Glossary
Twelve terms that come up when you buy a Web3 name, defined plainly. Nothing here is specific to one ending — the individual endings are described in the catalogue.
Twelve terms that come up when you buy a Web3 name, defined plainly. Nothing here is specific to one ending — the individual endings are described in the catalogue.
A name that resolves through records stored on a blockchain rather than through the DNS. It is bought once and held in a wallet as a token, so there is no renewal fee and no registrar able to suspend it. The trade-off is that no support desk can recover it either.
The part after the dot, such as .chainwallet. Endings are operated by a provider and are not sold to individuals — this site is a catalogue of them, not a shop. Thousands of different names can exist under one ending.
The part before the dot, and the part that is actually for sale. In yourname.chainwallet, yourname is the second-level name. Shorter ones cost more and go first.
An ASCII form of a name written in a non-Latin script or with an emoji, used in links and canonical URLs. The ending .crypto🚀 is xn--crypto-um84e in punycode. Both forms point at the same thing; some software shows one and some the other.
Creating the name as a token in your wallet at the moment of purchase. Nothing is leased and there is no expiry date, which is the difference between minting a Web3 name and registering a DNS domain.
Holding an asset in a wallet you control rather than with a company. Nobody can take the name away from you, and nobody can give it back. This is the single most important thing to understand before buying.
The list of words that restores a wallet. Whoever holds it holds every name in that wallet. Back it up somewhere offline before you buy anything, not afterwards.
The network charge for writing to a blockchain, paid when a name is minted or when its records are changed. It goes to the network, not to the provider and not to this site.
The values attached to a name that tell software where to send someone — a website, a wallet address, a social profile. They can be changed as often as you like, which is why the address on a business card stays correct after you move platform.
The software that reads a name's records and returns the address behind it. Wallets and a few browsers have one built in; most browsers do not. That is the practical reason a Web3 name sits alongside a DNS domain rather than replacing it.
The company that operates an ending and sells the names under it. For every ending listed here the provider is Freename, and every ending page links straight to it.
In the DNS, the company that leases a domain to you for a yearly fee and can suspend it. A Web3 name has no registrar. That is the main practical difference between the two, in both directions.
The catalogue lists 35 endings across six categories, each with what it is for and four example addresses.