The founders of Yats state that their mission is to become the best, most expressive censorship-resistant, self-directed, self-sovereign, identity system in history.
They care about privacy and view it as a basic human right.
Initially, they are working on creating an oracle service, which will allow Yats to be issued asNFTS on the EVM compatible chains such as BSC and Ethereum.
In the future, the underlying source of truth for Yats will be fully decentralized.
What Exactly Are Yats?
At the core, Yats are described as emoji usernames, which become part of a person’s user identity, website URL, payment address, and more.
The founders state that when someone buys a Yat, it becomes theirs forever. The Yat’s NFT and the underlying Yat are the same.
Users can import the Yat NFT into their y.at dashboard where they can rename it, and start using the emoji URL.
They can also customize a unique visualization for it.
Are Yats NFTs?
For now, Yats are not NFTs. They are located on a central registry that is controlled by a US-based company called Emoji ID, LLC DBA Yat Labs.
The company is registered as a Delaware LLC, and like all other Web 2.0 platforms, is run by a group of admins.
One of the reasons why people are buying into this project is, like most other projects in the NFT space, speculation. Some like Meebits have proven to be successful projects.
They believe that at some point, they can sell their investment at a profit. Community belief is what is driving the project as it was the case for 0N1 Force.
However, unlike other NFT projects, Yats cannot be transferred to another wallet or sold on a secondary marketplace such as OpenSea.
Does It Deliver On Its Promises?
One of the many selling points of Yat is censorship resistance. However, the centralized nature of Yat means that has not yet been achieved.
In terms of censorship resistance, it implies that users are immune from deplatforming.
However, the project’s T&C makes it clear that they can suspend or terminate accounts without warning.
It also states that it complies with all US laws and that all content remains the property of the company, just like content on other social media platforms.
Another term used by the project is that it is ‘Sovereign”. However, that idea is not true for now.
The reason for this is that to purchase something on Yat, you need to provide financial details such as those of a debit/credit card and an email.
The result is that any meaningful privacy has already been compromised.
That is because all purchases have to be made in fiat since the platform does not accept crypto.
What Yat Aims To Achieve
Yat has the goal of replacing a long crypto address with a simple Yat address.
The Yat CEO has stated in past interviews that the path to a decentralized internet has to be gradual.
Implication For The Domain Industry
Yat aims to create a single username that could be linked to one’s online identity.
It will be in the form of a simple emoji or a string of emojis that could direct internet users to a bank, social media handles, and domain names.
While it has not had an impact on the domain industry, in the future, it could.
