Arweave Name System (ArNS)

Overview

Decentralized GoDaddy: The First Permanent Domain System

Arweave URLs and transaction IDs are long, difficult to remember, and occasionally miscategorized as spam. The Arweave Name System (ArNS) aims to resolve these problems in a decentralized manner. ArNS is a censorship-resistant naming system stored on Arweave, enabled through AR.IO Gateway domains, and used to connect friendly domain names to permaweb apps, web pages, data, and identities.

The Arweave Name System (ArNS) works similarly to traditional domain name systems but with ArNS, the registry is decentralized and permanent. It's a simple way to name, and identify your data, apps, or websites on Arweave.

Like traditional DNS services, users can purchase a name in a registry and DNS Name servers resolve these names to IP addresses. The system is flexible and allows users to purchase names permanently or lease them for a defined duration based on their use case. With ArNS, the registry is stored permanently on Arweave via the AO Computer, making it immutable and globally resilient. This also means that apps and infrastructure cannot just read the latest state of the registry but can also check any point in time in the past, creating a "Wayback Machine" of permanent data.

It's an open, permissionless, domain name registrar that doesn't rely on a single TLD.

More Than Just a Name

• Use an ArNS domain as a permanent address for dApps, static sites, or content on the permaweb.
• Assign an ArNS name to identity in apps, wallets, profiles, or stored data.
• Use smart-domains to program names to trigger integrations and automations.
• Leverage the composability and permissionlessness of ArNS names, by integrating them directly into apps to provide seamless user experiences.

Each ArNS name is represented by a smart contract powered by AO offering unparalleled flexibility for developers. These Smart Domain Names can be programmed to trigger unique integrations, features, and automations. For example, a developer could create a domain that accepts tokens to purchase or lease undername space, or a DAO could implement governance to manage where a name points to. This programmability makes ArNS domains more than just human readable names, but dynamic tools for innovation in decentralized systems.

Users can register a name, like ardrive, within the ArNS Registry. Before owning a name, they must create an Arweave Name Token (ANT), an AO Computer based token and open-source protocol used by ArNS to track the ownership and control over the name. ANTs allow the owner to set a mutable pointer to any type of permaweb data, like a page, app or file, via its Arweave transaction ID.

Each AR.IO gateway acts as an ArNS Name resolver. They will fetch the latest state of both the ArNS Registry and its associated ANTs from an AO compute unit (CU) and serve this information rapidly for apps and users. AR.IO gateways will also resolve that name as one of their own subdomains, e.g., https://ardrive.arweave.net and proxy all requests to the associated Arweave transaction ID. This means that ANTs work across all AR.IO gateways that support them: https://ardrive.ar-io.dev, https://ardrive.g8way.io/, etc.

Users can easily reference these friendly names in their browsers, and other applications and infrastructure can build rich solutions on top of these ArNS primitives.

Read more about ArNS here: docs.ar.io/learn/arns