SorobanDomains was one of the first public contracts deployed in Soroban. At that time, there was no standard for Soroban NFTs nor projects looking to build one... But it's the end of 2025, and we have SEP-0050, which was proposed by the OpenZeppelin team.
So, to finish this year, we have decided to create our own implementation of the standard and make SorobanDomains an NFT protocol! Say hello to Non-Fungible Domains! This update will make it easier to transfer, trade, and interact between protocols, wallets, and other systems with SorobanDomains.
Registry v2
The first thing is: We are making a brand new Registry contract with new logic and are ready to mint NFDs to users. Let's go into detail about this new protocol:
Why making a new Registry contract?
The first registry was based on one key premise: collateral. This was good because it prevented the registration of domains in bulk by bad actors while allowing them to not pay anything for the domain in reality... But now that each domain will be its own NFD and token holders can just transfer them, trade them, or even approve others to move the tokens, the collateral at the Registry will be an issue. Because of this, the new Registry won't require locking collateral and instead will just implement a regular yearly fee like domain registries in other chains work.
Another reason to create a new Registry is to introduce Soroban Events to make the process of finding registered domains easier with the help of indexers. When the first Registry was made, we thought that most users would just keep one or two domains, so it would be easy to remember them. But to our surprise, many users registered multiple domains, and so it was hard for them to remember the domains they had. With proper events and our indexer keeping the record of new domains saved, you won't need to remember them and instead just check a list of your domains.
First year free for the OGs
We understand that the change from the collateral-based protocol to a fee-based NFT protocol is a big one, and so, to give old domain users enough bandwidth to decide if they want to keep their domains, the new registry will allow the migration of old domains for free.
How much time do we have to migrate? It will be 90 days after the new Registry is deployed, and during that same period, no one will be able to register a domain that is currently registered in the old Registry. Once this 90-day period has finished, the new Registry will allow the registration of domains that were not migrated before the deadline.
Domain Tokens
The new kid in the block is the NFD contract, and you can check the code here. Domains Tokens are just SEP-0050 NFTs, and the good thing with this is that wallets and marketplaces compatible with that standard will automatically be compatible with these domain tokens.
Users will be able to freely send and receive an NFD as long as the domain representing the token has not expired.
Soroban Governor
For the governance of the protocol, we will deploy a Soroban Governor contract, and all the fees collected by the new Registry will go there, we will also send the remaining PSD that has been sitting in the asset distributor for more than a year.
WEN?
We plan to deploy this new protocol during this month once we have deployed the Soroban Governor contract and it is set up and ready to control the Registry contract.