Ready to unleash the future of the internet with DomainFi? Learn More
Ready to unleash the future of the internet with DomainFi? Learn More
Blog
By Fred Hsu (CEO & Co-Founder, D3)
Our time in Hanoi was one of the most productive, high-energy weeks I’ve had in a while. Hanoi not only hosted ICANN’s Connected Parties Summit and APAC DNS Forum, it was also the location of our 3rd DomainFi Blueprint of the year!
Before I get to the Blueprint workshop, let me take a quick detour and with some quick shoutouts.
One of the first people I met when I landed in Vietnam was Viction’s Thanh Le. With over 4M community members, institutional backing, and government support, Viction has slowly and surely become the digital backbone of Vietnam. So proud of the team!
About two years ago I told Thanh Le that I would come back to Vietnam with more ideas to show what .Vic domains could mean something more than what they are.
Fast forward now, and we are hosting our first in-country domain industry event, right here in Hanoi! Feels surreal.
The forum brought together registrars, ICANN folks, and a good number of new builders. The energy was solid. Main topics discussed:
With so many key players from the domain world in Hanoi for the ICANN forum, the timing was perfect for another Blueprint event. The event was roughly broken into three main programs:
I kicked off the event with my presentation about the relevance of DomainFi.
The core message was simple, domains are real assets, but the market infrastructure around them hasn’t kept up.
While Web3 is trading trillions in tokens, domain names are still stuck in slow, opaque, broker-driven systems. D3 is working with leading registrars to create the rails to modernize the industry and help it realize its trillion dollar potential
The key to realizing this is Doma – the coordination layer that will make all this click and run like a well-oiled machine.
Choice Quotes 💭
“Domain names are the original NFTs. The only difference is they actually work.”
“In 2025, it’s easier to buy real estate than to buy a good domain. That’s broken.”
“Web3 naming systems were a noble experiment. But there’s only one domain system that matters: DNS.”
“We’re building bridges between the 362 million domains that exist and the 400 million wallets that move $10 trillion a year.”
“Tokenized domains are just the start. The next era of the internet runs on programmable, liquid, real assets, and that’s what DomainFi unlocks.”
EnCirca President & Founder Tom Barrett was up next.
Tom announced EnCirca’s pivot toward engineering services for registrars, launching MyPublicWallet, a dead-simple API service that makes Web3 user-friendly. One click, and your domain is tokenized and wallet-ready, without touching crypto.
He made it clear – “Web3 domains” as we know them now are nothing more than sandboxes. If we want scale, we have to build on the DNS backbone. This is why Tom is such a big believer in Doma.
Choice Quotes 💭
“Web3-only domains will stay in the sandbox forever unless they’re in the ICANN root.”
“There are tons of use cases that don’t require crypto. So let’s stop forcing it.”
“Your ICANN domain becomes a wallet-backed NFT. Instantly usable on Web3 and resolvable on Web2.”
“If you want to be part of Web3, you need to offer a wallet. And we now have the infrastructure to do it.”
Finally, we had the registrar panel hosted by D3’s VP of Business Development and Partner Ops, Anand Vora. The panel members were Tom from EnCirca, Reg Levy – the Head of Compliance at Tucows Domain, and Yatin Shah – Head of Business at Connect Reseller, one of the largest Registrars in India.
All three of them brought the heat and provided a different angle on how registrars are adapting in 2025. However, the core theme remained the same. Web3 isn’t a sideshow anymore. Any registrar worth their salt will have to eventually make Web3 a core part of their strategy. ICANN has a role to play in standardizing and safeguarding this next era.
Choice Quotes 💭
“Web3-only domains will stay in the sandbox forever unless they’re in the ICANN root.”
“It has to work in Chrome, Safari. Period. If it doesn’t, it’s dead on arrival.”
“If we get the tokenization standard right, adoption will follow.”
“Domains will still be around in 25 years. They’re the digital identity layer that survives everything else.”
“We’ve gone from calling operators to connect calls, to connecting instantly on Web3. That’s the real growth story.”
“If registrars don’t offer wallets, users will go somewhere else. We have to meet them where the market’s going.”
In the middle of all this, Anand even managed to host an X space with Yatin as part of our “We are DomainFi” series! In the Space, they covered:
As you can tell, Hanoi was hectic but fun. Post-event we had a fun cocktail reception. It’s always nice to run into old friends!
Oh, and you can’t resist the food in Hanoi! I may have a serious banh mi sandwich addiction.
.. and that’s pretty much it for Blueprint Hanoi. But there are more DomainFi events coming up!
If you’re in New York for Solana Accelerate this week, please join us at our builder pizza party event on May 22!
Until then, here’s to you Hanoi! You were incredible.
