For those that don’t know @marvin.id, he used to work at Hiro, the Stacks foundation, Trust Machine and Opensea. While working in Stacks, he built btc.us and the .btc namespace and wrote the book on the Clarity smart contract language (literally!). He’s currently co-founder and CTO at Ryder where they figured out how to build the first managed community identity system on BNS with Ryder community names.
When Marvin first shared this with me after meeting up for hotpot a few weeks ago, I was immediately struck at how elegant the design was. A recursive, multi-level name system where all names are NFTs opens numerous possibilities for future applications and new business models for BNS. This is also bullish for existing holders of names as well as their assets gain functionality and the possibility of future income streams.
I’m very excited that Marvin decided to share his prototype name system publicly so we can get more feedback and gauge community interest.
Since the beginning of DNS and throughout the history of BNS, we’ve had single level, two-dimensional systems. Marvin’s system bumps this up to a three-dimensional multi-level system that is much better placed to model the types of relationships we see both on and offline.
In my view, Marvin’s approach is a substantial improvement over both existing BNS and proposals on the table to upgrade it. I think it really has the potential to move the needle by re-invigorating the BNS ecosystem and delivering an industry leading name system for the bitcoin ecosystem.
The path forward
As most of you know, we have a BNSv2 proposal built by Trust Machines largely based on a set of specifications generated by the community through our BNS Working Ground discussions with the addition of a managed namespace feature added on to support their desire to integrate with the ICANN top-level domain that they own.
One option is to go forward with the TM proposal and build Marvin’s proposal as a future upgrade to BNS. The TM proposal is largely ready to go while Marvin’s proposal will require an investment of engineering effort to get to the same point.
Another option is to hold off on the TM proposal and build out Marvin’s proposal as BNSv2. This would take a more time in the short-term, but would avoid the additional coordination cost to the community of multiple hard forks.
These obviously aren’t the only paths forward, but I’ll leave it to bring up other approaches they think make sense!
I’m really excited to hear what everyone thinks of Marvin’s prototype!