.DOT Authority Registration for the Polkadot App

As many of you may know, at Polkadot Decoded this year (2024) Björn Wagner teased the new Polkadot App. This is a very exciting product which has been a long time in the making and plans to deliver an easy, beginner-friendly mobile wallet (and more) for newcomers to crypto and Polkadot. One of the strategic aims for the product is to remove the need for wallet addresses and replace them with an easy to remember, short user name, specifically a .DOT username.

Similar to how we have seen .ETH gain traction in the Ethereum ecosystem, we’d like to use .DOT as a short username in the Polkadot ecosystem. This short username is administered by an on-chain ‘Authority’.

This proposal seeks to gain community support to register a new authority to issue .DOT short addresses for the Polkadot Mobile app.

How does this all work?
Given the way the people chain is set up, an on-chain proposal is required for an individual or group to register as an Authority before short usernames can be issued using that specific domain.

Imagine authorities as nations providing specific local domains, .com.au for Australians or .co.uk for the Brits. Users will be able to request their specific short username to the authority, E.g. Birdo.Dot - The authority will then submit this on-chain, available for any dapp, wallet or product to query to match to a wallet address. As the user is onboarding to the Polkadot mobile app, the app will ask the user to choose a .DOT username, which the authority will register on-chain.

Users don’t need any funds, they can quickly sign up and get an on-chain .DOT short username without holding any crypto.

Other products like Coinbase offer free ens (.ETH) usernames, however these are stored off-chain, our method is fully on-chain. 😎 The Authority will be maintained by Parity. Key management for the authority will also be maintained by Parity.

The split of responsibilities between the pallet functions and the authority functions are as per below. The pallet can add an authority which gives the authority the ability to add usernames. Removing usernames is not currently possible but will be added shortly. The authority itself is then responsible for the moderation / rules of the authority and any fee / revenue models they might want to implement.

Full proposal: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K1K-AC5Cdyz7Fcl0aGIKWkM6yYMRnM8Uum2jFByvdhE/edit?usp=sharing