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[331salmon]

Yat The Fuck?

Yat is a service that aims to become a universal identifier for individuals. Currently, it takes the form of allowing users to purchase emoji subdomains of the “y.at” domain i.e. 😈😇😈😇😈.y.at. It promises to eventually be used as a payment address and a shared namespace for 3rd-party platforms.

Yats are built on the team’s Tari blockchain. Tari is an NFT-focused sidechain for privacy-oriented Monero. No details on blockchain custody of the purchased item are publicly given, but some kind of wallet or withdrawal feature may be added to the UI.

It is interesting to look at Yat from three angles: its current form as a typical consumer product, a near future in which it is bridged to Ethereum, and a further future in which it leads to Monero adoption.

The Yat namespace is quite large, with approximately 17 trillion identifiers based on their 447 emoji set. Yat’s team sells the idea of everyone wanting an emoji identifier very heavily. It’s unclear whether that is manufactured hype or genuine believe, but they will almost certainly add higher converting text identifiers similar to DNS and ENS once the marketing novelty diminishes.

At that point, Yat’s primary value is the lite-website hosting they offer. It is essentially Linktree without the brand recognition. The importance of that last part shouldn’t be underestimated since Linktree-type products are fundamentally marketing funnels.

The next step could be for Yat to become a Single Sign On option or first-class namespace for existing platforms.  A large part of the value of SSO integrations for platforms is its ability to serve as KYC, so if this ends up as a path for Yat it might preclude some of the more crypto and privacy focused potential. It will be especially tempting for them to keep compromising on those more forward looking goals given the initial success they’ve had with a heavily centralized system.

Yat has caught the interest of ETH enthusiasts and experts despite there already being a standard Ethereum identifier in ENS as well as Yats not being directly related to the Ethereum network. Users sign-in with their email, they make purchases with fiat-based credit cards, and any transfers of subdomains are done by contacting Yat support. The team has said they will be working on an oracle to allow Yat NFTs to be used on the Ethereum blockchain. At that point Yats could be used for dapps similar to ENS. A Yat’s value relative to an ENS domain in this regard will be determined by the BD efforts of their respective teams to get app adoption. ENS may have an edge here in that the decentralized nature of their project fits better with the ethos of many dapp developers.

Yat’s creator has said that they’ve focused on providing an enticing UX to users not familiar with crypto rather than create a decentralized experience. Given it is built on a Monero sidechain, this could potentially be an “ends justify the means” strategy. A viral launch and a shiny product which is nearly identical, post-launch, to incumbent Linktree are used to on-board users to Monero and potentially reap future privacy benefits. With the zk-proof related projects being built on and for Ethereum, we will need to wait to see how worthy of a goal that ends up being.

It’s early days for the product; I wish the team the best of luck!