The Bitcoin Bridge looks at NBdomain and blockchain identity with Jeff Chen

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The Bitcoin Bridge, CoinGeek’s weekly video show looking at Bitcoin in the Asia-Pacific region, heads to Singapore this week. It’s the home base of Jeff Chen, founder of blockchain domain registry NBdomain, and the Maxthon browser project.

Jeff sees Bitcoin development as being “like the early stages of the internet,” and says there’s a feeling in the world that big things are about to happen.

“Decentralization, that creates great power, compared to centralized power like mutual funds and hedge funds. We can feel there is a trend, we can feel the movement.”

So what is NBdomain? It’s an internet domain registry that associates a domain name (ending with a “.b”) with a Bitcoin SV (BSV) address. The domain is forever connected to that Bitcoin address—as the owner, you could either connect that to your real-world identity by letting everyone know it’s yours… or transfer it to another owner by giving them the keys.

Unlike the domains we’re familiar with today, the “dot-b” domain is yours forever, after paying NBdomain an upfront fee. There’s no renewal required, so you can’t lose it.

But what if you handed over the keys to a domain connected to your identity? What if someone is using a domain for illegal activities, or squatting on someone else’s trademarked name? Jeff explains how it all works.

Then there’s the issue of how to use that domain: How do you upload content so it works like the kinds of websites we know today? Does it require third parties to build services to make that possible? Watch the interview to find out.

Previously, you needed to use the browser Jeff also built, called Maxthon, to view a “dot-b” website. However, Maxthon now has plugins and extensions that let you do that on one of the more mainstream broswers. Maxthon is based on Chromium, like Google Chrome, Brave and others, so you can also use the same extensions you’d use there.

Maxthon also has a built-in digital identity wallet called VBox, and the plan is to use VBox as a login and verification function for many more services in the future. As Jeff says, it’s still early days and most of these related services are yet to be developed. But if you feel like getting in at the foundation stage and having a taste of that early-internet experience, check out NBDomain.com and Maxthon.com to try them for yourself.

NBdomain and Maxthon are another taste of where everything’s heading with Bitcoin, blockchain-based identities, and decentralized services. And they’re two more examples of projects coming out of the APAC region that everyone should pay attention to—and perhaps even join in.

Check out previous episodes of The Bitcoin Bridge on Streamanity.