Welcome to the third part of the series!! We've come a long way to give you the progress of this story. To refresh everyone, this is about a debacle on three main issues. One, a dispute over project naming. Both were named ANS or Alephium Name Service. Two, potential user confusion. Three, differing views on how a naming service should be implemented and managed within the Alephium ecosystem. To those who haven't seen the first and second episode, you can read it here: EP1, EP2. Today, we reached out to SPcrypto0 on Telegram to make this possible. With his help, we were able to get the side of the core developers behind the project AlphNameService. The project has concluded another phase of public testing and is now back at devving. They have recently posted an article detailing two weeks of development and partnerships that were forged which you can view here. I know you are already excited to see the interview, so here you go:
Thank you for taking this interview, ANS. Let's start by understanding your vision. What inspired you to create the Alephium Naming Service, and what value do you believe it brings to the community?
ANS aims to provide usernames and profiles for every Alephium user's wallet. The community loves it for the social aspect of it, as well as for the ease of use that it brings (eliminating addresses through-out daily use of dapps and wallets). Early contributors and testers already had a taste of it via the integrated wallet and “Send to name” functionality in the dapp. Furthermore, we strongly believe in creating alliances and partnerships instead of division and deceit, hence our numerous integration partnerships that we have already announced that will integrate the name service protocol within their dapps enhancing the Alephium user’s experience. Users will be able to define one profile with their name and favorite PFP and they can use it throughout the whole Alephium ecosystem.
There has been some controversy around the naming of your project. Can you share your perspective on these issues and clarify any misconceptions?
Confusion came up when a new project went public with the same naming and symbols. We kindly asked them to rebrand to avoid confusion in the community but didn’t get any positive response on that. Unfortunately, there are still some people that are deceived by this, so we want to make it clear that we are not affiliated with that project in any way.
Community feedback is crucial in any project. How have you engaged with the community throughout the development of ANS, and what steps have you taken to address their concerns?
We agree completely. We’ve been engaged with the community since day one, and always listened to their requests. The ANS as it is today, is mainly shaped by the community.
Can you highlight any outstanding features or innovations in ANS that you believe will particularly benefit Alephium users?
Most of the community wants the ANS to be integrated in their wallets as soon as possible. Thanks to the “Send to name” feature, ANS users can send tokens to names since day one without having to wait for the core team to integrate the protocol within the wallets and explorers. Furthermore, the value of the protocol comes from the dapp integrations. That’s why we are strongly committed to building partnerships and tooling with our off-chain indexer and sdk, s.t. the integration is smooth as it can be and the user’s experience is cohesive when they are using their favorite dapp.
Many people have suggested collaboration instead of competition. Have you reached out to the team behind the other naming service (Splinter’s), and is there potential for a collaborative effort to strengthen the Alephium ecosystem?
We cannot agree more on this statement. Hence, the partnership with numerous dapps, we are also in talks with others and we are open to many more partnerships. As mentioned above, we did try to reach out. We would like to ask anyone from the Alephium ecosystem to reach out to us for collaborations as they see fit.
Transparency and open communication are key to building trust. Can you elaborate on the transparency measures you’ve implemented in ANS's development process?
If you have followed closely in the community, we have always listened to its requests and needs. That shaped the ANS as it is today. We believe that we can make the Alephium user experience more accessible and smoother. ANS has been developed together with the community during the testing phases. To that extent, the contracts which are based on Alephium’s POC and the frontend with its optimized syncing mechanism will be open sourced. We are also looking into a way to open-source the off-chain indexer as well in order to alleviate pressure from Alephium infra.
Let’s talk about the future. What are your plans for the ongoing development of ANS, and how do you see it evolving to meet the needs of the Alephium community?
We’ve been building the beta version of ANS which would be the mainnet candidate. It contains most of the feature requests and wants from the community from the previous testnets. Stay tuned!
We think that ANS is the perfect complement to any dapp within the Alephium ecosystem that wants to smooth out their users’ experience. We are working hard to collaborate and help other projects, we are also inviting others to feel free to reach out if they think they could use ANS integration within their dapp.
Finally, what message would you like to convey to the Alephium community about your commitment to the ecosystem and the role ANS plays in its growth?
We believe that the community already knows our commitment to them and to the ecosystem. It’s been a hell of a two weeks, and it’s going to be even greater this following month. We are strongly committed in building and growing the Alephium ecosystem, so we would like to ask the users to join the community and for the projects to reach out for collaborations!
Thank you for accepting this interview, AlphNameService.
To our readers, we encourage you to explore their work and follow their socials:
Twitter: https://x.com/AlphNameService
Telegram: https://t.me/AlephiumNameService
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/KWshE9Efw7
Website: https://www.alephium.domains/
Reflecting on the past two interviews, I've learned that project developers need to consider more than just design choices. They also need to think about timing, onboarding for developers, onboarding for users, and, of course, naming. The crypto space is very diverse, with people having different tastes and design preferences, and that's okay. We are in a decentralized and permissionless space. Having overlapping solutions is a sign that the Alephium ecosystem is growing. This interview has been very insightful for me. I hope you enjoyed it too. Thanks for joining, and see you in the next one! Cheers! 🥂
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