​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​⚙ New Minting Standards​​​

In 2024, history has been written in the new ​Namecoin Vertical (NMC-V) Standard, honoring a memorable moment in history with the minting of the portrait of the 47th U.S. President in his iconic “fight, fight, fight” pose, followed by the minting of historical artifacts such as the iconic Quantum NFT, exceeding the 4MB limit known from Bitcoin “inscriptions”. Further key milestones were the eagerly awaited long-term archival of 10,000 CryptoPunks in the Namecoin Basic (NMC-B) Standard as well as the creation of the first blog post ever on the Namecoin blockchain, minted in the new NMC-V Plus (NMC-V+) Standard. These advancements highlight Namecoin's capabilities as a robust platform for decentralized content creation, backed by the Bitcoin network

​The History of Web3 Content

Since the hype of 2021, the NFT space has changed, most recently with NFTs being renamed “inscriptions”, tied to imaginary satoshis and stored in the witness data fields of Taproot transactions, or “Runes” embedded in the OP_RETURN outputs of non-standard Bitcoin transactions. These approaches often require “hiring” mining operators to accept non-standard transactions that regular ​nodes won’t even relay. While these experiments blow up Bitcoin’s blockchain, originally designed for the purpose of payments, they become inherently worthless without tracing their imaginary units of Bitcoin’s financial flow through the​ so-called “Ordinals” protocol. It’s like tracing individual drops of water flowing down the streams and rivers into the sea.

The concept of storing data on the blockchain, however, has been around for a long time already. Back in April 2011, Namecoin came to life ​as the very first Bitcoin code fork, purpose-built to offload payload data for Web3 IDs and domains from the parent Bitcoin blockchain. On proposal of Satoshi Nakamoto himself, merged mining was introduced to Namecoin in October 2011. Today, around 70% of all Bitcoin miners engage in merged mining with Namecoin, securing its blockchain and solidifying it as the most secure Web3 backend and blockspace for over 13 years. Defined by default policies, the standard size of data shuffled to the blockchain during transaction execution is limited to 520 bytes, set to prevent excessive resource consumption and potential denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

However, without breaking standard policies and without relying on Layer 2 protocols, it is possible to store NFTs and any type of datasets by concatenating multiple data fragments through direct TxID (transaction ID) references, all on Layer 1 of the native blockchain. This enables the storage of unlimited data attached to a single Web3 record, allowing for historical .bit and .web3 domains, many encoded with Punycode to support emoji domains, as well as alternative TLDs (top-level domains) and IDNs (internationalized domain names) with non-Latin characters to host decentralized link containers, contact information, and even full blog posts securely stored on Namecoin's blockspace. Over the years, we've seen various Web3 providers, especially from regions like China, try to assert control over the .bit TLD. However, none of them have succeeded or come close to the features, functionality and sovereignty that Namecoin continues to offer!

​NMC-V Standard

​On August 9, 2024, history has been written twice on the blockchain utilizing for the first time the new standard Namecoin Vertical (NMC-V), marking a historic milestone in blockchain innovation on the one hand, and honoring a memorable moment in history on the other, just days after the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump: The portrait of the 47th President of the United States in his heroic “fight, fight, fight” pose on the Times cover. This historic artifact is now available for download directly from the Namecoin blockchain, ensuring its permanence and accessibility for generations to come:

On August 22, 2024, the Quantum GIF, widely regarded as the most iconic NFT in history, originally minted on the Namecoin blockchain in May 2014 by artist Kevin McCoy, was minted fully on-chain in the NMC-V Standard with a size of about 9 MB. This mint marks the world’s first on-chain NFT to exceed 4 MB in size, setting a new benchmark for NFT storage and Web3​ development:​

NMC-B Standard

On September 21, 2024, the Namecoin Basic (NMC-B) Standard was introduced, which adds a declaration record with descriptions and any type of metadata to individual raw data records. This allows for representative NFT records with reference to the raw data in the asset's previous update. Using this standard, the eagerly awaited long-term archival of 10,000 CryptoPunks, originally minted on Ethereum on June 23, 2017, with links to a centralized web server, was finally achieved on the most reliable data blockchain: Namecoin.

​NMC-V+ Standard

​On December 6, 2024, the new NMC-V Plus (NMC-V+) Standard was introduced, allowing for extended declaration records across all NFT standards, as well as content creation of any size, fully on-chain, fully decentralized, fully Layer 1. The use of Namecoin’s blockspace eliminates the need for paid webspace from commercial service providers, marking the next step in the development of the decentralized web. This way, the record namecoin.nmc​ became our central Web3 ID, consolidating the most relevant communities, updates and releases.​

On December 20, 2024, the​ first-ever blog post on the Namecoin blockchain was minted under the Web3 domain 💎🙌🏻.crypto in the new NMC-V+ Standard​, elaborating on the psychology of trading, showcasing the basic possibilities of decentralized content creation. This record also shows the use of eye-catching emoji domains encoded in Punycode. While most of the decoded emoji wouldn't be displayed in the browser's address bar, showing only the underlying Punycode starting with "xn--", the Asset Viewer uses the browser's rendering of URL strings following the dotbit.app domain.

The NFT Time Capsule​

Check out the NFT Time Capsule​ with all on-chain artifacts created with the introduction of the new minting standards! While the creation of basic blockchain records using the new standards can easily be done manually, as detailed in the specifications​, auxiliary tools will soon be released to streamline the automated creation of NFTs, Web3 IDs, and any type of content. As visible in the embedded blockchain explorer​ above, all minting standards are implemented for one-click data reconstruction directly from the blockchain! Please note: The new minting standards are subject to continuous development and may be extended and updated anytime.

Please also check the external Namecoin Core Wallet Migration Tools for Windows, which allow the import of private keys into modern descriptor wallets. Follow us on social media or check our Web3 ID namecoin.nmc for the latest news and updates!