Inside the .sudo registry: namespaces, subnames and the ENS bridge

Type "aman.sudo" anywhere in a Sudo client and a wallet address resolves underneath. Type "[email protected]" and the message routes to whichever wallet your team has assigned that subname to. Mint a name once and it works for the rest of your account's life — across messenger, payments, calls, smart groups and any external dApp that integrates the registry.

This is the post that explains what is actually inside the .sudo namespace, how it composes with ENS, what subnames cost, and why we think a chain-rooted username is one of the most consequential primitives a Web3 application can ship.

Names are infrastructure, not vanity

It is tempting to treat usernames as a marketing surface — pretty handles people put on their profile. They are more important than that. Names are infrastructure. They decide who you are reachable as, where your payments land, which DAO you vote in, what permissions you have inherited and how a recipient renders you across two thousand different apps.

Web2 figured this out a long time ago: email addresses are infrastructure, DNS is infrastructure, phone numbers are infrastructure. The crypto industry under-shipped on names for a decade because it was easier to ask people to copy a 42-character hex string. ENS broke that pattern at the protocol layer. The .sudo registry is what we built on top of that pattern for messaging.

What a .sudo name actually is

Each .sudo name is an ERC-721 token minted on Base. The token's tokenURI resolves to an on-chain metadata record that lists the controlling wallet, the resolver contract, the avatar reference, an arbitrary text record set, and a list of authorised subname owners.

That is it. There is no central server that maps "aman.sudo" to a wallet. The mapping lives in a contract that anyone can query, anyone can audit, and nobody — including Sudo Labs — can rewrite without your signature.

The minimum mint price is 0.004 ETH on Base, which at current prices is a few dollars. That price is intentional: cheap enough that anyone can mint a name in casual usage, expensive enough that automated squatters lose money on volume. We do not run an annual rent, because perpetual rent on usernames is a bad UX trade — and the storage cost on Base is negligible. We do reserve a small list of generic words (admin, support, team, abuse, etc.) so they cannot be squatted and weaponised.

The subname tree

Subnames are where things get interesting. If you own aman.sudo, you own the entire *.aman.sudo namespace and you can issue subnames at no per-name cost.

That single fact unlocks a long list of patterns:

• A creator at aman.sudo issues mod.aman.sudo to a community moderator. The moderator gets a stable identity and a tip jar without signing up for anything.
• A small team mints brand.sudo and issues ceo.brand.sudo, support.brand.sudo, tip.brand.sudo — branded handles that resolve to different wallets.
• A DAO at dao.sudo issues per-contributor subnames alice.dao.sudo, bob.dao.sudo etc., each pointing at a contributor's payout wallet.
• A validator at v.sudo issues stake.v.sudo for delegators and votes.v.sudo for governance signalling, separating those flows for accounting clarity.

Subnames cost their owner nothing to mint and inherit the parent's reputation, but each subname has its own controlling wallet — so a mod can lose access to mod.aman.sudo without affecting the parent name. Subname ownership can be revoked by the parent at any time, which is the right default for delegated identities.

The ENS bridge

We are pragmatic about ENS. Hundreds of thousands of wallets already own a .eth name. We do not want users to have to choose between worlds.

Every .sudo name has an optional ENS bridge. If you own aman.eth and you mint aman.sudo, you can prove ownership of the .eth name with a single signature and the registry will store both records under one identity. After that, anyone messaging aman.eth reaches you on Sudo, and anyone tipping aman.sudo lands the payment at the wallet your .eth resolves to.

There is also dual-direction subname resolution. pay.aman.eth and pay.aman.sudo resolve to the same wallet if you bridge them. We never charge for the bridge.

Anti-squatting and the dispute path

Names are valuable. People squat valuable things. Our defences are layered.

Generic English words and an ICANN-derived shortlist are pre-reserved and cannot be minted. Names that match registered trademarks can be challenged through a lightweight on-chain dispute filed against the holder; if the challenger provides credible trademark evidence, three randomly sampled validators vote on the transfer. The bond required to start such a dispute is non-trivial and is forfeit if the validators rule against you, which keeps frivolous trademark trolling off the platform.

Subname squatting is the parent owner's problem. We do not arbitrate legit-mod.aman.sudo issued by aman to scam a fan — that is a parental responsibility, the same way it is on a domain.

What you can and can't do

You can transfer your .sudo name to another wallet at any time by burning the old token and minting to the new owner; the registry preserves your subname tree across the transfer and updates your messaging history without breaking conversation continuity.

You can rotate the resolver. We ship a default resolver that is sufficient for 99% of users; advanced users can deploy their own (for example, a resolver that returns different wallets depending on which chain is asking, or one that delegates to a multisig).

You cannot recover a name whose controlling wallet is lost. The same key-loss caveat that applies to your funds applies to your identity. We strongly recommend social-recovery wallets and multisig signers for any name with reputational value.

You cannot get a name that is already minted. There is no "premium tier" that lets you jump the queue. The first wallet to pay the mint price wins, full stop.

Roadmap

Three things are on the immediate roadmap for the registry.

First, we are integrating with the OpenWallet identity standard so that any compatible mobile wallet can render your .sudo name in its address book without us shipping a vendor-specific SDK. Early integrations with two major mobile wallets are in test.

Second, we are landing a "name health" check inside the Sudo client. It nags you when your controlling wallet has been inactive for ninety days, prompts you to test your recovery, and offers to enrol your name into a social-recovery contract you control. This is the kind of mundane defensive feature that prevents heartbreak much later.

Third, we are designing a tiered resolver that supports per-app permissions. The idea is that a third-party dApp can ask "may I resolve aman.sudo to a wallet for this specific purpose, for the next 30 days, with a daily spend cap?" and you can answer yes once. This is the missing primitive for safe one-click subscriptions on chain.

Why bother

A username on a centralised messenger is a row in a database that the messenger owns. A username in the .sudo registry is a token in your wallet. The first arrangement gave us the modern internet's identity architecture; the second is what we believe its replacement looks like. We built the .sudo registry to be small, boring, audited and unsurprising — exactly the qualities you want in identity infrastructure.

Mint your name from the homepage. It will outlast every app you have today.