Buy any domain on Sudo in 3 steps: search, select, pay with any crypto — no KYC

Most people who try to buy a domain in 2026 still end up in 2008. A signup form. A captcha. A credit-card field that demands your billing address. An email "verify your account" loop. A registrar dashboard that tries to upsell you on five things you didn't ask for. And finally, somewhere around minute fourteen, a domain in your name — held by a company you've never met, gated by an account you'll inevitably forget the password to.

This guide is about the opposite of that.

In Sudo Messenger, domains are a first-class object. You can buy a fresh .com, .io, .xyz, .ai, .app, mint an ENS .eth, claim a free .sudo subname, or pick up a Solana .sol — all from the same search bar, with any crypto in your wallet, in three steps and under three minutes. No KYC. No card. No "create an account." The wallet that signs is the wallet that owns.

This post walks through the full flow, the chains and tokens supported, what you actually own at the end, and the seven questions everyone asks before they try it.

Why we built a domain marketplace inside a messenger

The short answer: identity is the same problem as messaging. The wallet is your handle. The domain is the human-readable shell over that handle. Forcing people to leave the messenger, set up a registrar account, then come back with a copy-pasted address is the exact friction Sudo was built to remove.

The longer answer is that the registrar industry has been a mediocre place for a long time. Renewals get sneaky. WHOIS records leak your real name. Privacy add-ons cost extra. Transfers take a week. Payment options stop at "Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal if you're feeling brave." None of this matches how the rest of someone's digital life works once they have a wallet. So we built a registrar layer that does.

The result is a domain experience that takes the same time as sending a tip — search, select, pay — and produces the same kind of artifact: an on-chain record in your wallet that no one can revoke.

Before you start

You need exactly two things:

1. A self-custody wallet. MetaMask, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet, Ledger, Trezor, or anything that speaks WalletConnect. If you don't have one, the /download page walks you through setup in under two minutes.
2. Any ERC-20 token with a tiny bit of gas. USDC, USDT, ETH, MATIC, BNB, DAI — anything Sudo supports on Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Ethereum or BNB Chain. You do not need to hold a specific "registrar token." Sudo handles the swap on your behalf if the registrar settles in a different asset.

That's it. No email. No phone. No "verify your identity." If you've used Sudo payments before, this will feel identical.

Step 1 — Search

Open Sudo, tap the Domains tab (or go to /domains in any client), and type the name you want.

Sudo runs the lookup against five sources in parallel and returns results in roughly 800 milliseconds:

• ICANN registries for legacy TLDs (.com, .net, .org, .io, .xyz, .ai, .app, .dev, .co, .me, .gg, and 400+ more via our registrar partner).
• ENS for .eth names, including current ownership, expiry, and primary record.
• SNS for Solana .sol names.
• The Sudo registry for .sudo names and subnames.
• Secondary marketplaces (OpenSea for ENS, the Sudo P2P book, Unstoppable Domains' resale market) — so if the .com is taken but listed for sale, you'll see the resale price right next to fresh alternatives.

The result list looks like a search engine for names. Each row shows:

• the full domain (e.g. myname.io),
• the live price in your wallet's preferred token (Sudo reads the largest balance and quotes in that — if you mostly hold USDC, that's what you'll see),
• a status badge: Available, For sale, Premium, Expired soon, Reserved.

A small but important detail: the WHOIS check uses our partner's authoritative registry feed, not a cached zone file. The "available" status you see is the actual status at the registry level the millisecond you searched.

Search works for partial queries too. Type maya and you'll get maya.com, maya.io, maya.xyz, maya.eth, maya.sudo ranked by price and availability. Type gm. and you'll get every TLD that still has the two-letter prefix free.

Step 2 — Select

Tap the row you like. Sudo opens a detail card with:

• The price, in three tokens of your choosing — toggle between USDC / USDT / ETH (or whichever stables you hold) to see the live FX-adjusted total.
• Where it settles — which chain the payment lands on. Base is the default for stable-settled purchases because it's the cheapest; ENS mints settle on Ethereum mainnet since that's where the .eth registry lives.
• The first-year cost and the renewal cost. We show renewals upfront. Always. If a TLD has a "promo first year, surprise renewal" pricing model (looking at you, .info), we surface the renewal number in the same font size as the first-year price.
• The ten-minute lock. The moment you tap Select, Sudo reserves the name at the registry level for ten minutes. You will not lose it mid-checkout to a sniper bot. If you back out, the lock releases.
• Privacy by default. WHOIS privacy is on. The public record shows Sudo's registrar partner's privacy proxy, never your wallet, your name, or your address. There's no "WHOIS privacy add-on" upsell — it's just on.

If you're comparing options, use Stack — Sudo lets you queue up to five names in a single basket so you can register a matching set in one signature instead of five.

Step 3 — Pay with any crypto. No KYC.

This is the step that sounds too good and isn't.

Tap Pay. Sudo presents:

1. The total in your selected token.
2. The chain it'll settle on (with a single-tap switch if you'd rather pay from a different chain — Sudo bridges and swaps in the background using audited routing through 1inch and Across).
3. The wallet that will receive the domain (defaults to the signing wallet — you can route it elsewhere if you're buying for a treasury or a gift).

Confirm. Sign once in your wallet. That's the entire payment.

What happens behind the scenes is a small piece of choreography. For a Web3 name — .eth, .sudo, .sol — Sudo broadcasts the mint transaction directly. The NFT lands in your wallet, usually inside the next block (under 30 seconds on a layer-2). You own a transferable, on-chain artifact. Done.

For a Web2 TLD — .com, .io, .xyz, etc. — the flow has one extra hop. Sudo's registrar partner accepts the on-chain payment, registers the domain via the underlying ICANN registry (this is the 1–5 minute step), then mints an ownership NFT to your wallet that wraps the registrar record. The NFT acts as your proof of ownership and as your transfer key. If you want to move the domain to another registrar later, you redeem the NFT for an EPP transfer code from any Sudo client; the registrar releases it; the domain leaves Sudo's books and shows up at whichever registrar you transferred to. No phone-tree. No "please email a scan of your ID." A signed wallet transaction is the auth.

The whole flow — search to confirmation — averages two minutes and twelve seconds in our internal telemetry. The slowest minute is almost always the wallet's hardware-signing prompt.

Which TLDs and chains work

A non-exhaustive but useful list, as of the May 2026 mainnet beta:

Web2 TLDs: .com, .net, .org, .io, .xyz, .ai, .app, .dev, .co, .me, .gg, .so, .sh, .cc, .tv, .fm, .pro, .biz, .info, .design, .studio, .agency, .finance, .market, .shop, .store, .news, .blog, .build, .cloud, .gives, .tech, .vc, .ventures, .capital, .fund, .city, .global, .world, .zone, plus 400+ more via our registrar partner's catalogue.

Web3 names: .eth (ENS), .sol (SNS), .sudo (Sudo registry), .crypto / .nft / .x / .wallet (Unstoppable Domains), .lens (Lens), .farcaster (Farcaster Names).

Chains for payment: Ethereum mainnet, Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Smart Chain. Solana for .sol settlement. (Bitcoin via Lightning is on the Q3 roadmap — see the whitepaper for the bridge design.)

Tokens for payment: USDC, USDT, DAI, ETH (and wrapped variants), MATIC, BNB, SOL, plus 30+ blue-chip ERC-20s. If you hold something exotic, Sudo will quote a route through 1inch and show you the slippage before you sign.

What you actually own

People reasonably ask: "If there's no account, what proves the domain is mine?"

Your wallet does.

For Web3 names, the answer is the same as for any NFT: the registry contract has your address mapped to the name. Block explorers can prove it. You can transfer it with a single send. You can list it on OpenSea. You can put it in cold storage and forget about it for years and it'll still be yours.

For Web2 TLDs, ownership has two layers:

1. The ICANN registrar record is held by Sudo's registrar partner under your wallet's identifier — they're an accredited registrar, audited annually, ISO 27001 certified. They cannot transfer your domain out without your wallet's signature.
2. The on-chain ownership NFT in your wallet is the bearer instrument. Whoever holds it can request an EPP transfer code from the Domains screen. Lose the NFT, you lose the domain (so treat it like a hardware-wallet key, not a screenshot).

This is the same pattern OpenSea uses for wrapped CryptoPunks: the on-chain artifact represents the off-chain right. It works because the registrar partner is contractually bound to honor wallet signatures.

What about renewals?

Renewals are the dirtiest part of the legacy registrar industry. We treat them like recurring payments in Sudo Payments.

Open the Domains screen, tap the domain, tap Auto-renew. Pick the token you want to renew in and the wallet you want to deduct from. Sudo will request a signature 14 days before expiry, then again 24 hours before, and execute the renewal payment automatically when you approve.

If you don't set up auto-renew, you'll get push notifications at 60, 30, 7 and 1 day before expiry. If you ignore them all, the domain enters the standard ICANN 30-day grace period and a 30-day redemption period after that. Web3 names follow the registry's own grace logic (ENS is 90 days; .sudo is 30 days; .sol is 14 days).

Privacy: what the registrar sees, what we see, what the chain sees

A short, honest table of what's visible to whom:

• The ICANN registry (Verisign for .com, Identity Digital for .xyz, etc.) sees: the domain, the registrar partner's privacy proxy, and the registration timestamp. They do not see your wallet address or your IP.
• Sudo Labs sees: your wallet address (because it signed the on-chain payment), the domain name, and the transaction hash. We do not see your real name, your email, your IP at the time of purchase, or anything outside of what's on-chain.
• The blockchain sees: a payment from your address to the registrar partner's address, with the domain in the calldata.
• The public WHOIS sees: the registrar's privacy proxy. Anyone who runs whois yourname.com will see the proxy, not you.

If you want to publish your wallet address as the WHOIS contact (some Web3 builders do, intentionally, for verifiability), there's a toggle for that on the Domains screen. Off by default.

Common pitfalls — and how Sudo avoids them

A few patterns we've seen real users hit. Each one has a fix baked into the flow.

• "I forgot the password and lost the domain." Doesn't apply. There's no password. The wallet is the credential.
• "The registrar sold my domain to a parker the day it expired." Doesn't apply. Sudo doesn't sell your expired names. Web2 TLDs follow ICANN's grace and redemption windows, and we'll ping you four separate times before that clock starts.
• "My WHOIS leaked my real name." Doesn't apply. WHOIS privacy is on by default and the only WHOIS field that maps back to a human (the registrant) is the proxy.
• "I got hit with a surprise renewal four times the first-year price." Doesn't apply. Renewal pricing is shown next to first-year pricing in the same font size, in your preferred token, before you sign.

What this unlocks in Sudo

Once the domain is in your wallet, the rest of Sudo recognizes it automatically:

• Your chat handle can switch to the new name with one tap. Messages addressed to myname.com route to the wallet that owns the NFT.
• Your payments auto-resolve. People send to myname.com from Sudo Payments and it lands in your wallet, regardless of which chain they paid on.
• Your escrow contracts can be addressed by domain instead of by hex address — useful when sharing escrow links in public.
• Your smart-contract groups can require ownership of *.yourbrand.com to join, since the NFT is on-chain.
• Your mining reputation stays attached. Buying a fresh domain doesn't reset your pair-to-earn history — it just gives the same wallet a new face.

A note on price

We don't take a registrar margin. The price you see is the registry price plus the partner's wholesale fee, denominated in whichever crypto you chose. Sudo's revenue from this flow comes from the on-chain swap fee (10 bps if you pay in a token the registrar doesn't natively settle in) and from optional add-ons like premium nameservers. The vast majority of purchases pay zero Sudo fee — only the swap is on the meter.

That's an unusual position for a registrar to be in. We think it's the right one. The domain market should be a commodity layer, not a margin-extraction surface.

Try it now

Three steps, one wallet, any TLD.

1. Open Sudo.
2. Tap Domains.
3. Type the name you want.

If you hit a corner case — a TLD we don't support yet, a chain we don't route through, a swap path that looks expensive — drop us a line on /feedback. The TLD catalog grows on user requests.

And if you're a developer wiring this into your own app, the registrar SDK ships TypeScript, Swift and Kotlin first-party. You can embed the same three-step flow inside any wallet, marketplace, or onboarding funnel.

See you in the chat — under your new name.

— The Sudo team

Mainnet beta · May 2026