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I intend to do a project on Decentralizing DNS using Blockchain.

As I was researching this topic, Namecoin was a name that popped up a lot. On searching further, I got to know that Namecoin hosts .bit addresses on its blockchain (Please correct me if I am wrong)

What I want to make is a DNS which does exactly what the current DNS does but remove the need for a centralized server. Meaning, I want to map the IP's of .com/.net etc. sites and not introduce a new top level domain.

I do not have an in-depth knowledge about Blockchain. I know what it is and the basic idea on how to make one, but I'm still learning the rest. Its a field that I am very much interested in learning more about.

I just want to know how I can go about fulfilling my requirement. To be honest, I am not even sure on where to start. My current research methodology has been watching the various "talks" about Decentralized DNS on YouTube.

If anyone could help guide me in the right direction, I would be grateful.

Thanks

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  • docs.ens.domains/en/latest/index.html and github.com/ensdomains/ens
    – Shawn Tabrizi
    Nov 22, 2018 at 14:15
  • @ShawnTabrizi Hi. Much appreciate the reply. About ENS, I should have mentioned it in the original question, but isnt ENS similar to Namecoin in the way it only maps .eth addresses? Are you implying that I can use the same principle as ENS to map regular TLD addresses as well? Thanks
    – user3536523
    Nov 22, 2018 at 14:22

2 Answers 2

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You probably want to write a daemon that runs in the router or local machine, this daemon would be connected to an Ethereum Node and query the smart contract for the registries everytime a DNS request is made to it that are from a specific zone (like .eth).

You should have your own zone, otherwise it will concurrent with other systems.

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You probably know now a lot more about the topic than I do, but I can maybe provide some insights from Ethereum/blockchain perspective. I also don't understand the technical parts how the actual DNS would work but @Ricardo provided some ideas for that.

I guess you could use Ethereum or some other blockchain for DNS. At least for most parts it might work quite ok. Reading the data is fast. Writing the data is fast enough.

Biggest issues you would probably encounter would be:

1) How to integrate this with the existing systems. I don't see how this system could coexist nicely with the existing systems - unless you keep your system up-to-date all the time with some DNS services (incurs some heavy traffic I'd imagine) and it would never be really really up-to-date. If we currently didn't have existing DNS systems this might be an alternative when choosing the technologies to use for DNS but currently it would be challenging to integrate this.

2) Costs. Ethereum (and blockchains in general) are very bad for storing data. You probably can't store all the required data in Ethereum due to storage costs. There are workarounds with storing actual data elsewhere (IPFS) and only storing reference to the data in Ethereum, but then it's not blockchain (and neither decentralized) anymore.

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