About

Introduction

Sats Names is a standard for writing names to Bitcoin using ordinals. The goal is to build a name ecosystem for Bitcoin, that is built by Bitcoiners, and developed entirely on Bitcoin.

Someone was inscribing .ord and .btc names very early in ordinals. The Sats Name System (SNS) formalized this process, created first JSON protocol on Bitcoin, and introduced the .sats namespace. Today, SNS has been widely adopted and has inspired an explosion of namespaces and JSON meta-protocols on Bitcoin.

These are the guiding principles of the SNS project:

All namestate lives on Bitcoin

Bitcoin transactions, and only Bitcoin transactions, are all that is needed to register and update names. A Bitcoin node contains all information needed to materialize all namestate. No other database or trusted services are required. Any client can independently compute the true state of all names.

The standard will remain credibly neutral

No gatekeepers: Nobody can turn off the standard or block anyone else from registering names. There is no smart contract or front end with privileged access. No tokenomics. No premine. No gas token. No governance. No perverse incentives.

The first write of a name on Bitcoin owns the name

For example, the first user to register an ordinal containing "satoshi.sats" owns that name and the rights to update that name. With ordinals anyone can write any data they wish, including duplicate names. This will lead to collisions and competing tribes of name standards. Bickering over various standards is a waste of our community’s energy. There is only one neutral, objective pattern for settling collisions; First is first.

History and traction

SNS was launched on block 777847, Feb 22, 2023. Since then:

  • 400,000 .sats names have been inscribed

  • Over 1.8M SNS names have been inscribed for other namespaces like .ord, .btc, .xbt

  • 65,000 users hold .sats names

  • SNS marketplaces are supported on all major ordinal exchanges such as unisat.io, ordinalswallet.com, ordswap.io, magiceden.io, element.market, and okx.com.

  • SNS name resolution is supported on Unisat wallet and Ordinals wallet.

The SNS community is looking forward to future namespaces, integrations, and products built on top of the SNS standard.

NextSNS Spec

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