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RNS glossary

Overview

This reference page defines the key terms used in the Ronin Name Service (RNS).

Controller

The account that edits the records of a name. The controller may be changed by the registrant or controller.

Label

An individual element of a name, such as hello in hello.ron.

Labelhash

The keccak256 hash of an individual label.

Name

An RNS identifier, such as hello.ron.

Namehash

The algorithm for generating a cryptographic hash from an RNS name. It takes a name as input and produces a node.

Node

The output of the namehash algorithm, used to uniquely identify a domain name in RNS.

Owner

The owner of a name is the entity referenced in the RNS registry's owner field. Owners may transfer ownership, set a resolver or time-to-live (TTL), and create or reassign subdomains.

Registrar

The registrar is an RNS component responsible for allocating second-level .ron domain names. This is essentially a subdomain registrar for the TLD (top-level domain) .ron. When you register a .ron name, the registrar issues you an ERC-721 NFT.

The owner of that NFT is also called the registrant or owner of that name. It can be used to reclaim ownership of the name in the core registry—in other words, the registrant can overwrite the controller.

Architecturally, the registrar is located in the RNS Unified contract.

Registration

A registration is a registrar's record of a user's ownership of a name. This is distinct from the owner field in the registry. The registrar contract stores information about registrations, including expiry dates and fees.

Registrant

The owner of a registration. If necessary, the registrant may transfer the registration, set the controller, and reclaim ownership of the name in the registry.

Registry

The core component of RNS, the registry maintains a mapping from domain names to the owner, resolver, label, expiry, and the parent domain. All RNS lookups start by querying the registry. Architecturally, the registry is located in the RNS Unified contract.

Resolver

A resolver is a contract that maps a name to a resource (for example, cryptocurrency addresses or content hashes). Resolvers are pointed to by the resolver field of the registry.

RNS Unified

The core contract combining the registry and registrar components.