How many times did you have to search for that obscure NEO wallet address in your external hard drives, just so that your friend could send you some GAS? And how many times have you had to go through the painful process of adding a script hash to your Neon wallet, simply because you wanted to gift a Hash Puppy token to your little niece? If only it were possible to save our wallet addresses like WhatsApp contacts (sighhhhhh). Well, fret no more, as our collective prayers have been answered. Neo Name Service, or NNS, is creating a name service which will replace these evil looking combinations of letters and numbers with simple words and phrases, which are easy to remember and convenient to use.

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Whitepaper : read here

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What is Neo Name Service?

Consider Wikipedia, a website that we all love and use on a regular basis. Whenever you want to access any of Wiki’s pages, your computer has to connect to Wiki’s server. For this, your computer has to know the server’s IP address, which is essentially a string of digits. Now if you have to do this for every single website you visit, you’ll end up maintaining a register as thick as the inventory of The Louvre Museum. Fortunately, we have a system in place called the Domain Name System (or DNS), which automatically converts the term ‘wikipedia’ to its IP address as you type it in the browser.

NNS is doing the same thing for the NEO blockchain as the DNS for the world wide web. Blockchain addresses and script hashes are long, complicated, and almost impossible to remember. Since it’s difficult to manually check the complete address everytime, it’s very easy to make a mistake while typing or pasting the address. NNS is providing a decentralized domain-name service which will let you map your wallet address or smart contract hash to an easy-to-remember alias. There have been instances where hackers have simply changed the contribution address during an ICO, and unsuspecting investors have ended up losing their money. Had there been a simple string representing the ICO wallet address, it would have been much more difficult for any hacker to trick people.

Although this might seem to be a trivial addition to the features of the NEO blockchain, this can go a long way in bringing blockchain to the masses. Do you think e-mails would have been as popular as they are today if you had to type out a complex incantation everytime you wanted to mail your girlfriend? Many people believe that blockchain is the infrastructure for the next generation of internet, and aliasing services like NNS will become a necessity once this vision is realized.

NNS Features

The NNS Architecture

The alias names are in the form of hierarchical names separated by dots, known as domains. Smart contracts called ‘registers’ own the top level domain names, such as ‘.neo’ and ‘.gas’. The registers specify rules relating to the allocation of subdomains. The NNS architecture consists of 4 components.

Top level domain name contract — which maintains all information of a root domain name. This information includes the owner name, the registrar name, the resolver name, and the time-to-live (TTL) of the domain name.

Owner — this can either be an account address or a smart contract. The owner has permission to transfer ownership to another entity, modify the registrar and change the resolver.

Registrar — a smart contract with two functions; it specifies sub-domain names of a domain to other domain owners, and checks whether owners of sub-domain names are legal.

Resolver — a smart contract which actually maps the aliases into addresses, using an algorithm called NameHash.

NNS Economic Model

The NNS ecosystem incorporates 2 tokens — NNC and SGS.

NNC is an equity proof token, and functions similar to Neo in the NNS ecosystem. The root domain name of NNS is started by voting by NNC holders, by either of 2 methods. In the 1st method, the administrator starts the voting, and the domain name gets activated when less than 30% of total votes are against it at the end of 3 days. In the 2nd method, any NNC holder can start the voting, and the domain name is initiated if 50% of votes are in favour within 3 days. In order to keep the ecosystem up and running, the charges collected from all domain name auctions will be distributed to NNC holders in proportion to their holdings. The total supply of NNC is 1 billion.

SGAS is a NEP5 token bound to (NEO)GAS in a 1:1 ratio. SGAS can be converted to GAS as and when required. It will also be used to participate in domain name auctions, and for paying auction fees. In domain name auctions, the bid winner will be charged the bid fund as the fee, while bid losers will be charged 5% of the bid fund. Apart from this, smart contracts in the NEO ecosystem will also be able to use SGAS for intra-contract GAS operations. The total supply of SGAS is 100 million.

Roadmap

The roadmap of the project is provided below.

NNS Roadmap

Their test-net has been live for quite some time now. The next major milestone is the release of the main-net based domain name browser, which is scheduled to happen this month (September, 2018). The ‘.neo’ domain name is expected to fully open up in 2019.

Team

Team NNS

Liu Yongxin, the founder of NNC, is the co-founder of NEL, a Chinese NEO developer community. Li Jianying, the co-founder and CTO, is also associated with NEL. Vincent Zhao is a seior web development engineer working on this project, and Liu Qianming and Yin Wei are their core developers. Unfortunately, hardly any information is available on their LinkedIn profiles, and NNC’s official website is as good as the only source of information available about them.

Parting Thoughts

Domain name services will definitely improve the user experience associated with blockchains, and help in making blokchains more accesible to the masses. In the near future, NNC plans to work with NEO ecosystem clients to enable all NEO wallets to support the transfer of tokens via alias. Another interesting use case mentioned in their whitepaper is that they would work with pet games on the NEO blockchain, so that users would be able to name their pets using NNS. With the Hash Puppies game coming up on the NEO blockchain, NNS seems to be a natural fit. In a nutshell, all evidence points to the fact that as the NEO ecosystem grows, NNC will grow alongwith it.