Namesdao, the .xch Name Service for the Chia Blockchain

CHIP-0009 Name Service Wallet Address Resolution

Explainer part 1

Chia Improvement Proposal number 9

is for Name Service Wallet Address Resolution

This means that a wallet or other service implementing CHIP 9 will let people use text names to indicate a Chia address.

Instead of telling someone a huge 62-character address, you could tell them a short name like HiMyNameIsJoe.xch

You might want a service like this to be

CHIP 9 uses standard Chia NFT’s, using the NFT1 specification.

Name NFT’s have a name and may optionally have an expiry date, in the form of a Chia block number.

Let’s see how these are encoded.

Name and Expiry in Metadata URI

If we look at the metadata addresses of the NFT, we see the name and expiry block number listed in the second to last URI.

We trim off the .json at the end, take the text after the last slash character (“/”), and split the remaining text by the hyphen(“-“).

Name and Expiry in Metadata URI Highlighted

The address for the name is simply the owner address of the NFT.

Again this is a decentralized, self-custodied NFT, and all the data we need is right there inside the NFT.

We don’t need to load the off-chain metadata file. We don’t need to run any custom Chialisp. It is all simply there on chain.

And because it uses the NFT1 standard, transferring the Name to another Chia address is as simple as transferring any NFT.

No special configuration is required.

And automatically, the Name can be used in the rest of the Chia ecosystem, including offers, block explorers, NFT explorers and more.

Because there is no extra address configuration step, ownership and usage is easily accessible to any Chia user.

And a Name cannot be pointed to another address without that addresses’ ability to burn it.

As we see, primary name resolution of the name is

Simple, Compatible, Decentralized.

CHIP-0009

In production for 3 months and securing more than 3,100 Names.

Namesdao is not affiliated with the Chia Network corporation.

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