The question nobody asked us

When we first started talking publicly about what we were building — permanent onchain addresses for Queensland, TLDs that would carry the names of places people actually live and love — the questions came fast. What will the addresses do? Can I use mine as a website? Will the Gold Coast address be worth more than a Brisbane one? Can I sell it?

Nobody asked us which chain we built it on. And in the early days, we assumed that was a gap in people’s curiosity. Now we understand it differently. People didn’t ask because, for the people we were building this for, the chain is supposed to be invisible. Infrastructure only becomes visible when it fails.

That invisibility was, in fact, what we were designing for. The chain underneath a Queensland address should feel like the electricity grid underneath a light switch. You don’t need to understand it for it to work. You just need to be able to trust that it does.

But the choice mattered enormously. It still does. And we think it’s worth saying, plainly and at length, what we were actually looking for and why the infrastructure we chose was the right answer — not the flashiest answer, not the most hyped answer, but the right one for the specific, values-driven thing we were trying to do.

Starting with the people, not the technology

Every technology project begins with a constraint. Sometimes the constraint is money. Sometimes it’s time. Sometimes it’s the capabilities of the team. For us, the binding constraint was the people we were building for.

Queensland is home to a lot of different kinds of people. Sugarcane farmers in the north. Surfers who haven’t owned a suit jacket in decades. Engineers at mining companies. Retirees on the Gold Coast who got their first smartphone to video-call their grandchildren. Teachers in Cairns. Market stall operators in Noosa. People who have lived in Toowoomba for four generations and can’t imagine being anywhere else.

These people did not grow up thinking about wallets and private keys and gas fees and minting. Most of them don’t have a strong opinion about proof-of-stake versus proof-of-work. They have never opened a crypto exchange. They are not adversarial to technology — they use it every day — but they have no patience for technology that treats them as students rather than customers.

If we built something that required them to first become crypto-literate before they could claim their own name, we had failed before we started.

This is not a niche concern or a polish-later problem. It is the entire problem. The whole point of Queensland Foundation is to give Queenslanders a permanent piece of digital infrastructure with their own place’s name on it. If the act of claiming that piece requires navigating three wallets, paying for gas in a token they don’t hold, and understanding what a seed phrase is, the thing we built is not for them. It’s for us. And that would have been a kind of arrogance we were not willing to accept.

So before we ever looked at specific chains, we wrote down the person we were serving. We called her Margaret. Margaret is in her early sixties. She lives on the Sunshine Coast. She has a laptop and uses it competently — she pays her bills online, she emails her accountant, she books flights without help. She is not afraid of technology. But she has no crypto holdings, no wallet app, and no particular desire to acquire either just to own a digital address with her city’s name on it.

Everything we evaluated, we evaluated through Margaret. Could she do this? Could she do this without help? Could she do this without first learning a new financial system? If the answer was no, we kept looking.

The wallet problem

Let’s be honest about something most blockchain projects don’t like to say out loud: wallets are a barrier.

Not for the people who already have them. Not for developers or traders or NFT collectors who set up their first wallet years ago and now find the whole process trivial. For those people, asking “do you have a wallet?” is like asking “do you have a browser?” It’s a given.

But for the majority of people who have never interacted with blockchain — and that is still the overwhelming majority of the population, including in Australia — a wallet is not a given. It is a new concept, a new application, a new set of vocabulary, and a new set of risks. You have to understand what a seed phrase is. You have to understand why you should never share it, never store it digitally, never lose it. You have to understand that if you lose it, there is no customer service line to call and no account recovery process to trigger. It is simply gone.

This is true ownership, and we believe in it deeply. We’ll come back to that. But there is a meaningful difference between “ownership that requires a wallet” and “ownership that you can access before you have a wallet, and acquire a wallet for later if you choose.”

We needed the second option. We needed a path where someone like Margaret could visit the Queensland Foundation, search for her name, pay five dollars with a card she already has, and receive a confirmation that she now owns that address permanently — without ever having to open a crypto application first.

This was not a small engineering ask. Most blockchain infrastructure assumes the wallet as the starting point. The wallet is how you are identified. The wallet is how you receive your asset. The wallet is how you prove ownership. Without it, the entire flow breaks.

We looked for infrastructure that inverted this assumption — where the onboarding could happen through familiar, card-based payment rails, and the onchain ownership could be assigned or claimed later, without the purchase being invalidated or the address being in limbo.

That requirement eliminated many otherwise excellent chains from consideration immediately.

Permanence is not a feature. It’s a promise.

We throw the word “permanent” around a lot in our materials, and we should be clear about what we mean, because it is doing serious work.

A Queensland address is not permanent the way a social media handle is permanent — until the platform decides to shut down your account, or shuts down entirely, or changes its username policy, or gets acquired by someone who changes the rules. That kind of permanent is not permanent at all. It is conditional. It exists at the pleasure of a centralized authority.

A Queensland address is permanent the way property title is permanent. Not in the sense that the physical land can never be lost or damaged, but in the sense that the record of ownership is robust, distributed, and not controlled by any single party who could decide, on a Tuesday afternoon, to revoke it.

Unlike traditional domains, which users rent annually through centralized registrars, blockchain domains function as permanent, on-chain assets. Once purchased, they belong to the owner indefinitely — no recurring fees, no risk of expiration, and no intermediary controlling access.

This was the model we needed. Not leasing. Not renting. Not subscribing. Owning.

But permanence as a promise requires permanence as infrastructure. You cannot build a genuinely permanent address system on a chain that might not exist in twenty years, or that charges fees in a token whose price volatility could make future interactions prohibitively expensive, or that is controlled by a foundation that could change the rules if its board decided to.

We thought about this in terms of what we were asking people to trust. When someone pays five dollars for a .queensland address and we tell them it is theirs forever, we are making a claim that extends across decades. We are asking them to believe that in thirty years, that address will still be theirs, that it will still resolve, that no one will have come along and said “sorry, there’s a new system now.”

That is an enormous promise. And we were only willing to make it if the infrastructure beneath it could actually hold it.

Unlike traditional DNS records that sit on centrally controlled name servers, blockchain domains live on public ledgers, giving owners permanent, code-enforced control. That is the model that makes the promise credible. Not the promise of a company. The promise of code on a distributed network.

We thought hard about what chain longevity actually means. The most honest framing we found was this: the right chain is one where, even if the original development team disappeared tomorrow, the records would survive. Ownership would survive. The addresses would still resolve. Because the chain itself — its validators, its nodes, its distributed architecture — doesn’t depend on any one team or company for its continued operation.

Censorship resistance means no authority can block, alter, or reverse legitimate transactions once they’re confirmed. This is not a political statement for us. It is a feature we needed. Because once someone pays for their permanent address, the question of whether they keep it should be answered by code, not by us.

The cost question, and why it’s a values question

Five dollars. Once. No renewals. No annual fees. No gas surprises.

We talk about the price a lot, because it matters enormously. But we don’t always explain why it is set where it is, and what the process was of arriving there.

The first thing to understand is that the price of a Queensland address is not primarily a business model decision. It is a statement about who these addresses are for. If we priced them at $200, we would be saying, implicitly, that digital addresses with Queensland’s name on them belong to the people who have $200 to spend on a digital collectible. That is a meaningful sub-segment of Queenslanders, but it is not Queensland.

At five dollars — a price most Australians can access without real deliberation — we are saying that this infrastructure is for everyone who lives here, or who has ties here, or who loves these places. The grandmother in Ipswich. The teenager in Mackay. The backpacker who spent a formative summer in Surfers Paradise and wants to hold onto a piece of it. The diaspora Queenslander living in London who still calls it home.

But setting a price of five dollars requires infrastructure where five dollars is actually viable. And that means two things: the transaction costs on the chain cannot eat into a five-dollar payment to the point of incoherence, and the operational model cannot require ongoing fees that we would eventually have to pass on to users in the form of annual renewals.

There are no renewal fees, and blockchain domains cannot expire. This shift to decentralization empowers users with a sense of permanence and autonomy.

That is the model we wanted to deliver. But it only works if the underlying chain makes it economically possible. A chain where every transaction costs several dollars in gas — or where gas costs are unpredictable and can spike dramatically during periods of network congestion — makes a five-dollar, once-only price point either impossible or unsustainable.

If the underlying blockchain has issues like congestion or high fees, it can affect domain usage. During Ethereum network congestion, for example, registering or renewing can become very expensive due to gas fees.

This was a real constraint. We evaluated chains where the technology was excellent and the ecosystem was mature but where the transaction fee environment made our pricing model untenable. We were not willing to say “five dollars, but also you might pay another few dollars in gas.” That is not five dollars. That is an unpredictable and anxiety-inducing fee that contradicts everything we were trying to do.

The chain we chose has transaction costs so low that they are essentially invisible. Not low for a blockchain — low by any standard. The kind of low where a five-dollar payment is genuinely a five-dollar payment, and the cost of minting an onchain asset doesn’t require a separate financial decision from the person doing it.

This sounds like a technical criterion, and it is. But it is also a moral one. Pricing that is genuinely accessible requires infrastructure that makes accessibility economically feasible. You cannot separate the values from the engineering.

What we mean when we say “aligned”

We use the word “alignment” when talking about why we chose this chain. It is a word that gets overused to the point of meaninglessness, so let us say precisely what we mean.

Alignment, for us, means that the people who built and maintain this infrastructure appear to have asked the same questions we asked. They appear to have started from the same place: how do we make this work for people who are not already insiders?

Most blockchain infrastructure is built by people who are already deep insiders. That is not a criticism. Deep expertise produces excellent infrastructure. But it also produces infrastructure whose defaults assume a certain kind of user — technically literate, comfortable with volatility, holding existing crypto assets, prepared to navigate complexity in exchange for control.

That user is real, and that user deserves excellent infrastructure. But that user is not our primary user. Our primary user is Margaret.

The chain we chose has made decisions, at the infrastructure level, that signal the same priorities. Fees are kept minimal not as a marketing tactic but as a structural feature. The developer ecosystem is oriented toward building consumer-facing applications that non-technical users can actually complete. There is a culture of building bridges — toward traditional payment methods, toward familiar interfaces, toward the experience of using something rather than configuring it.

We noticed this not in the marketing materials but in the actual products that had been built on top of the infrastructure by third parties. When a chain attracts applications that serve real, non-specialist users well, that is evidence of alignment. It means the base layer has been designed in a way that makes those applications buildable without fighting the infrastructure at every step.

That matters enormously for us, because Queensland Foundation is not the last application that will be built on this infrastructure. Addresses are just the start. Over time, what you can do with a Queensland address will grow. And every layer we build on top needs to inherit the same accessibility properties as the first layer. A chain that is easy to build accessible applications on is not a luxury — it is a prerequisite.

On immutability and what it actually means to own something

There is a version of the permanence argument that people find uncomfortable, and we want to engage with it directly rather than slide past it.

If a user loses their private key or seed phrase, access to their domain is permanently lost — there’s no “forgot password” recovery mechanism. This risk makes secure key management essential.

This is true. And we are not going to pretend it isn’t. True onchain ownership — the kind where no one can take your address away, the kind where even we cannot revoke what you own — comes with a corresponding responsibility. If you lose access to your wallet, the address doesn’t disappear from the chain. It persists there, permanently, with no pathway back to you.

This is the honest trade-off at the heart of genuine digital ownership. And we spent a long time thinking about how to present it.

The conclusion we reached is this: the same property that makes the ownership real is the property that makes it unrecoverable if access is lost. You cannot have both “no one can take this from me” and “there is always a way to get it back if I mess up.” These are in tension. One implies central authority. The other implies genuine self-custody.

We believe the right answer for our users is to build the best possible experience around key management and recovery while being honest about the nature of what is being offered. That means: making it very easy to claim an address without a wallet initially, so the first step is not overwhelming. Providing clear, plain-English guidance about how wallets work and why they matter. And encouraging users to move toward self-custody when they are ready, rather than requiring it before they can participate at all.

The key difference is control — with Web3 names, possession of the cryptographic token equals ownership, without needing continued approval from a registrar.

That is the sentence we kept coming back to. Ownership without a registrar’s approval. Ownership that does not depend on us continuing to exist as an organisation. Ownership that survives company acquisitions, policy changes, government directives, and the long, unpredictable arc of institutional decisions.

That kind of ownership is worth something. It is worth explaining carefully, worth making accessible, and worth the effort of designing around the complexity that it inevitably carries with it.

The transferability piece

Something that doesn’t get talked about enough in the context of onchain addresses is what transferability actually unlocks.

With a traditional domain, transferring ownership is a process mediated by a registrar. You initiate a transfer, the receiving party accepts, there are waiting periods, there are fees, there are possible complications if the two parties are using different registrars, and there is a centralised authority overseeing the whole process who could, theoretically, intervene.

With an onchain address, transfer is a transaction. It is native to the system. Blockchain domains are minted as non-fungible tokens, allowing users to buy, sell, and transfer ownership directly on the blockchain. There is no waiting period that a third party controls. There is no intermediary who must approve the transfer. There is no authority who could deny it.

This matters for a few reasons. One is practical: it makes secondary markets possible in a genuinely open way. A Queensland address holder can sell their address to another person without involving us. They do not need our permission. They do not need to go through a platform we control. The transfer happens on chain, it is recorded immutably, and the new owner’s claim is as strong and as permanent as the original owner’s.

Another reason this matters is philosophical. If we say “this is yours,” we need to mean it completely. The ability to transfer is part of what ownership means. A possession you cannot give away, sell, or leave to someone in your will is not really fully yours. It is a licence with an unusual set of terms. We were committed to building genuine ownership, which means building something where the owner has the full bundle of rights that ownership implies — including the right to dispose of it however they choose.

For Queensland addresses, this has some interesting implications. A .brisbane address purchased today might become genuinely valuable in the future as onchain infrastructure becomes more central to digital life. The person who bought it for five dollars has not just bought a personal convenience — they have acquired an asset, fully theirs, that the market will value however the market chooses to value it. We think that’s fair. We think that’s right. And the chain we chose supports it natively.

Why we didn’t choose the obvious answer

There are chains that nearly everyone in the blockchain space would have nominated first if you had asked them “which chain should a naming project be built on?” We evaluated those chains. Some of them are excellent. One of them, in particular, has the most mature naming infrastructure and the most established ecosystem for exactly this kind of project.

We did not choose it.

The reasons were not technical. The technology is sound, and the naming infrastructure built on it is genuinely impressive. The reasons were about cost, about accessibility, and about what the realistic experience of a non-technical Australian would be when they tried to use something built on that chain.

For a user like Margaret, the gap between “I want this five-dollar thing” and “I have successfully claimed this five-dollar thing on this chain” involves steps that include acquiring a token she doesn’t hold, understanding what gas is and why it fluctuates, potentially watching a transaction fail because she underestimated the fee, and paying again. That experience — which is extremely common for people entering that ecosystem for the first time — is not the experience we were willing to deliver. It is not five dollars. It is five dollars plus confusion plus the possibility of losing money on failed transactions plus the need to already hold a specific cryptocurrency before you can participate.

We were also mindful of the power of the default. Most people, most of the time, will not read documentation. They will not watch a tutorial. They will arrive at the page, form an intention, try to complete it, and either succeed or leave. The default experience has to be good. It has to be something a person can complete on their first attempt, without help, without prior knowledge of blockchain, and without a pre-existing crypto wallet.

No chain with meaningful transaction fees can satisfy that requirement for a five-dollar product. The math simply doesn’t work, and the user experience breaks down too predictably.

The chain we chose has transaction costs so small that they vanish into the background of the overall interaction. They do not require the user to hold a separate token. They do not require a separate fee decision. They are simply the cost of the transaction, handled at the infrastructure level, and invisible to the person completing the purchase.

That invisibility — which we have already described as the goal for the chain itself — had to extend to the fees as well.

The long game

We want to be transparent about something: part of why the chain question matters so much to us is that we are trying to build something that does not need to be rebuilt.

Most technology projects are built with an implicit assumption of iteration. You ship version one, learn from it, build version two, improve on that, and so on. The pace of change is assumed. Obsolescence is expected. Users accept that the product they use today will look different in three years.

That model does not work for us. A Queensland address is not a product in the iterative sense. It is a record. Blockchain domains live on decentralized ledgers, recorded as tokens that represent ownership. Once minted, the domain exists permanently on-chain, meaning the holder can transfer, sell, or link it to various blockchain applications without intermediaries.

The record of who owns alex.queensland, set down on the day Alex registers it, should be as legible and as operative in thirty years as it is today. That is not an aspiration. That is the requirement. And it means we needed to choose infrastructure with a credible thirty-year horizon — infrastructure that is decentralised enough to survive the disappearance of its founding team, mature enough that its security model is well-understood, and stable enough that the records written on it today will not need to be migrated to a new chain in a decade because the original one became untenable.

The question of chain longevity is genuinely difficult to answer with certainty. Nobody can guarantee that any specific piece of technology infrastructure will still be operating in thirty years. The internet as it was conceived has changed enormously. Software that seemed permanent has become obsolete. Standards have evolved. Ecosystems have collapsed and others have risen.

What we could evaluate — and what we did evaluate carefully — was the balance between decentralisation, adoption depth, economic sustainability, and technical soundness. A chain with many independent validators is more robust than a chain with few. A chain with a large and active developer ecosystem is more likely to evolve appropriately than one that is thinly maintained. A chain whose security model does not depend on a single company’s continued investment is more trustworthy over the long run.

These were the factors we weighted. Not which chain had the best marketing. Not which chain had the most impressive whitepaper. Not which chain had the most vocal advocates in the spaces we moved in. The questions that mattered were structural: will this still be here? Will the records still be legible? Will the ownership still be enforceable?

We believe the chain we chose answers those questions well.

Accessibility as infrastructure, not UX polish

There is a tendency in technology to treat accessibility as something you add at the end. You build the thing, and then you add accessibility features — simplified language in the help docs, a support chat button, maybe a tutorial video. These are good things. They are not enough.

Genuine accessibility is structural. It lives at the level of the choices you make about what system to build on, what fee model to use, what the default flow requires of the user before they can complete it. If the infrastructure requires technical prerequisites, no amount of surface-level polish can overcome them. You can write the clearest possible help document about how to set up a wallet, but if setting up a wallet is required before a person can start, you have already lost the people who were most likely to be daunted by it.

We made the accessibility decision at the infrastructure level. We chose a chain and a set of tooling around it that allowed us to design a flow where the starting point is “visit the page and search for your name” — not “first acquire crypto, then set up a wallet, then connect the wallet, then check your balance, then proceed.” The simplification is not cosmetic. It is native to the system.

Blockchain domains enable users to send and receive cryptocurrency, access dApps, and manage digital identities with simple, human-readable names. That simplicity — human-readable names as the interface layer over complex blockchain infrastructure — is exactly the model we are extending to the Queensland context. The name is the thing. The chain is the infrastructure. The user should only ever have to think about the name.

There is also a dimension of accessibility that is about price stability over time. A five-dollar address is only accessible if it stays five dollars. If the pricing model depends on a token that fluctuates wildly, the “five dollars” is fictional — it is five dollars today and something else tomorrow. We designed around this by keeping the pricing in familiar, stable currency terms, and by choosing infrastructure where the cost of an individual transaction is low enough and stable enough that it does not distort the user-facing price.

This is harder to do than it sounds. Most blockchain transactions are priced in the chain’s native token, and most native tokens have price volatility that would make any fixed-price product unpredictable. Finding infrastructure where this problem was either solved or small enough to be managed was part of the evaluation process.

The mission connection

Queensland Foundation is not a technology project that happens to involve Queensland. It is a project about Queensland — about the identity of this place, the connection people feel to it, and the desire to hold a permanent piece of it in the digital world.

The places whose names our TLDs carry — Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Surfers Paradise, the broader state — are not abstract. They are specific. They are places people have fought for, built in, grieved in, celebrated in. The Gold Coast is not just a brand. It is a coastline that people have watched change across their lifetimes. Brisbane is not just a city. It is the place where certain families have been for generations.

Giving people a permanent onchain address with those names on it is not primarily a technological act. It is a cultural act. And the technology has to serve that cultural purpose, which means it has to be invisible, affordable, permanent, and accessible enough that the act of claiming the address feels simple and right — not like navigating a financial product.

When we chose our chain, we were not thinking primarily about which one had the best consensus mechanism or the most sophisticated smart contract language. We were thinking about Margaret. We were thinking about the teenager in Mackay who would probably never have thought about blockchain before, but who recognises their home in a TLD and wants to claim a piece of it. We were thinking about the diaspora Queenslander for whom a .qld address is a small, real act of connection to a place they miss.

For those people, the right chain is the one that gets out of the way. The one whose fees don’t interfere. The one whose onboarding doesn’t require prerequisites. The one whose permanence is structural rather than promised. The one that will, in all probability, still be here long after we are done building.

That is what we chose. That is why we chose it.

A note on what we didn’t optimise for

Choosing well sometimes means choosing not to optimise for things that seem important but aren’t, given what you are trying to do.

We did not optimise for being on the most-talked-about chain. We did not optimise for having the most sophisticated DeFi ecosystem around our addresses. We did not optimise for the chain with the highest trading volumes or the most venture capital behind it. We did not optimise for the chain that the most prominent voices in the blockchain space would have told us to choose.

These are all legitimate things to optimise for in the right context. They were not the right things for us.

What we optimised for was: can Margaret own a .queensland address for five dollars, without a crypto wallet, without technical knowledge, and trust that she will still own it in thirty years? Can the sixteen-year-old in Townsville claim their own name under a Townsville-adjacent TLD without first becoming a blockchain expert? Can a small business in the Sunshine Coast hinterland own a permanent address they can build their digital identity around, without worrying about renewal fees eating into their operating costs in future years?

For the first time, domain ownership can exist independently of external organisations, offering a new level of security and freedom that challenges traditional domain practices.

That independence — from registrars, from renewal obligations, from the decisions of organisations whose interests may not align with individual owners — is the thing we were optimising for. And the chain we chose was the one that made that independence most realistically available to the widest range of Queenslanders.

Final thought

We will probably be asked this question many times, in many different forms, as the project grows. People will want to know whether we chose right. Whether the infrastructure will hold. Whether the decisions we made in the early days will look wise or naive in the long light of hindsight.

We cannot know. Nobody can. Infrastructure decisions at this level involve irreducible uncertainty. We chose carefully, we chose with clear values, and we chose by asking the right questions — even when those questions led us away from the obvious answer and toward something less familiar.

What we can say is that the criteria we used were honest. We were building for real people, in a real place, with a real promise: that the thing they buy will be theirs, permanently, for the price of a cup of coffee. Every technical decision flowed from that promise. The chain we chose is the one we believed could keep it.

We still believe that. We will keep building like we do.