INS is the ICON Name Service, a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the ICON blockchain.
INS is to map human-readable names like portal.icon to machine-readable identifiers such as ICON addresses, content hashes, and metadata. INS also supports reverse resolution, making it possible to associate metadata such as canonical names or interface descriptions with ICON addresses.
INS has similar goals to DNS, the Internet’s Domain Name Service, but has significantly different architecture, due to the capabilities and constraints provided by the ICON blockchain. Like DNS, INS operates on a system of dot-separated hierarchial names called domains, with the owner of a domain having full control over the allocation of subdomains.
Top-level domains, like .icon are owned by smart contracts called registrars, which specify rules governing the allocation of their subdomains. Anyone may, by following the rules imposed by these registrar contracts, obtain ownership of a second-level domain for their own use.
Blockchain addresses are not friendly enough to humans, the hash addresses are too long, hard to remember, and not easy to identify which is correct or incorrect.
The blockchain now becomes more and more popular, the shortcomings of address transfer will become more and more obvious. Just as we are sending emails today, it is difficult to use a 32-bit string as an email account. Therefore, an alias service is very helpful for the ease of use of the blockchain system. For example, IPFS has an alias service called InterPlanetary Name Service (IPNS), and Ethereum has its own domain name service called Ethereum Name Service (ENS). We do think that ICON system should also have its own alias service. Called ICON Name Service (INS),
The most important use case of the INS is for transfer, especially those address that need to disclose their own transfer address and do not change the address frequently.
For example, such as ICO smart contract, the project party needs to disclose its official smart contract address in advance on the official website, but it may be modified by hackers. The address, however, it is difficult for investors to find out which is correct or incorrect. If the project party announces a short and easy-to-remember address alias such as INS, the INS will be easily recognise, so that the smart contract address can be prevented from being modified by the hacker.
What kind of resource an alias should point to is flexible and can be implemented just by implementing the corresponding INS resolvers. In addition to pointing to an address, it can also point to a contract address, thus enabling interaction through INS and smart contracts.