It's certainly been a tumultuous start to 2025, and one that is certainly going to bring some challenges to everyone on Radix, from holders to builders. At the RNS we set out with an ambitious goal to have a fully fledged DAO with many engaged participants utilising their domains to guide the project's trajectory. After a successful launch of domains, we remained cautiously optimistic in our approach, despite the incredible outlay in setting up a DAO in the Cayman Islands! Since then (and there's no way of sugar coating this), the performance of Radix has been in decline. Both in terms of price, but also with respect to some of the decisions made by RDX Works which have hindered our ability to continue down this path. We wont dwell on that though, let's leave the politics aside and get on to how we navigate through this...
The first question people will have is, are we exiting the Radix ecosystem? Firstly, let's dispel that. The founding members of the RNS DAO (Wylie, Faraz, Beem and Simon) are all still very strong believers in Radix and the vision of unlimited scalability, backed by the best UX and DX, and probably one of the strongest communities in the space. Both Wylie and Faraz remain dedicated node runners, Beem is championing Radix's presence on TikTok and Simon is still plugging away at Scrypto. Whilst not an exit, Radix's current situation has forced us to take some drastic steps to protect the future of the Radix Name Service, and ensure its long term viability.
On February 1st, our DAO proposal goes live for voting on the Crumbs platform. For full details of the proposal, see here. The proposal lays out plans to dissolve the DAO in the Cayman Islands, upgrade the RNS to be fully open source and at the same time, simplify the economics of domain ownership. Let's take a look at what this means in practice for Domain holders:
Governance
The smart contracts powering the RNS will be locked down and made immutable. The only way to initiate change will be to fork and migrate. This should open up the possibility for upgrades to the entire community, rather than being dependent on the founding team.
Safeguarding Decentralisation
The current system of upgrading smart contracts will be scrapped. The RNS DAO founders will no longer be able to make changes to the Scrypto components using authorisation badges. As part of the proposed upgrade, these badges will be revoked and destroyed, preventing any centralised entity from having control of the service.
Domain Lifecycle and Renewals
Domains will no longer expire or require renewal. Domains will instead require a bond (paid in xUSDC) to be staked to the domain in order to hold and utilise it. As long as the bond is applied to the domain, it remains in the possession of the holder. Should a holder wish to surrender a domain, they are free to sell it (with it's bond attached), or simply unbond the xUSDC and the domain will drop into a pool for a subsequent party to bond and take possession. The bonding fee will be comparable to the existing base pricing, and by utilising xUSDC this negates the need for upgrades to smart contracts to reflect any changes in exchange rates.
Economic Enhancements
This proposal effectively makes domains free to purchase, and the requirement for a small bond simply acts as a mechanism to deter squatters from sitting on domains. The proposal also includes provision for an optional registrar fee to applied. This opens up the possibility for anybody in the community to provide an outlet for offering domains and can collect a small fee for providing this service.
What's next?
Firstly we'd love to hear from you if you have any questions, concerns or doubts about the proposal to contact us either on X or in Telegram. Voting goes live on February 1st and will run for 1 month. All domain holders are welcome to vote, with each domain equalling 1 vote. Assuming the vote is passed (we will need >50% in support of the proposal) then we will commence work on upgrading the RNS smart contracts to reflect the changes/enhancements detailed above.
Once this work is completed, the existing DAO treasury will be disbursed to the founding team (Wylie, Faraz, Beem and Simon). For full transparency, this treasury stands at ~3,000,000 XRD and will be utilised to fund the upgrades described here, and provide fair compensation to the team for their efforts to build the RNS over the past several years.
It's important to reiterate, this doesn't mean the end of the road. As domain holders and community members we too will be able to build out further functionality of the RNS, and will be on a level playing field with everyone else in the community. We will continue to lobby the Radix Foundation to consider the RNS as a primitive and prioritise it's implementation in the wallet to enable a much needed enhancement to the Radix user experience by providing name resolution!
We'll be dropping a few more blog posts over the coming weeks while the vote is ongoing, to explain in a bit more detail the new registrar system, the registration/bonding flow and how the fork based governance model will work. So keep an eye out for those and don't forget to vote before the end of February.
