Back in the days, when the Internet wasn’t so mainstream, one of the main problems that users faced was that domain names hadn’t been matched up to Internet protocol (IP) addresses. This made them very unfriendly towards the average Joe, who had to type in the IP address of the website they wanted to visit, as in to literally type in the numbers.

Unlike traditional IPs, cryptocurrency addresses represent even longer strings of numbers and letters. If a user wants to send another user funds over the Ethereum network, they would have to input the address and make sure that each number and letter is written correctly.

It’s also important to know that, in this regard, blockchain-based technology is very punishing. This is because if you fail to input the address correctly and mistype a letter, the funds you send will be irreversibly lost. There’s no central authority to contact to reverse or refund the transaction – that money is lost.

And just like Domain Name Services (DNS) came to life when using the Internet, the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) came to be.

ENS allows for a readable username that is portable across dApps and blockchains. Why is it important for the Web 3.0 world?

As the cryptocurrency space is highly technical, it can be overwhelming for first-time users and non-tech-savvy individuals to onboard.

Take crypto transactions, for example. To send a crypto payment, you need a long public wallet address composed of a string of digits and letters of the alphabet that looks like gibberish. Moreover, users have a different public address for every cryptocurrency, making it difficult to manage and confusing for crypto beginners.

XNS, short for X Name Service, aims to make the crypto and decentralized finance space a bit simpler by allowing a user to create a universal nickname for all your public addresses and decentralized websites. Instead of having an unreadable string of keys for each crypto address, you’ll have a single XNS domain, like “Alex.x.tech,” where you can receive any kind of crypto and NFTs.

XNS aims to become the naming protocol of the decentralized internet by creating portable Web 3.0 usernames that are interoperable across all blockchains and decentralized apps (dApps). To understand its impact, let’s take a look at how XNS works.

What is XNS?

In a nutshell, XNS is a name and lookup service built on the Ethereum & Base blockchain that allows crypto users to translate their machine-readable addresses to human-readable addresses. Think of it as a nickname generator for public addresses, aiming to make crypto more accessible.

Say your friend wants to pay you back for dinner in cryptocurrency. To do so, you must share your Ethereum public address made up of 42 hexadecimal characters, which might look like “0xDC25EF3F5B8A186998338A2ADA83795FBA2D695E.” This is the equivalent of your IBAN, enabling others to send crypto to your wallet. With XNS, you can create a “nickname” for your public address, so instead of sharing that complicated string of characters with your friend, you’ll have a link, like “Alex.x.tech” — which is automatically connected to your public address.

Besides Ethereum addresses, XNS also offers human-readable domains for other crypto wallets, websites, content hashes and metadata — aiming to be your Web3 username, connecting all your addresses and websites under a single nickname, so that you can receive any type of cryptocurrency or NFTs via your XNS domain.

As per the XNS Documentation, the protocol calls itself “a distributed, open, and extensible naming system” that offers decentralized, blockchain-secured domain naming and look-up services. Due to its decentralized nature, XNS isn’t controlled by a single entity. This makes XNS more secure than centralized naming services as there is no single point of failure.

X Name Service (XNS) takes the exact same concept as the Domain Name Service (DNS) but adjusts it for the needs of XTech users. At its core, the X Name Service is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system that operates on the Ethereum & Base blockchain.

It aims to map human-readable names to machine-readable identifiers. In this case, the human-readable name can be something like “admin.x.tech,” whereas the machine-readable identifier can be the Ethereum address (or other cryptocurrency addresses, for that matter.)

In the image below, we have given an example of what it looks like. The address belongs to the XTech. The XNS domain name that we created is just an example for the purpose of this guide:

The standard Ethereum & Base Address is converted into a human-readable text (foundation.x.tech). This means that users are able to send funds or interact with “foundation.x.tech” instead of with the standard address. Obviously, this makes it a lot easier for regular users and also tightens the possibility of a mistake considerably.

According to the official XNS documentation, the system “has similar goals to DNS, the Internet’s Domain Name Service, but has significantly different architecture due to the capabilities and constraints provided by the Ethereum & Base blockchain.”

Similar to DNS, XNS also operates on a system made of dot-separated hierarchical names that are called domains. The owner of a domain also has full control over the subdomains.

How does the XNS work?

XNS is built on two Ethereum smart contracts. The first smart contract is the XNS registry, which records all the domains registered on XNS and stores three critical pieces of information about each domain: the owner of the domain, the resolver for the domain, and the caching time for all records under the domain. The second smart contract is the resolver, which translates the domain names to the machine-readable addresses and vice versa. This second smart contract matches each domain to the corresponding user, website or address.

Those wishing to create their Web3 username can visit the XTech app and start by searching for an available domain name. Once you find one, you’ll simply have to follow the registration process, which includes confirming two transactions from your wallet and paying the yearly fee, for names longer than five characters. Once you own the domain, you can link it to your crypto wallets, and websites, and create multiple subdomains, like Alex.x.tech — all connected under the same XNS domain.

There are two core components to the X Name Service. Namely, these are the registry and the resolvers. The architecture of the system looks like this:

Registry

The registry is composed of a smart contract designed to maintain a list of all the domains and subdomains while also storing three essential pieces of information about each. These pieces are:

• The owner of the domain

• The resolver of the domain

• The caching time-to-live for all the records that are under the domain

The purpose of the XNS registry is very straightforward – it’s to map from a name to the resolver who’s responsible for it. Meanwhile, owners of domains in the XNS registry are allowed to:

• Change the ownership of the subdomains

• Transfer ownership of their domain to another address

• Set the resolver and the time-to-live (TTL) for the domain

Resolvers

• Resolvers, on the other hand, are responsible for the process of translating the names into addresses. Every contract that implements the required standards is capable of being a resolver in the X Name Service. However, resolving a name in XNS is a process composed of two steps.

• The first one is to ask the registry what resolver is responsible for the said name. The second one is to ask that particular resolver for the answer to the query. In terms of architecture, it looks like this:

X Name Service functions in the ecosystem

XNS owns the domain name function that users have for themselves one or more private domain names that come with their own website that can be accessed from the internet anywhere and without any limitation and ownership time. XTech designed an IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) with superior features to create a decentralized file system, helping to store and share data efficiently and securely. Instead of storing data on centralized servers, IPFS distributes data across multiple nodes in the network while optimizing security control from the Data Domain Management Center (DDMC) is a high-level data program brought by XTech to store data about Web3 Name Service of users as well as perform security with super encryption measures based on extremely high dispersion and reliability.

With the NFT format of XNS, users can completely use it as a pure Non-fungible token, buying and trading are created with the best possible conditions for traders at the same time with advanced technology called real time continuously helping each XNS avoid losing value or inconsistent transactions at the same time. In the XTech ecosystem, XNS is more special as an important key to participate and experience the completely new SocialFi features. Users use their own XNS as the most useful tool in all cases to determine the level of engagement while increasing the value and rewards over time. XTech brings XNS to a high level of user authenticity, there is no case of duplication or forgery allowing one or more XNS to be owned by each individual account in the XTech ecosystem.

Conclusion

XNS is a critical advent in the cryptocurrency field and a step towards solving some of the pressing issues that riddle the industry – namely, user experience.

Having to deal with long strings of random numbers and letters is oftentimes the reason for mistakes, and in the field of crypto, mistakes are quite commonly very expensive. Normalizing addresses and presenting them in a human-readable and friendly way is a step towards improving the overall user experience the way DNS improved the UX for Internet users.

At the same time, though, DNS records of domains and names are typically stored on centralized servers, making them prone to hacks. XNS, on the other hand, are secured by Ethereum’s blockchain, making them multifold and more secure.

That said, the X Name Service is undoubtedly a very important invention and an innovation that’s quickly become widespread and used by thousands of people.