PIVX.Name - human-readable names for shielded addresses, live on mainnet

A PIVX shielded address is 78 characters long, and nobody actually reads all 78. We check the first four and the last four and hope for the best, which is precisely the habit address-replacement malware was built to exploit.

PIVX.Name fixes that the boring way — by putting a short name in front of it:

alexxiy.pivx  →  ps19wd4eft4mw2mlwad6tjrny5hlvtdxymatu2e3dge7jr6scqask0llvdsa3xhx06499vmzymatxr

There are four zones — .pivx, .private, .secure and .safe — and they behave identically, same rules and same prices, so the only reason to prefer one is how it reads.

Already usable in a wallet

MyPIVXWallet is the first wallet to support it. You type a name where you'd normally paste an address; the wallet resolves it, verifies the Merkle proof locally against the root anchored on-chain, and only then lets the send continue. If the proof doesn't check out, or the indexer serves a state the contract has never accepted, the send is blocked rather than quietly going through. It's opt-in by address shape — if you never type a name, nothing about your existing send flow changes.

The pull request is open and waiting on review from the MyPIVXWallet developers:
github.com/PIVX-Labs/MyPIVXWallet/pull/630

While it's in review, wallet.pivx.name runs that exact build, so you can try the whole flow today without waiting for the merge.

A fair start

I want to be specific about this, because it's the part naming projects most often quietly get wrong.

• There was no waitlist.
• There was no early access for insiders, supporters or friends.
• There was no pre-registration round, and no names were set aside for anyone, including me.

The registry opened empty and public at the same moment for everybody. From day one everyone has had exactly the same chance at the name they want.

Pay once, keep it

There's no expiry, no renewal, no annual fee and no check-in window you can miss. A name leaves your control only when you transfer or sell it.

Shorter names cost more simply because there are fewer of them. These are protocol constants, identical for every zone and every registrant — there's no tier that buys anyone a better price.

Why you don't have to trust me

This is the part I'd most like people here to attack, because it's the whole design.

A registration is an ordinary shielded PIVX transaction. The amount is the payment and the memo is the signed command, so intent and payment arrive together and can't be separated. Block height, transaction index and input index give every command a deterministic place in the queue.

I publish the registrar's protocol address and its viewing key. With those two things, anyone can:

1. scan PIVX from block 5536811 and recover every command and payment the service has ever received;
2. replay them through the open-source indexer;
3. compute the registry's state root themselves;
4. compare it against the root anchored on BNB Smart Chain at 0x25c7ab6e524a67a9571ac4f02c266658c4e620cb.

If I censored a paid registration, invented a transfer, mis-credited a sale or reordered anything, my root would stop matching what every independent indexer computes. That's detectable by anyone, at any time, without asking me first.

I'd rather state the limits than oversell it: this makes fraud evident, not impossible. A bad batch could land on-chain and be contradicted afterwards, and recovery would be a social process rather than an automatic one. The zero-knowledge proof behind the anchored root shows the transition rules were followed; it's the public replication above that shows the inputs were real.

Marketplace

You can list a name at your own price, unlist it, or buy one that's listed. Sale proceeds credit your balance net of a flat 5% service fee, and anyone who bid on a name that sold to someone else is refunded automatically.

Where the money goes

I'd like this to give something back rather than only extract, so a share of revenue is committed to the PIVX community. Roughly, income is meant to cover:

• infrastructure and development costs;
• a reserve, so the service survives a quiet period;
• donations to PIVX community initiatives that already exist;
• helping start new ones;
• periodic coin burns, so there's a deflationary effect for PIVX itself.

Two honest caveats. The percentages aren't fixed yet — this is a plan, not a finished policy, and I'd genuinely like input from this forum before I pin it down. And I'd rather commit to something I can actually sustain than publish an impressive headline number and revise it later.

Links

• App — pivx.name
• Wallet with name support — wallet.pivx.name
• MyPIVXWallet PR — #630
• Docs — docs.pivx.name
• Source — github.com/PIVX-Name
• Tor — pivxns3wsp3g6rtekzjwhqtcic2yhgngqg3ovod67hp3obt2ckmtcjyd.onion
• Contact — [email protected]

Questions, criticism and attempts to break it are all welcome, particularly on the verification design. If anyone finds a way to make an independent replay disagree with the anchored root, I want to hear about it before someone else does.