Blockchain Domains Integrated Into Web Browser Opera In A Major Push For Web 3.0

Blockchain domains system Unstoppable Domains just got integrated into a web browser Opera Ltd OPRA in a major push for Web 3.0 adoption.

What Happened: According to a recent announcement, Opera users will be able to access .crypto blockchain-powered domains on any platform — iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, or Linux.

"We have always supported web innovation, and the decentralized web or Web3 is the natural next wave. Making Unstoppable Domains accessible in the Opera browsers means our users can try blockchain technologies for themselves. Registering your .crypto domain, which is forever yours, is a great first step into Web3," the company's product director Maciej Kocemba said.

Why It Matters: Opera is quickly becoming a leader in pushing for the adoption of Web 3.0, also often described as the decentralized web.

Without downloading any third-party software, users of the web browser will be able to access the websites that use Unstoppable Domains for decentralized domain name assignment and inter-planetary file system (IPFS) for hosting with no centralized server.

Unstoppable Domains' .crypto domains are represented by non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum ETH/USD blockchain that grant their holder ownership and administrative rights over the domain in question.

Once acquired, such domains do not require their owner to pay annual renewal fees and can be used to replace traditional domains or wallet addresses.

Web 3.0 is believed to be an answer to the shortcoming of the current generation of web, the Web 2.0.

What Else: Currently, a handful of big corporations control the data and services used by most of the worldwide population through a limited number of servers.

This means that users put a great deal of trust into those companies and that it only takes a hacker to successfully attack the right server to cause major damage to the global economy, as well as the wellbeing of "netizens."

With Web 3.0, servers are replaced by decentralized infrastructure that often is — or is intertwined with — blockchains that have no obvious centralized point of failure or third-party that is entrusted with all user data. 

This way, hackers would have to attack separate users to get their data, and no bad player can meddle in a political election by profiling users using social media data to tailor manipulation campaigns like in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. 

See also: What is Blockchain?

Furthermore, a website hosted on IPFS with a domain acquired through Unstoppable Domains is almost impossible to censor.

The reason is that there is no server with a specific IP address that local network administrators can exclude from the national Domain Name System or simply blacklist.

Instead, the same data is available at many locations that change all the time and also host other content making it hard to determine what content a user connected to the host is downloading thanks to cryptography.