Exploring Onchain Identity and Community Infrastructure with Box Domains

Common Team -

The growing overlap between onchain identity, governance tooling, and community coordination is reshaping how communities organize and build lasting infrastructure on the internet.

Our conversation with ohms.box from Box covered naming infrastructure to contributor incentives, and how projects like Box and Common are building toward a more sovereign and composable crypto ecosystem.

With .box domains, users can use a single name for their website, wallet, and web3 identity, an increasingly valuable capability for multichain uses.

Why Identity Infrastructure Matters

We dug into the importance of digital ownership, especially in the context of identity. Unlike traditional domain names that can be lost or hijacked through centralized DNS providers, Box Domains are fully onchain. If you hold the private key, you control the domain.

The team pointed to recent web2 examples like the Squarespace/Google Domains incident as a clear case for onchain alternatives. While security alone isn’t always the initial driver for adoption, ohms.box made a compelling case that true ownership will become increasingly important as more users and builders start caring about composability and control.

We also talked through how identity ties into DAO participation and contributor legibility. From a tooling perspective, Box is exploring how tokenized subdomains could power a new layer of DAO infrastructure, where contributors can hold their own name.dao.box, and departments can be organized under ops.dao.box or grants.dao.box, creating clearer pathways for collaboration, funding, and accountability.

Common’s View: Contributor Sovereignty at Scale

At Common, identity is at the heart of the product experience. Our platform gives communities a way to coordinate transparently, through discussion forums, polls, token-gated threads, and onchain contests. We’ve spent the past few months expanding our incentive stack to include:

  • Quests that reward specific actions (with support for Aura and token-gated participation)
  • Contests where submissions and votes are stored onchain, and rewards go to the winning thread
  • Custom onboarding flows for contributors, supporting both custodial and self-custody options via integrations with Magic, Privy, and other auth tools

We also talked about the tension between ease-of-use and sovereignty. While many users want the simplicity of Gmail or Twitter logins, we believe it’s possible (and necessary) to design for a future where contributors own their reputation, own their content, and carry their identity across communities.

Doing the Unscalable (On Purpose)

One of the most refreshing parts of the conversation was hearing how Box has grown their community. They emphasized that their early traction came not from ads or massive campaigns, but from talking to users one-on-one and supporting them in Discord, helping them launch .box projects, and building strong ties between community members.

This “do things that don’t scale” approach has resulted in an unusually creative and engaged user base, with contributors experimenting on .box domains for personal portfolios, 3D art galleries, web3 resume pages, and more. Box supports these users with POAPs, public showcases, and soon, token-gated discounts and reward flows tied to wallet holdings.

It’s a great example of how identity infrastructure can enable creative expression, not just utility.

Community Ownership is the Alpha

It’s always energizing to speak with teams who share our values around sovereignty, coordination, and product-led ecosystems. Box Domains and Common are both working on different pieces of the same problem: how do we give communities the infrastructure they need to own, express, and govern their identities onchain?

We’re excited to continue exploring how our platforms can integrate, support one another, and push forward a shared vision of community-driven internet infrastructure.