rely on any centralized institution, and ultimately realize a DID system based on Bitcoin to promote the large-scale adoption of Bitcoin. Unfortunately, this idea was not implemented at the time.

Tim Yang, the founder of .bit, worked at Tencent and Xunlei. He started to get in touch with Bitcoin very early and was attracted by its elegant design. After leaving Xunlei, Tim chose to enter the blockchain industry and has rich experience in the industry. In Tim's mind, he has always hoped to realize Satoshi Nakamoto's idea and run DID on Bitcoin. In 2018, Tim paid attention to ENS (Ethereum Name Service). With his keen intuition, he concluded that ENS already had the prototype of DID and urgently felt that the Bitcoin ecosystem should also have its own DID. In 2019, Tim formed a team to make similar products on Bitcoin. Although they completed the development and deployment of the test version, they finally chose to give up because although Bitcoin is strong and reliable enough, the threshold for use is extremely high and cannot serve a wide range of organizations and individuals.

In 2020, with the introduction of Zhixian, the founder of UniPass, Tim learned about Nervos CKB, which also uses the PoW consensus mechanism and UTXO model, and is completely isomorphic to Bitcoin. CKB supports custom cryptographic primitives, so that users no longer need to care about private keys. In addition, CKB has improved the UTXO model, making UTXO (Cell) on CKB an asset container, which cleverly allows users to no longer care about transaction fees when operating assets, making it possible to serve a wide range of organizations and individuals and achieve large-scale adoption. As a result, the project was restarted, and Satoshi Nakamoto's original idea was simplified and named .bit. Based on the technical accumulation of the .bit team over the years and the technical advantages of CKB, .bit completed the product launch in just 8 months.

At the beginning of this year, CKB adjusted its positioning and transformed into L2, which is completely isomorphic to Bitcoin, and fully embraced the Bitcoin ecosystem. In early April, RGB++, a Bitcoin layer-one asset issuance protocol proposed by Cipher, co-founder of Nervos CKB, was officially launched. Through isomorphic binding technology, Bitcoin layer-one assets and CKB chain assets can be bridged between the two blockchains of Bitcoin and CKB. The underlying asset types of .bit before were quite different from the RGB++ protocol, so the .bit team chose to completely reconstruct it. After the upgrade, .bit can now become a Bitcoin layer-one DID through the isomorphic binding technology of the RGB++ protocol, realizing the original vision-running on Bitcoin.

So, .bit originated from Bitcoin and now returns to Bitcoin.

.bit: A more powerful inscription asset with more diverse gameplay

After the RGB++ upgrade, .bit is a veritable Bitcoin layer-one inscription asset. Compared with other BRC-20 and ARC-20 inscription assets, .bit is more powerful in function and has more diverse gameplay.

First of all, .bit is a Bitcoin inscription asset with practical functions. The most basic function of .bit is to serve as the "domain name" of the blockchain, responsible for blockchain address resolution and reverse resolution. For example, if a user registers or purchases a .bit account, such as btcman.bit, it can be mapped to multiple addresses, such as BTC addresses starting with bc1p, ETH addresses starting with 0x, CKB addresses starting with ckb, TRX addresses starting with T, etc. The advantage of this is that when someone transfers money to the user, they only need to enter their .bit account, without having to enter the long, difficult to read, and difficult to recognize blockchain native growth address. At present, .bit has supported the address resolution of nearly 40 public chains and can be used as a unified collection account for most crypto assets. Reverse resolution means that after logging in to some websites or applications with a wallet, the account name is no longer the native long address of the blockchain, but displays the user's .bit account.

Secondly, .bit is also a DID asset on the first layer of Bitcoin, which can meet the identity needs of Bitcoin ecosystem users. Users can add any data they are willing to make public, such as their social accounts, email addresses, personal profiles, personal preferences, etc., to their .bit accounts. In this way, users have a personal information homepage that is completely censorship-resistant. At the same time, the personal information homepage will automatically display the NFT, POAP, badges, etc. of the Owner address of the .bit account on multiple chains. Of course, .bit accounts can also be registered in multiple languages ​​and even Emojis around the world to meet users' needs for personalized identities, such as: jacky.bit, 蚌.bit, 😄.bit, etc.

Finally, this upgrade also makes .bit comply with the Spore DOB standard, making .bit composable and more playable. Spore is a digital object (DOB) creation protocol on the CKB blockchain. Currently, well-known DOBs minted using the Spore protocol include Nervape and Unicorn. The upgraded .bit DOB can be combined with these existing digital objects, such as giving Nervape accessories the .bit logo, allowing the user's on-chain identity to be completely integrated with the image of the on-chain digital object they own, creating greater imagination space.

Competitive product analysis

.bit’s current main competitors include ENS in the Ethereum ecosystem and TNA, RNS, BRC-137 and Spaces Protocol in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Among them, ENS was launched in April 2017. Backed by the entire Ethereum ecosystem, it is currently the DID project with the highest market value and the most registered users. However, ENS does not support cross-chain, and the registration and use thresholds are high. In contrast, .bit not only supports the use of multi-chain wallets such as Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TRON, Dogecoin, but also supports users to use Passkey to register and manage accounts, without private keys, passwords, or gas fees. In other words, .bit allows users to use blockchain without touching any complex technical concepts, and truly achieves a low threshold. Anyone can use .bit without knowing any Web3 knowledge.

TNA is a Bitcoin domain name service based on the Taproot Assets protocol. Its domain name assets are compatible with the UTXO model of the Bitcoin mainnet and the Lightning Network. This compatibility allows users to flexibly use domain name assets on the Bitcoin network, whether for secure transfers on the mainnet or fast payments on the Lightning Network. In addition, TNA also supports subdomain services. However, TNA is currently inferior to .bit in terms of multi-chain support, functions, registration and use thresholds, and ecological construction.

RNS (Realm Name System) is a domain name system based on the Atomicals protocol. Compared with ENS, it has higher scalability and flexibility while retaining decentralization. Specifically, the RNS domain name protocol allows any user to issue subdomains under any RNS domain name, manage the domain name ecosystem in a hierarchical/graded manner, and tokenize it. In theory, there is no limit to the number of times an RNS subdomain can be extended, which brings a lot of imagination to the RNS domain name system. However, the RNS registration rules are complicated, and multiple languages ​​need to be converted to Punycode for registration, which increases the threshold for users to use. At the same time, the system has been around for a short time, and its development remains to be seen.

BRC-137 is based on the Ordinals protocol and aims to realize "composable" DID in the Bitcoin ecosystem, giving users the ability to monetize digital identities and promoting on-chain value exchange and social ecology. Currently, the BRC-137 protocol has completed a $2.5 million seed round of financing, but its products are still in the early stages.

Spaces Protocol is also a Bitcoin domain name protocol. "Spaces" are community identifiers that are distributed through an auction process built using existing Bitcoin script functions. The proceeds generated by the auction will be irrevocably burned. Within each space, users can create "subspaces" as trustless personal identities that mainly operate highly autonomously off-chain, but can also submit transactions directly on-chain. Currently, Spaces Protocol is still in the testnet stage, and it will take a long time before the real product is launched.

Compared with the above competitors, the advantages of .bit are more functions, lower barriers to entry, and stronger composability. Thanks to RGB++'s isomorphic binding technology, .bit domain name assets can be securely and bridgelessly cross-chain between different UTXO chains (currently Bitcoin and CKB, and in the future, including chains issued with one click through UTXO Stack).

Summarize

"We cannot underestimate the significance of DID to human beings, because human beings are social animals, and identity is the starting point of social relations. Identity freedom that is independent of the issuer is the starting point of freedom. Only with identity can we discuss various rights including property rights, just like the right to use a website only after registering an account. Only when we have an identity subject that is generated and used independently of any subject can we discuss establishing data ownership." - Excerpted from "DID Industry Research Report"

The importance of DID is self-evident. After more than 7 years of development, ENS, the DID project with the most registered users, currently has a market value of 870 million US dollars, which is about 0.02% of Ethereum's market value. The market value of Bitcoin is 3 times that of Ethereum, and the Bitcoin ecosystem is just getting started. As a DID project in the Bitcoin ecosystem, .bit is superior to ENS in terms of functionality, scalability, usage threshold, and multi-chain support. Therefore, .bit is expected to become the most promising DID project in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and the future is promising.