Opera, a web browser company, announced on Monday that it will support emoji-only web addresses in order to “to bring a new level of creativity to the internet.” The integration is the result of a partnership with Yat, a startup that sells URLs with emoji strings in them.
“It’s been almost 30 years since the world wide web launched to the public, and there hasn’t been much innovation in the weblink space: people still include .com in their URLs,” said Jorgen Arnesen, executive vice president of mobile at Opera, in a press statement.
Yat pages are one-of-a-kind websites created when someone buys a string of emojis (which itself is called a Yat). Yat owners can make an NFT of their emoji string, and the business hopes to allow users link their Yats to electronic payments in the future. Musicians are among the early adopters of Yats, according to the business; for example, singer Kesha’s Yat page has the emojis Rainbow Rocket Alien (editor note: Vox’s CMS doesn’t enable rendering of emojis), followed by y.at, which links to her Kesha’s World website.
Yat co-founder Naveen Jain explained that Yat emoji domains allow individuals to customise their online identity, potentially increasing the visibility of innovators, artists, and others. On February 1st, the company launched Yat pages.
Users will no longer need to insert the y.at part of the Yat page web URL as they would in other browsers, thus to get to Kesha’s Yat page in Opera, simply type in the Rainbow Rocket Alien emojis.