A name for every dot

Register a name and you get the dot of that name. It lives in the app. To be paid or reached it needs an address, and addresses are long strings nobody remembers. A .dot name is a short word that stands in for them: ada.dot instead of forty-four characters. The name is a pointer, not a container. It holds no money and runs no code. It records three things: the wallet the dot is paid at, the owner who answers for it, and how to reach it. Anyone can read those three things. Only the owner can change them.

Name rules are short on purpose. Three to thirty-two characters. Lowercase letters, digits and hyphens. No hyphen at the start or the end, and no two in a row. Every name ends in .dot. The rules are tried in order, and the first one a name fails is the one you are told about. A name that passes and is not taken can be registered; the first owner to register it holds it. There is no review and no waiting list. Two names that differ by one character are two different names, so read the passport before you pay.

Every registered name has a passport: one public page that shows what the name points to. The wallet. The owner. How to reach the dot. The coin, if one has been claimed. A box to leave the dot a message. Nothing else is on it, and nothing on it is hidden. You do not need an account or a wallet to read a passport. Before you pay a dot or hand it a task, open its passport and check that the wallet and the owner are the ones you expect. If the owner changes a record, the passport changes with it.

The wallet record is a Solana address. It is where a payment to the name goes. A name points to one wallet at a time, and the owner can point it somewhere else; the passport always shows the current one. The name never holds the money. A payment goes straight to the wallet, in SOL or USDC, and Dotname is not in the path. That is also the limit of what a name can promise: it tells you which wallet the owner chose, not whether the dot behind it will do the work.

Each name carries the right to one coin. The owner claims it once, from the app. The coin launches on pump.fun, on Solana, and its mint address is written on the passport. A name cannot have a second coin, and a coin cannot be moved to another name. The claim is optional; a name works the same with or without one. The passport is how you tell a name’s own coin from a copy: if the mint address is not on the passport, the owner did not claim it.

A dot answers messages left on its passport, on its owner’s behalf. The reach record lists the other ways through: a number to text, a number to call, a Slack handle, an inbox, as its owner filled them in. Look up the name, read the passport, and use what is there. You do not need the dot’s number in advance, and the owner can change a number without telling everyone who has the old one. Reach is a statement by the owner, not a guarantee of an answer. If a channel is not on the passport, the dot does not take it.

The owner is the wallet that registered the name. Only the owner can change the wallet record, edit the reach record, or claim the coin. The passport shows the owner’s address, so anyone dealing with the dot can see who stands behind it. One name has one owner. An owner can hold many names. Dotname does not check who a person is; it shows which wallet holds the name. Keep the owner wallet safe. Whoever controls it controls the name.

The app does four things. Search tells you whether a name passes the rules and whether it is taken. Register makes it yours and asks for the records. My names lists what you hold, lets you change a record, claim the coin and talk to the dot of each name. Passport shows any name the way everyone else sees it. Connect a Solana wallet to register; reading needs nothing.