Address Name System: Wallet Ownership Resolution Based on Reliable Self-Declaration

Abstract

Distributed ledger technologies have become popular through the advent of cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, bringing new applicabilities and new challenges. Even though privacy and anonymity are desirable attributes of their users, there is ample evidence that, in some cases, such attributes may be dispensable and digital wallet ownership could be known. In this paper, we introduce a wallet ownership resolution mechanism based on reliable self-declaration of wallet address holders, called Address Name System (ANS). The address-entity mapping public service proposed here relies on special certificates voluntarily populated and verifiable in an independent way. A prototype of this service was implemented as a proof of concept of the proposal and a functional validation of its operations was carried out.