The story of a country whose destiny was changed by a domain name

The story of a country whose destiny was changed by a domain name

The year 2020 has been the year of 'major restructuring'. Bitcoin is becoming more attractive as trust in the current financial system continues to decline. Data has taken the place of precious oil.

This reality is proving to be beneficial for Tuvalu, a beautiful, remote and small island country on earth. This small coastal country of 26 square kilometers consisting of 9 small islands in the Pacific Ocean has a population of 11,000.

Tuvalu's main source of income is the sale of fishing licenses to foreign trawlers and the export of desiccated coconuts. But Tuvalu's economy cannot be sustained by these things alone.

Due to changes in the environment and industry, the old ways of living there started to become irrelevant. But fortunately today, Tuvalu has managed to make its economic future dependent on the two letter domain name .tv.

Tuvalu's two letters on the Internet hide the price equivalent to today's oil. This domain name is also a natural resource for Tuvalu.

The story of Tuvalu begins when he was fighting for his survival against the effects of the environment. In the 1990s when the Internet was just starting. Then the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was providing their domain names to all countries.

United States got .us, Japan got .jp, New Zealand got .nz then Tuvalu also got .tv domain name. Which turned out to be a big draw for him.

Until 1997, the fortunes of the island of 11,000 people, which had been making a living by exporting coconuts and fish, changed when an American startup offered Tuvalu $50 million to use the .tv domain name.

Then in 1998, Tuvalu signed the contract with Canadian Jason Chapnik. Even though Tuvalu sold the rights, he started selling .tv but it didn't do very well.

Then in 1999 another company named Idea Lab bought that contract from Jason and they started .tv Corporation. That went on for a few years. Then in 2001 a company called VeriSign came to Tuvalu and took over the contract. Since then, this contract has been with VeriSign.

You may be surprised to hear that for the past 21 years, Tuvalu has been collecting royalties from every website that has .tv in its URL. Today Tuvalu is raining money without any effort.

There is neither a farmer, nor a merchant, nor a fisherman. The name Tuvalu is enough to make this country rich today. Today even big networks like emmys.tv pay huge royalties to Tuvalu. Do you believe that this is the main source of income of Tuvalu today?

An over-heard story in the startup world is that the shovelers didn't make nearly as much money as Tuvalu renewed their .tv deal when California was running for gold.

By 2019, twitch.tv had earned one billion 540 million US dollars in revenue. Meanwhile, people's fascination with other eSports and video game streaming platforms like YouTube, Hulu, Caffee and Macross was still awakening.

Their business model also required a .tv domain name. Then Tuvalu had the starting base of all those companies, i.e. the digital land. During the corona virus period, the use of .tv domain names has increased even more.

When he first signed a deal with VeriSign for the domain name in 2001, he didn't know the value of .tv. But the price of the deal, which was agreed for five million dollars, has reached much higher today. According to Name Bio, the .tv domain has sold so much in the last five years that it collects more than $1.4 billion in royalties from the top 100 websites.

Today, Tuvalu has joined the United Nations with this money. In September 2000, Tuvalu became the 189th country. Today, Tuvalu's roads and schools are being built with that money. Its other islands are connected to electricity.

Tuvalu was previously known as Ellis Island. If that name was still there today, Tuvalu would never have been like this.

Tuvalu has the opportunity to achieve what Singapore achieved by becoming a world-class financial hub from its strategic port location.

In the pre-internet world, everyone could see that Tuvalu's future was in jeopardy, but today this island nation has what everyone needs to survive in the modern world.

Crypto company founder says - Meta and Microsoft are 'digital tyrants'

For a long time, large technology companies have been criticized for having a monopoly in the digital world. The founder of a cryptocurrency company in Hong Kong has expressed his opinion on this matter.

Yat Siu, the founder of Hong Kong's crypto company Animoka Brands, has accused big technology companies of trying to dominate the online world.

Siu's company has invested in more than 340 companies spanning finance, gaming and blockchain.

In a conversation with Bloomberg, he said that his goal is to break the dominance of the big technology companies in the market.

He also said that he is trying to return the digital ownership of the user to the user, saying that the technology company cannot do anything about it since the dominance of the digital assets is in the hands of the user.

He explained Meta and Microsoft as 'Digital Dictatorship'.

Theoretically, 'Web 3' is considered to be the future of the Internet, which is based on blockchain, and through this blockchain, cryptocurrency is traded.

This technology cannot be controlled by big technology companies such as Meta, Google, Apple.

This means, because the data is decentralized rather than being on someone's server, it gives the right to the user's digital assets to the user, according to Siu.