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Name Hashing
Names are identified by their hash on-chain. Publishing the preimage of the hash is optional.
A detailed explanation of the motivations behind our hashing mechanism is available in the blog post Privacy Mechanisms for Name Registrations.
We highly recommend using our client libraries to handle operations related to hashing.
Names must be in lower case before starting this process.
We use the Circom implementation of the Poseidon hash function, initialized with three inputs.
Given a name that consists of n labels, we perform n rounds of Poseidon where the first input is the output hash from the previous round (or 0 for the first round) and the second & third inputs are derived from the current label. We refer to the second & third inputs as input signals.
Each label can consist of 62 characters in the set [a-z0-9-]. We convert a label to input signals by splitting the label into two strings of 31 characters. Each of these strings is then converted into a 248-bit string, then into an integer. The resulting integers are the input signals for the hashing function.
Users are able to register their names using only the hash. This the first of a number of privacy features which allows users to utilize the system without creating visible links of information on-chain.
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What are Input Signals?
The hashing algorithm that is used to hash the domains accepts only integer inputs. Any name consisting of n labels can be converted to a set of n * 2 input signals, which can then be used as inputs in our hashing algorithm.
Example: the name myname.mydomain.avax has 3 labels and can be converted to a set of 6 integers known as the Input Signals