The Space Club Crypto Stopped Being an ENS Clone Years Ago
SPACE ID has registered over 6.7 million domains in Q1 of 2026. It's live on 24 chains, has over 330+ integrations and burned $2.1 million worth of tokens as revenue in Q3 of 2025. Yet, the perception that SPACE ID is "ENS but for BNB Chain" persists. Was true until about 2023. In fact SPACE ID's use case has forked far away than what these space amateurs will believe. Space ID has evolved far more than BSC and every other blockchain SPACE ID is live on have, since that elementary naming-service scaffold that initiated the entire genre. And not every aspect surrounding that use case has caught up. That's the disconnect we're looking to bridge. The framework that most people have SPACE ID (and pretty much every other blockchain based domain name project) pinned under was forged back in the heyday of ENS ape rushes of 2021, where every naming protocol functioned basically the same. Pick a chain, register your .something name, idly await a useless airdrop. Now 5 years later, the SPACE ID ecosystem cultivating on-chain identity, has branched away to have its own proprietary business logic. SPACE ID is the nucleus of that branching. Time to break down how and why that happened, by dispelling myths about SPACE ID one at a time.
SPACE ID protocol metrics versus ID token market signals. Sources: CoinGecko, CoinCodex, SPACE ID protocol disclosures.
First Myth, All Domain Protocols Are ENS Forks With Different Logos
Fair, that is still a semi-okay misconception to have because for a very long time it was correct. For most of 2021 and even going into mid 2022, most of what we see as existing Web3 naming services today operated similarly to ENS. They were launched on a single chain, they had a single TLD extension, and captured registrar value through redirecting registration fees to a DAO treasury. SPACE ID came close to that model originally, in fact it didn't originally launch with SPACE at all. SPACE ID actually provided a bnb domain for the BNB Chain ecosystem natively in that single-chain-first way. But that similarity didn't last long. Midway through 2023 SPACE ID open sourced their multi-chain SDK in a way that allowed any chain to deploy its own native TLD name through SPACE ID's infrastructure. In January of 2025 Gravity Chain launched .g domains. In Q1 of 2026, 0G Chain followed that pattern with .0g names for both AI agents as well as human users. Taiko crypto explorers resolve SPACE ID domains natively. Same with Arbitrum block explorers starting in July of 2025. ENS by comparison is shackled to Ethereum. Unstoppable Domains is multi-chain yes, but of an entirely different technical flavor all together. Even more so because they do not provide the ability for one to create a chain-native TLD as an option. Point being that it's important to recognize the distinction because Web3 domain protocol tokens aren't one market. It's a basket of many overlapping markets that have their own revenue streams and adoption timelines. Comparing this space's club crypto token to ENS governance tokens is just plain wrong. It asks you to value a multi-chain infrastructure provider as if it were a one-chain utility. Which profoundly skews anyone's ability to have a reasonable sense of valuation. $0.03 SPACE is largely a product of incredibly bear sentiment right now combined with where the protocol is at with token unlock. But the opportunity scope of the protocol is structurally different than what that price may lead you to believe if you're thinking like it's 2021.
How Domain Logic from Twenty Twenty-One Breaks in a Multichain Reality
Dead assumption #2: Web3 domains were purchased purely for vanity purposes with absolutely no utility outside of vanity wallet address replacements. This was almost entirely true in 2021. Buying yourself a .eth name meant you got a human-readable address and some juicy bragging rights. The popular "space coin" thesis of that day revolved almost exclusively around speculation on premium names. Reality in 2026 does not bear this out. As of mid-2025, SPACE ID had registered approximately 2.7 million unique domain owners across its platform, with the Payment ID product (a service that maps domain names to centralized exchange transfer flows) launching on MetaMask and Binance in April 2025 and integrated into Enkrypt wallet in June 2025. Web3Decision launched July 2025, allowing companies to attach Know-Your-Business compliance data to domain names like startup.arb or company.bnb.
These aren't vaporware integrations that we're spitballing. They are live right now earning monthly reg/renew fees on a recurring basis. The DAO burns 50% of that quarterly. This is deflation, but based on actual demand instead of speculative mania cycles. Whether that burn rate is high enough to outpace the continual unlock schedule that won't finish until 2028 is a conversation for another day. But just know the cashflow to pay for it isn't theoretical. What space crypto naysayers really need to come to grips with isn't even blockchain consensus. It's that SPACE ID just successfully built a working fee model for identity infrastructure when virtually every naming service today still generates the lion's share of revenue from primary registration sales.
That fee model didn't exist in 2021. Didn't really exist in 2023 either.
Cross-Chain Shift Changed the Naming Service Economics
That changed once naming went cross-chain because SPACE ID flipped how we should think about the competitive landscape of crypto as a whole with on-chain identity. A single chain domain service can only scale linearly (more users on that chain = more registrations), while a multi-chain domain provider scales exponentially. Every new chain that integrates the SDK opens SPACE ID up to an entirely different userbase with their own TLD. SPACE ID works on 24 blockchains. Every chain added (Taiko, Arbitrum, 0G Chain, etc.) is another revenue vertical. SPACE ID isn't cannibalizing Ethereum native registrations with ENS. It's taking market share on the blockchains that ENS doesn't exist on. And that's why SPACE had 6.7 million registered domains despite coming in behind on Ethereum specific integrations.
What's the tradeoff? Fragmentation risk. Users on Mina crypto are going to need .mina domains. Users on Gravity Chain are going to need .g domains. Every TLD is going to go through its own adoption cycle and there's no way to ensure chain-to-chain resolution is going to function seamlessly as this protocol scales in complexity. That's why onboardings on eight blockchain explorers by July of 2025 is going to be massively important. Without displaying a readable name when you simply register a domain, we face serious fragmentation risk. Integrating that level of capability solves that. Domain standard fragmentation is SPACE ID's most mentioned technical risk on the sentiment dash and for good reason. It is a risk. But the idea that naming protocols cannot generate sustainable revenue streams has been proven wrong by SPACE ID burn numbers. Low-single-digit million dollar burns aren't "huge". They're revenue. Quarterly recurring revenue from a product category poached from "everyone's amazon".
Revenue Burn That Defied the No Utility Thesis
Domain naming projects have long been criticized as having registration systems worth only annual registration fees and nothing more. Space oriented crypto communities have heard those criticisms for years. SPACE ID built their burn mechanism on renewals, marketplace transactions fees, and new registrations and announced quarterly results. ~$2.1M was burned in Q3 2025 from three revenue generating sources across multiple chains at the same time. That rate retires $8.4M of ID tokens per year. Compared to a fully diluted valuation of $65.5M ID's burn to FDV ratio compares favorably to several higher market cap DeFi protocols. The catch with SPACE ID is token unlocks. The unlocking of 9.88 million token spaces this April translates to about $324k today. It was also only 0.49% of total token supply. Even large unlocks like June 2025's release of 0.9% of total coins in circulation still have a negative price impact. ID fell 5-8% in 72 hours after June's release. Unlock schedule still continues until 2028 so price impacts from dilution will be active (as will the burn) for at least the next two years. Whether burns will be able to keep pace with unlock dilution hinges on growth of paid namespace registrations. Sitting at 6.7 million names and growing registrations have had a positive growth rate. Can it accelerate?
What the Space Club Crypto Has Proven
The crypto ecosystem loves holding onto old takes way longer than they should. You can still read articles that claim web3 domains are "just" ENS and a bunch of ENS "clones", insinuating domain projects don't have 7-figure revenues, or that web3 naming services peaked in 2021. Reality says otherwise. SPACE ID failed to show domain tokens as either a "good" store of value, or even a legitimate investment vehicle. Trading at $0.03, or 98% lower from a March 2024 all-time high of $1.84, ID is by any metric just that: a terrible store of value. But what the SPACE token did show was that the multi-chain naming infrastructure can create recurring revenue, enterprise integrations (KYB verification), and operate on two dozen blockchains at once. This was proven at the protocol-level and has little to do with token performance. This seeming contradiction of "strong" fundamentals (6.7M domains, 2.7M unique owners, 330+ integrations) and "weak" price action ($42.7M mcap, all-time lows hit days ago) isn't a paradox. It's simply how bad token unlocks and overall market noise can impact the valuation of a lower cap asset. Competition like Air Space Intelligence, Polygon ID (zk-proof privacy), Unstoppable Domains, all exist and play a role in how risky the asset is when people look at the industry sector. Currently trading with a RSI of 39, and a Fear and Greed reading of 12, there's also merely a very negative market sentiment towards the cryptocurrency space in general. That isn't analysis. "It'll never catch up" or "looks like everything else" aren't newfound understandings of SPACE. The protocol. As of today. Does not fit those descriptions. Running a multi-chain identity layer and actually generating real revenue, burning quarterly, and getting enterprise integrations are feats that don't correlate with the perception of an "ENS clone" that SPACE was accredited at launch. Your average 2021 "proof of space" crypto thesis for naming services doesn't apply if you're trying to judge what is coming in 2026. Comfortable myths don't make for interesting analysis.
