Emoji-Only Web URLs Are Here, Because Regular Text Is So Yesterday
At this point, emojis are basically a mother tongue. A picture speaks a thousand words, or so they say. We’ve already begun to replace vital elements of language like “LOL” with the cry-laugh emoji, so what else do we stand to lose?
URLs. They’re still made up of words and letters—for now—and where there is a character, there is an emoji to take its place.
The Opera browser announced on Monday that emoji-only web addresses are now in existence. Gone will be the days of “www.” or “.com,” and in their place will be the Unicode symbols that we all know like the backs of our hands.
This is in partnership with Yat, which is a company that sells exactly this: emoji URLs. Gizmodo likens it to Domain.com, which sells regular domains. The emoji combinations, or Yats, are—you guessed it—tokenized on the blockchain. They can either be made into an Ethereum NFT or animated as a string on OpenSea.
Some musicians have been the first to snap up these Yats, including Lil Wayne and Kesha. “The integration is equally about functionality as it is expression,” Julia Szyndzielorz, Senior Public Relations Manager at Opera, states in the blog post.
Additionally, emojis embedded in web pages can also be linked to Yat pages, which could make a particular combination truly someone’s own, and an integral part of their brand.
