I should add that one motivation for the project was the possibility of encrypted DNS, made possible at the time by DNSCurve and CurveDNS. The idea is that a large registrar could run CurveDNS forwarders in front of its authoritative servers and the user could then have encrypted DNS packets for many, many domains by connecting directly to the registrar's servers. I doubted at the time, and I still do, that root servers or registries would ever run CurveDNS forwarders.