About Namesdao

We help out! 5% of all initial registration fees received for at least the first 3 years will go to a charity DAO to be set up supporting education, open source and freedom-oriented initiatives. We thank all of the community members who’ve helped us along the way.

(this page is a little stale, we should update contents at some point.)

What is Namesdao .xch Name Service for the ChiaTM Blockchain?

Namesdao .xch Names are analogous to ENS, the EthereumTM Name Service

The .xch name provides an easy to remember wallet address. It’s much easier than telling someone a long xch address.

It’s not a domain name per se, and .xch is not a TLD (top-level domain), just as .eth is not a TLD, top-level domain. Any domains under the jurisdiction of ICANN are subject to government seizure and censorship. (“Unstoppable Domains”, for example, is a company focused on ICANN-censored TLD’s like .crypto.) In the future, browser extensions will let your browser resolve .xch names potentially, but it will not likely be supported by default for some time. There will likely be redirect link services in future also.

.eth names have been sold at auction for prices of great than $1 million U.S. Probably nothing?

Team

Our team thinks with a long-term perspective and looks to create positive incentives for the long term. Our first project, after an initial time-locked airdrop to our community members, was to package that capability in a way that others could use it, what we built into a dapp called Time Machine. This way projects can keep their team member’s incentives aligned, and look to build significant value over time. Indeed, we will be using Time Machine as part of our own team’s compensation and bounty compensation.

Ben Atreides Ving leader and co-founder of Namesdao; Chia and Proof of Space and Time maximalist [Pseudonymous Persona]

RS Orc Co-founder of Namesdao, Long term software developer - Active in studying Chia for years; Contributed to chia forks wallet open source code in Jan/Feb 2002; launched OrcNation Discord with mini-courses and Chia tips, launched ORC token with first ever CAT time-locked airdrop, leader of Time Machine, a Goby-integrated Chia dapp using custom Chialisp in early beta [Pseudonymous Persona]

Lee Jay Namesdao developer, very experienced software developer [Pseudonymous Persona]

Why do we have an anon team initially? A doxxed team can be pressured to use censorship. We can do a larger range of experiments and serve a larger vision as anons. See Satoshi Nakamoto’s choice to be anon. We do have a very significant vision of empowering the community. We also do not require venture capital funding and would like the xchommunity to participate in the upside of the creations we contribute to.

Does this mean this is higher risk? Maybe/Maybe not, the recent CeFi collapses like Luna/Terra, Celsius Network and 3 Arrows Capital have been led by non-anon, public leaders. The community’s monetary risk on Namesdao is mainly limited to the current amount of tokens/XCH being processed by the Namesdao platform. This limited and quantifiable risk also will go down dramatically when we get to a future version that is more smart coin / chialisp-based. We have experience innovating by building our own Chialisp-based dapps, and look forward to applying that expertise here.

If you are interested in joining the team, we invite you to join our Namesdao discord and contribute. We welcome new team members who may have been working on other name service ideas and projects.

Bounties, in NAME tokens

Please see our new Bounties and Grants page

Roadmap

Here are some things on our to-do list. We’d love to hear from you about what you suggest we should prioritize.

DONE Improve the Name Resolution Caching service to update when NFT’s are transferred.
Upgrade namesdao.py wallet send script to also support CATs (in progress)
DONE Release of “_” “lite” namespace (small registration fee, namespace starting with 1 underscore character)
Release of “__” free* namespace (namespace starting with 2 underscore characters)
DONE Rollout of rest of namespace (regular registration fee)
DONE Automated refund processing for registration requests with errors
Architecture for connecting additional info with .xch name
Move to primarily chialisp-based, fully decentralized registration system
Advanced/power version of namesdao.py wallet send script to also support CAT Airdrops / sends to multiple wallets

API / Wallet integration for Developers

The ultimate source of truth for NFT and Namesdao Name ownership is on the Chia blockchain, through NFT’s with the Namesdao DID that have not expired. We offer a secondary cache which is initially served via IPFS. This will likely be upgraded before long.

We expect to offer some MIT licensed, open source code that can be used to integrate Namesdao Name resolution into your wallet or application soon.

Technical Structure

Namesdao .xch names are NFTs under the Chia NFT1 standard. They are generated with a special Namesdao image with the name, and the attributes and image display both the name and the expiry date. By default, names are registered for one year (technically 1681920 # of blocks of the Chia blockchain) at a time, and can be renewed during the year to extend their expiry date, which will result in the generation of a new NFT with the new expiry date. Our Namesdao server watches for registration requests and processes them accordingly. Many major decentralized projects on the Ethereum blockchain started off rather centralized and gradually increased their decentralization over time, and Namesdao expects to follow a similar pattern. It is not yet 100% decentralized.

The onchain NFT is generally the final arbiter of name ownership. In the case of an error and the generation of two NFT’s, the one with the earlier mint block # shall have precedence. In the case of 2 NFT’s being generated with the same name and block #, Namesdao will arbitrate ownership.

The Namesdao.py script is a utility that looks up the address of a .xch name from a web-based secondary cache, suitable for local test usage. We would imagine that blockchains and wallets will want to go off of the NFT values accessible from a full node.

Fees and Tiers

Our fee structure is:

starting with 3 underscores, free* per year, proof of concept tier (480p image)
starting with 2 underscores, free* per year (480p image)
starting with 1 underscore, approximately $0.50 per year (0.5 NAME tokens, (720p image)
starting with no underscore, approximately $5 per year (5 NAME tokens) for names of 7 or more characters (1080p image)
starting with no underscore, approximately $10 per year (10 NAME tokens) for names of 6 characters (1080p image)

*free but requires send of a minimal amount of some accepted CAT, at launch Spacebucks, AIR, or NAME, to be completed. Additionally, registration is not guaranteed, and during registration dust storms, may be paused for these tiers.

Short names may have a somewhat higher price, and there may be a limited number of reserved names that are not initially available for registration and would become available at special prices later. There is a 4% creator’s royalty on sales of the NFT.

We wish to provide a free tier as much as possible. Due to its free nature, our costs will hopefully be covered by fees for the other tiers of names. Because the free tiers could be subject to over-use, we do not guarantee we will handle all free tier requests, nor on a timely basis, for example if someone tries registering all of the names etc.

No Guarantees

Namesdao .xch names are provided without warranty or guaranty and Namesdao’s liability shall be limited to the registration fee paid to Namesdao, excluding the Chia blockchain transaction fee. This is an experimental product in an early beta test release.

[ We thank you in advance for helping us find and diagnose any bugs. We invite you to join Namesdao by joining our Discord . This is experimental beta software, use at your own risk. ]

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Namesdao is not affiliated with the Chia Network corporation.