OpenAlias seeks to provide a way to simplify aliasing amidst a rapidly shifting technology climate. Users are trying to cross the bridge to private and cryptographically secure infrastructure and systems, but many of them have just barely started remembering the email addresses of their friends and family.
As part of the ongoing development of the Monero cryptocurrency project, we asked ourselves: how can we simplify payments for users unfamiliar with cryptocurrency? Monero stealth addresses are at least 95 characters long - memorising them is not an option, and asking someone to send a payment to <95-character-string> is only going to lead to confusion.
At its most basic, OpenAlias is a TXT DNS record on a FQDN (fully qualified domain name). By combining this with DNS-related technologies we have created an aliasing standard that is extensible for developers, intuitive and familiar for users, and can interoperate with both centralised and decentralised domain systems.
