DAS to the crypto world is what Phone/Email to the internet.
Introduction
I trust many of you will already know ENS as a distributed, naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. Decentralized identities are a key component of Web 3.0, and we know remembering each other’s public chain address can be a daunting task (How many of you just look at the first 4 and/or last 4 digits?). The issue with ENS is that you can only use it with Ethereum, a BTC address cannot hold a .eth domain name. That’s not so great! If you think the future is a multi-chain world then you need something that works across different chains.
Luckily we have Nervos which is on a higher abstraction level than Ethereum and DAS (Decentralised Account Systems) which work across chains! How great is that? Based on the Nervos public chain, any public chain can naturally use DAS without any modification.
Borrowing from DAS official website, a typical DAS account abstraction looks like this:
How do I register DAS?
Now there are 2 ways you can register:
- Buy on DAS
- Buy on DAS marketplace from other people
Let’s go through how we can register by buying on DAS!
Web registration
Click on da.systems and click on the top right [Register | Manage]
Here we choose DAS which supports payments in ETH, TRX, CKB, BNB and MATIC. Then we can connect with Metamask wallet.
We can text the name we want and hit search to see if the name is available. You could also batch query available names using das.la.
After deciding on what name you are interested in, you can click on Register and go to the registration page. Here Fee paid at registration = Annual fee \( \times \) Length of registration period + Storage deposit.
The storage deposit is refundable when your account expire. It is the amount of on-chain storage space required to store account information on the Nervos CKB chain, and DAS is carefully structured so that a fixed storage fee is pledged regardless of the number of parsed records stored in the DAS account. The pledged storage fee is 206 CKB per account.
The annual fee also depends on the length of the name you want, the shorter the name you want, the higher the annual fee.
Then you can use your preferred method of payment to secure your name!
Once the transaction is processed you have your .bit name!
After you register you can manage your .bit account. Your account will have 2 types of permissions:
- Owner, grants ultimate ownership of the account
- Manager, grants permission to change parsed records like public chain addresses, Twitter account
Owner of DAS
Personal .bit.cc page
Once you have a .bit account it comes with many interesting features with more to come. You would have a personal .bit.cc main page which can showcase your NFT collections and pop collections. You could also personalise the theme of your personal page.
Receive crypto payments using .bit name
You could add your addresses on different chains to DAS, and when other people transfer money to you they simply needs to enter your .bit name.
Currently wallets that enable DAS:
- Huobi Wallet
- TokenPocket
- imToken
- AlphaWallet
- Hyperpay
- MathWallet ...
If you write on Mirror you could also see your .bit name being recognised. The ability to have a single identity across multiple chains is just so easy and powerful.
Reverse records
When you add your addresses on DAS, your DAS account is linked with multiple records. You could use your .bit account to point to these addresses depending on which chain you are on. What reverse record means is that you could also go from the other end. Your address could also point to the .bit account you have and your .bit account can be accessed via the address in applications. Imagine a case when you need to send money to your friend. This can be scary even when you are using banks to do transfers. Now banks can help you verify who you are sending money to using their sort code and account number that gives you confidence when making large sums of transfers. DAS reverse record does exactly that, when you enter the address of your friend, DAS reverse record link to the .bit account your friend has via the address.
Future of DAS
DAS is a future-proof, cross-chain system and we can imagine the use cases increasing as web3 infrastructures are being built, end-to-end encrypted communication account, password-less login authentication, token of honour, there is so much to expect from your decentralised identity using DAS.