Instead of www and .com we can now use only icons

The idea behind internet addresses comes from Yat, with which the company behind Opera Browser has signed a partnership, which sells URLs consisting of emoticons, just like any other company that sells domains. Yat allows you to reach the required site by typing an emoticon in the field for the address you want to go to. Emoticons instead of addresses

Opera recently announced that it has provided web address emojis to “give the internet a new level of creativity”. Instead of typing www, or .com in the search box, all you have to do is type in a few icons (smiles, emoticons, emojis) and you’ll get to the site you wanted.

These emoticons are called Yats and their owners can turn them into tokens like NFT on the Ethereum blockchain and sell or own a short animation on the OpenSea platform. The company says the Yat can be between one and five characters long and sell for several to several hundred thousand dollars.

For example, the most expensive Yat is the address of one emoticon - the golden key, which was sold in the middle of last year for 425,000 dollars. Try it yourself

Yat addresses are mostly bought by musicians such as Kesha (), Steve Aoki () and Lil Wayne (), or Quest’s Supreme podcast (❓❤️).

After more than 30 years since the launch of the World Wide Web, there has not been much innovation in this area, which is one of the reasons why Opera has sought to partner with Yat, Opera officials said. Opera has full support, but it also works on other browsers

Opera is the first browser that simplifies visiting Yat pages by simply typing Yat into the address field. Note that Yat addresses work in other browsers as well, you just need to type the y.at prefix before the emoticon, so some of the addresses will look like this: https://y.at/. Emoticons on web pages will now be able to lead directly to Yat pages, so whenever you come across several emoticons on a site, they can take you directly to a Yat page (if one exists).

Yat believes that in this way it can enable users to personalize their online identity and to make celebrities more popular. The concept is fun in itself and can be really interesting, but the fact that these new addresses are sold for extremely large sums of money is of little concern. For now, the best on smartphones

We should not forget that the process of typing new emoticons is inconvenient on a PC, and that it is much harder to remember an emoticon than the logical name of a site, especially when it comes to four or five Yat. Basically, these addresses are designed for typing on phones, because you have a keyboard with emoticons, which you don’t have on computers, which somewhat limits their use.

Some of these addresses lead to y.at emoticons, while some simply redirect to regular addresses, making the whole point of Yat meaningless. On the other hand, this whole concept is new, so we will only see the directions in which the work will develop.

On the other hand, what all is being sold as NFT today, and at what prices, Yat’s really don’t seem like something extreme, so we wouldn’t be much surprised if this is just one new bubble that is going to burst.