PopRules and Pricing¶

Introduction¶

dotNS uses a scarcity ladder for .dot name registration. The shortest, most-premium names are reserved for governance or free to personhood holders; longer names are open to anyone for a deposit. The mechanism that enforces "free for personhood holders" is PopRules — the contract that evaluates a proposed registration against the registering account's PoP status and the requested name's length and suffix shape.

This page documents the ladder, the two PoP tiers PopRules recognizes, and the deposit formulas for open-tier registrations.

The Two PoP Tiers¶

PopRules recognizes two personhood tiers, registered separately on the People Chain:

• PoP Full: Cryptographically proven personhood, the destination state. The user completes the full biometric verification flow in the Polkadot App; their key joins the active membership ring on the People Chain. PoP Full holders can generate zero-knowledge proofs of personhood. See the Proof of Personhood reference for details.
• PoP Lite: Third-party attestation. An authorized attester submits an on-chain attestation that an account belongs to a real user; the account is registered against a separate lite-people ring. Lite supply is bounded by governance — it is the on-ramp; Full is the destination.

Both tiers qualify for free name registration, but at different name-length tiers.

The Pricing Ladder¶

Two patterns explain the ladder:

• Premium = short and unmarked: A 6–8-character name with no numeric suffix is the most valuable shape; PopRules reserves it for PoP Full. A 6–8-character name with a 2-digit suffix is the next tier down; both PoP tiers can register one. Beyond that, the ladder opens up.
• Anyone can buy length: A 9–14-character name with a numeric suffix is open to anyone for a sliding-scale deposit; the longer the name, the smaller the deposit. A 15+-character name uses a fixed half-startingPrice deposit.

Lite → Full Migration Reservation¶

When a PoP Lite holder registers a Lite-tier name (6–8 chars with suffix, or longer), dotNS reserves the matching no-suffix base name for them for 12 weeks. If the Lite holder upgrades to PoP Full within that window, they can claim the base name without contention — without the reservation, by the time they upgraded, someone else might have grabbed the unsuffixed name and they would have lost their identity continuity.

The reservation is automatic. A PoP Lite holder registering alice01.dot reserves alice.dot for themselves for 12 weeks; if they upgrade to Full in that window, alice.dot is claimable.

Where to Go Next¶