Announcing support for .xyz on ENS
We’re delighted to announce that as of today, it’s possible to claim your .xyz domain name on ENS! We’ve been working on this feature for a while, and it’s been possible to test it on Ropsten, but as of today, .xyz names are now supported by ENS on mainnet!
What does this mean?
This means that if you own a .xyz domain name (purchased through any DNS registrar), you’ll be able to claim the same name in ENS, and use it just like you would any .eth name — associate it with your wallet, use it to name smart contracts, create subdomains, and so forth.
An information page with more detail about how this works and how to use it is available here on the XYZ site.
EasyDNS has developed an easy, wizard-based process for enabling this on .xyz domains registered with them; for more details read this howto on their site.
For everyone else, doing this is a somewhat manual process for now — outlined below — but we’re working on improved tools, and we’re hoping to see easy-to-use integrations from registrars in the near future that will simplify things further.
How to claim your .xyz name on ENS
Set up DNSSEC
The first thing you need to do is set up DNSSEC signing on your .xyz domain name. Depending on your DNS provider, this may be really easy, or quite involved.
If your DNS provider already supports DNSSEC-signed domains, great! Follow their instructions for setting up DNSSEC.
If they don’t, you’ll need to migrate to someone who does. I recommend either EasyDNS or Google Cloud DNS. EasyDNS’s setup guide for DNSSEC is here, while Google’s is here.
Whatever provider you need, make sure you select RSA signatures and SHA256 hashing when configuring DNSSEC. We are working on support for ECDSA signatures, but it’s not ready just yet. Notably, this means that you can’t use CloudFlare as your DNS provider at present.
Once you’ve set DNSSEC up, your DNS provider will give you some data — DS or RRSIG records . You will need to provide these records to your registrar. Doing this lets them insert the relevant ‘glue’ to make sure everything works end-to-end.
When you’ve finished this step, use Verisign’s DNSSEC debugger to verify everything is working before going further.
Add a TXT record
The DNS Registrar on ENS looks for a DNS TXT record with a specific name and format in order to verify what Ethereum address should be given ownership of the domain.
To claim ownership of mydomain.xyz on ENS, create a TXT record in your DNS zone, _ens.mydomain.xyz, with text data of the form a=0x1234..., where 0x1234... is the Ethereum address you want to give control of the ENS record to.
Claim your name in ENS
Head over to this tool in a web3-enabled browser, and enter your domain name in the text box, then click “Lookup”. If all goes well, you’ll see some information about your name pop up in the “On DNS” section. Click “Submit the Proof” down the bottom, approve the transaction, and you’re done!
Check it out
If you want to verify everything is working, go to the ENS manager and enter your domain name there. It should show it as being owned by the account you set in DNS — and if you’re using a web3-enabled browser with that account, it should let you configure it as you wish.
What’s next
We’re rolling out our ENS support initially on .xyz to give it a test-drive, but the best thing about this is that it doesn’t require any cooperation or permission from each DNS TLD. Once we’ve had a chance to see how it works, we plan to roll it out to all other DNS TLDs that support the necessary features — which is almost all of them.
Because ENS has only had one general purpose TLD until now, we’re expecting to find a few ENS enabled applications that don’t understand ENS names other than .eth. If you find one, please let us know by filing a bug, and we’ll get in touch with them and help them make it work for all top-level ENS domains.