Opera has announced that its Web3 browser now supports Yat emoji-based web addresses within its browser. Just by entering a string of emoji, users will be redirected to the webpage that’s attached to that unique combo through Yat. Similar to domain names that you can buy, Yat sells strings of emoji that represent users. While this integration redirects to a site, Yat’s APIs allow these emoji strings to be used for payments and much more.
Commenting on the integration, Yat’s co-founder and CEO, Naveen Jain, said:
“Whether you’re an artist, musician, creator, business owner, or just want to increase your following, this integration is invaluable, making it easier for you to connect and share content with your community through your unique string of yat emojis. This integration is a testament to Opera’s continued innovation in the web browser space. We are thrilled to be partnering with them to make URLs more user-friendly and expressive while giving yat creators more visibility on the web.”
To be clear, all web browsers support these emoji links, for example, y.at/👽🎵 will get you to Lil Wayne’s record label, however, in Opera, you can dispense with the prefix and just put 👽🎵 to get to the page. For those on the desktop, you can invoke a little pop-up on the URL bar to easily select emoji characters.
Unlike Vivaldi which came out last month against crypto and Mozilla which folded under pressure to stop accepting crypto donations, Opera is really getting into the decentralised Web3 crypto space and even has a dedicated Crypto Browser that tries to put Web3 projects at your fingertips from the get-go. Web3 is still an emerging sector so it’ll be interesting to see which projects last, but shaking up the URL bar for the first time in decades is definitely noteworthy.