AHS Explained

There are two components in an AHS handle: the base and the handle.

Bases

Base names are the components at the end of an AHS handle, like eth or weld (mine). You can buy any base anytime you want as long as it hasn't been registered already. Registering a base costs 1 ETH. The price is high for now to test demand and for early adopters to be able to get some bases before they are snatched, it will be made free in the future and will be the only thing that costs money in the AHS. Ownership of a base can be transferred to anybody.

eth is owned by me, but anybody can register a eth handle for free (more on that later in this post).

Handles

Handles are the components at the beginning of an AHS handle, like ghiliweld or vitalik . Handles correspond to Ethereum addresses, which you can assign however you want. You can register any handle for a eth base for free as long as it hasn't been registered already and you can register any handle for any base you own for free.

You can register myname.eth for free and as quickly as the transaction can be mined, no auctions and no middleman. You can register myname.mybase , mymomsname.mybase and mydog.mybase for only the cost of buying mybase (and the gas fees of course).

Pricing

Now before you start going nuts over the price, hear me out. The rationale behind the pricing is to allow people to purchase a valuable base (like co or io ) early on. This helps monetize the project but also allows me to stop charging for bases eventually. When enough money has been made I plan on making bases free so that anyone may have one. I’m always willing to listen to the community however and if I notice reasonable demand for lower prices I will lower them.

I don’t know what the buyers will plan to do with their base but one possible scenario would be transferring the ownership over the base to a smart contract and launch their own handle registrar. AHS gives users total freedom over this.

Interface

An interface is included in the GitHub repo as well as some code examples so that anyone can implement AHS in their smart contract (it’s easy).

Standards

AHS handles are written like this: handle.base

As a standard, clients should register anything after the last period (.) in the string as a base and anything before it as a handle. Meaning all of the names below have an eth base.

handle.eth name.eth word..eth addr.ess.eth and even .ai....eth