We're so close to the launch of Arweave Name Service (ANS) that we're able to give concrete dates and specifics about the protocol and the minting event for your new permanent identity.

If you don't know yet, ANS names are human-readable usernames representing your Arweave address. They're supported by ViewBlock, being integrated with ArConnect, and displayed by the Arweave social explorer ar.page.

Check out an example of an ANS user's profile here:

The first wave of ANS names was launched in 2022 and has been adopted by 581 users since. In the private beta, we airdropped to users of Verto ID, select giveaway winners, and early Ark NFT holders.

Since then, we've rebuilt ANS from the ground up (while migrating beta names to the new contract), and developed the first NFT and identity standard on EXM, a smart contract engine on Arweave.

By using EXM and everPay, we made it possible to mint ANS names with instant transaction finality using AR, despite the fact that Arweave smart contracts cannot traditionally accept AR payment.

Thanks to EXM and everPay, we're finally able to come out of private beta and get ANS out into the wild -- and we're so excited to share more details with you.

Minting timeline

ANS minting will happen in two phases:

• Whitelist mint (10% discount, 1 week headstart)

• Public mint

The whitelist mint is scheduled to go live on February 17th 2023, and will allow eligible users one week to mint names at a 10% discount before the general public.

The public mint goes live one week later on February 24th.

Eligibility

To be eligible to mint names during the whitelist period, we can currently confirm the following criteria:

• Hold an ANS name from the private beta stage

• Own an Ark NFT

• Link your identities using Ark Protocol

• Hold an everPay auction NFT

• More criteria to be announced -- stay updated on Twitter

Meeting any of these conditions qualifies you for a spot on the whitelist, and we will announce more conditions in the coming days.

Interested in integrating ANS into your dApp and whitelisting your users? Open a ticket on Discord!

What to do next

To prepare for the mint, make sure to deposit AR to everPay. This will mean you can mint as soon as the event goes live and not wait for network confirmations:

To give you an idea of how much to deposit without revealing full pricing, we’ll just say that domains are priced by character length, with the longest being the cheapest. Six-character domains will cost the AR equivalent of $50 for whitelisters.

Stay tuned. Join the Discord to be the first to see any further transmissions 🔮