NNS — A Unique NEO Alias Service for Wallet Addresses and Transaction Hash Code Foley Follow Aug 8, 2018 · 3 min read

Ever wanted to send your wallet address to somebody and you don’t have immediate access to where it is saved? You tried to remember the long string of alphanumerical but all you can muster is just a few of the first and last characters? Don’t worry, you are not alone(. Just recently, I had to format my PC due to virus and when I finished, I remembered I saved my private key (and many other wallets) on my sticky note and had forgotten to copy before formatting. You know the result? I lost close to $500 worth of my asset. Sad, right? Yea!

Now, the emphasis of my story is not losing my private key, many of us just like me save our wallet addresses in places that it can be lost and most times the places we save them are not easily accessed. We have to open Notepad, sticky notes, email addresses, notebook and the likes because there is absolutely no chance of us carrying those long, scary numbers in our heads right? Lol.

NNS

NNS stands for NEO Name Service. It is a distributed, open and extensible naming system based on the NEO blockchain. Their primary goal is to replace irregular string such as wallet address and smart contract Hash which are hard to memorize for humans with words and phrases which will end in the “.neo” extension.

What this does in turn is, save us from the daunting task of trying to remember our wallet address or copy and paste our address from whatever place they are saved. It is surely easier to remember our wallet address with words or phrases and it will surely help in speeding up transaction between peers.

As with IPFS (IPNS) and Ethereum (ENS), it is argued that NEO should have its own alias service which will be called the NEO Name Service (NNS). Basically, what an alias service does is enable the transfer of tokens through alias. Not only is this easy to memorize, it also helps in curbing the abilities of hackers to modify a wallet address and steal from unsuspecting people.

Besides pointing to an account address, an alias could also point to a contract address, so smart contracts can be invoked via alias. This will help in avoiding probable mistakes caused by using smart contract templates to create smart contracts.

Furthermore, a hash value can be given an alias such as a file name for easy understanding by linking the alias to the file’s hash value (file address). NNS could be used with NEO’s decentralized file storage (NEOFS) based on NEO. It could also be used to provide alias service for decentralized messaging, decentralized email service and many other services as they get built on the NEO blockchain.

NNS will implement the traditional auction (bidding) method for initial registration and distribution of domain names. But unlike the ENS will adopt a transparent bidding mechanism so that users no longer have to memorize the ciphertext and also removes the bid revealing period.

The mainnet is scheduled for August 2018 and in a just a matter of few weeks, you can have your very own .neo domain names.

For more information about the NEO Name Service, kindly use the following important links:

Website: https://neons.name/index_En.html

Whitepaper: http://doc.neons.name/en/latest/

GitHub: https://github.com/NewEconoLab/neo-ns

Medium: https://medium.com/neweconolab

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NeoNameService

QQ: https://jq.qq.com/?_wv=1027&k=5SahDHr

Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/IESfVEkjE8iSVKfBnaOhTQ