The Arweave Name Service (ANS) was launched as the first human-readable address protocol on Arweave in February, 2023. Since that launch, 2 years ago, over 1,300 users have registered more than 2,000 domains and helped us gain the traction needed to be integrated in a range of Arweave ecosystem apps like ViewBlock, everPay, and Arweave-compatible wallets.

We had a lot of fun building in the wild west of Arweave in its pre-ao days, but it's time for ANS to make the switch for the sake of long-term sustainability and interoperability with where Arweave compute will live.

The post-ao Arweave ecosystem

ANS was built at a time where there was no unified compute layer for the Arweave ecosystem. We pieced it together using SmartWeave contracts and everPay payment infrastructure to ensure it was possible to mint names with AR tokens. A lot has changed since 2023.

The launch of ao provides an ecosystem-standard compute layer with support for bridged AR and a rich feature set capable of replicating the functionality ANS needed -- in a decentralized environment.

What the migration means for you

The core promise of ANS has always been similar to the core promise of Arweave: pay once, own forever.

Since all name ownership records are stored on Arweave, there is no way to lose your ANS names. However, without a migration to ao, we aren't doing enough to sufficiently decentralize functions around minting, transferring, and managing names.

As ao settles into early mainnet, we are working to migrate ANS to a dedicated ao process. While that's underway, ANS is in read-only mode. Apps that rely on ANS as an identity layer will work as they always have, but it will not be possible to mint new domains.

The $ANS DAO token is currently an ERC-20 on Ethereum. While the previous lack of a robust token standard on the Arweave L1 got in the way, ao's token support is healthy and enables us to migrate the $ANS token alongside the protocol itself.

Work on the ao migration begins now. For existing owners, your names will still work as before. For new minters -- hold on until we announce the migration, and see you on the other side. 🫡