Human Readable Blockchain Addresses: Cronos Domains – inspired by Ethereum Name Service (ENS)

Blockchain brought many possibilities to the web by creating a new class of assets through programmability, decentralization, and interoperability. However, as the latest technologies are brought into the world wide web, confusion intensifies. Cronos Name Services, briefly CNS or Cronos Domains, plays its own part to make everything a little bit better primarily by bringing ease of use to Cronos Chain wallets.

For an average customer, and address name like “0x10C9573a73A05263E56F50aBB03aFe86A89cb4c4” muddies the waters and obscures the main idea of blockchain wallets into complexity. The address we sampled in the previous sentence is a public key enforced by the cryptographical function blockchains built on top. However, understanding the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies, including how cryptography’s role provides fundamental functions to blockchains by keeping them secure and decentralized, for most people, using a human-readable wallet address without knowing anything about cryptography for everyday usage of their crypto transactions is sufficient. It is also preferable, even for experts, for ease of use and paramount for driving the adoption of cryptocurrencies making the general public inclined towards these new technologies.

What is Cronos Domains?

Cronos Domains is a Cronos Chain native identification service with the primary goal of turning crypto wallet addresses into their human-readable forms to provide ease of use, more functionality, and effortless identification with some extra capabilities.

An example of a Cronos Domain would be a person’s first name registered through the CNS(Cronos Name Service). As the writer of this article, my first name is Meliksah. I can purchase a Cronos Name goes meliksah.cro. After the purchase, I could use that CNS as my wallet identifier, and I can have people directly deposit funds to my Cronos Address by typing the meliksah.cro at the wallet section instead of entering 64 letter random letters(as we sampled at the start of the article).

Cronos Names are also interesting from the perspective that they are technically NFTs. They are Non-Fungible Tokens which makes them innately unique so they can act as identifiers. They can also be transferred to the other Cronos Wallets, which means the identification of a Cronos Name is easily transferrable instead of being permanently bonded to the wallet address they had been minted.

How to Use Cronos Domains: Homepage

Users can see the navigation bar sections: Search, My Domains, Favorites, and FAQs.

The search division is to look for registered and unregistered addresses to either buy, save or check the details accommodated to the already bought Cronos Domain. Furthermore, the expiry date can also be viewed to see when the domain will expire so the person browsing and saving those addresses can purchase it later if they would like to.

My domains division is for viewing the already purchased domains on Cronos Domains. Because Cronos Name Service addresses are technically NFTs, they can be transferred as NFTs and even sold on the NFT markets. 

Favorites division is for saved Cronos Names for later purchase or to keep track of owners of those addresses about what they are doing, what information they attached to the domain, and which social media addresses they appended to create a digital identity through CNS around their identified on-chain address.

FAQ division is simply a frequently asked questions section of the website. Although there is not much information covered here, it is a good starting for people who are just getting started with CNS.

How to Use Cronos Domains: Looking for Cronos Addresses

Purchasing a CNS is a quite straightforward practice. Simply writing what name is desired to be purchased to be held later on as a human-readable identification registration for Cronos wallet addresses, entering the title would show the particular CNS with .cro extension. Then the price and CNS domain availability is instantly displayed.

Below the search division, recently bought CNS domains are shown after clicking on search.  

How to Use Cronos Domains: Purchase

After a positive decision has been made towards buying a particular domain, clicking on it brings users to the purchase page.

On this page, users can choose how many years they would like to register their domains to be their own. The payment for the purchase would be in USDC, also Cronos Domains is a decentralized application, and it requires transaction fees paid in $CRO because it is built on top of Cronos Chain, so gas is required for transactions. A sufficient amount of USDC and a maximum of 5 $CRO would do the job because Cronos Chain is quite cheap. Regardless of how many years the domain has been registered, the gas fee of $CRO remains the same, so if the user would like to save some gas fees from the future where they would be required to pay gas again to repurchase the CNS Domain when it gets closer to its expiry date, a bulk purchase could be made to save some gas fees.

Beyond choosing the years of registration, there would be two different on-chain transactions to purchase a CNS domain. One would be for approval, and the second would be for minting. Using gas for approval determines which CNS domain name will be minted, and minting with gas is the registration process of the approved domain name on the previous transaction.

How to Use Cronos Domains: CNS Domain Details

CNS Domains can substitute for Cronos Chain wallet addresses, but they can also hold other information.

Take an example of our news website TheCronicle.com. We bought the TheCronicle.cro CNS domain, then we attached our email, website URL, and Twitter address accompanying our Cronos wallet address. Ideally, the main on-chain address we use for our newspaper can be found through Cronos Domains, and our operations can be efficiently associated through Cronos Chain.

How to Use Cronos Domains: Favorites

Favorite division on Cronos Domains website is saved .cro registrations for later purchase or the addresses that we decided to keep an eye on.

We can find and save whale .cro domains and observe their on-chain transactions. The market movements can be foreseen by following famous domains with .cro extension, or institutions can be audited on-chain if they particularly want to be transparent with their funds.

High-Level View Conclusion

On-chain identification is a big deal to further efforts to build a transparent, decentralized, and trustless ecosystem. Although, 64 character long nonsense addresses made it challenging for average and expert users alike to recognize transactions taking place on blockchains. Applications like Cronos Domains make the gibberish wallet addresses human-readable; they also constitute a possibility for a singular identity to be created and correlated to the other social media channels on the web that which a particular pseudo-anonymous user can attach.

We could be biased by saying that blockchain makes everything better, but there is no doubt that the transparent identification can bring the zero-to-one application implementations into the world and support building a more egalitarian society powered by wealth creation via clear accountability.