What is a FIO Address?
For full a complete overview viit the official FIO KB here.
FIO Addresses will act as the human-readable wallet identifier for users on the FIO Protocol. They are necessary for users to utilize all the capabilities of the FIO Protocol, but also serve as a replacement for complicated public addresses across all tokens and coins in the user’s wallet.
FIO Addresses have the construct of username@domain. Examples of a FIO Address would be:
brad@edge or Shakar@funds
Registration of a FIO Address is done directly through a FIO-enabled application, or through a hosted registration site that is open to the community.
The FIO Address itself and all subsequent interactions with the FIO Protocol are controlled via a FIO private key. Loss of access to this private key suffers the same consequences as with any crypto asset – the FIO Address will no longer be usable by the original owner, nor can it be retrieved.
How Does a FIO Address map to public addresses?
While there are many services that allow a user to map specific public addresses to a wallet name, the FIO Protocol is designed with the expectation that users should never see, or even know about, public addresses in the first place. To achieve this, a FIO Address stores public addresses on the blockchain based on a “just-in-time method“.
Manual Mapping Solutions | FIO Addresses | |
Supported Blockchains | Must be added by mapping provider | Automatically supported |
Mappable to arbitrary data(IP Addresses, etc) | Yes (data types may differ) | No |
Requires user input to map | Yes | No |
Openly readable | Yes | User Option |
Rather than a user logging into a portal and choosing what blockchain public addresses their FIO Address (like jane@gold) should map to, a FIO Address will automatically store a copy of the user’s public address for the transaction being processed (which can be encrypted for privacy reasons).
For example:
- jane@crypto is attempting to send BTC to satoshi@edgewallet
- satoshi@edgewallet stores their BTC public address on the FIO Chain
- If the two counter parties have elected to “friend” each other then this can be stored encrypted where only the two of htem can read the BTC public address
- jane@crypto‘s wallet is able to send to that BTC public address, utilizing the underlying Bitcoin blockchain