SNS and .sol: Solana's Name Layer and the Tale of Two Tokens
Nobody wants to read a wallet address out loud. Forty-four characters of base58 is how machines identify accounts; metasal.sol is how humans do. That gap, between what the chain needs and what people can actually remember, is the entire reason the Solana Name Service exists.
SNS has quietly become one of Solana's longest-running pieces of infrastructure, and its story wraps together a rebrand, a push toward the traditional internet, and one of the more instructive token migrations in the ecosystem: the handover from FIDA to SNS.
From Bonfida to sns.id
The service began life under Bonfida, one of the earliest projects to ship on Solana, and rebranded to Solana Name Service in 2024 with its home at sns.id. The product is simple to describe: register a human-readable name ending in .sol, and it maps to onchain data, most commonly your wallet address, so people can send funds to a name instead of a pasted string. Wallets like Phantom and Solflare resolve .sol names natively, and explorers display them in place of raw addresses.
One design choice sets SNS apart from both traditional DNS and Ethereum's ENS: .sol domains are bought once, with no renewal fees. There is no annual subscription to forget; the name is an asset you hold, trade or transfer like any other. By the time the project launched its token in May 2025, roughly 127,000 wallets held .sol domains, and the accompanying registration wave pushed those numbers substantially higher.
What the .sol TLD Actually Is
It is worth being precise about what "TLD" means here, because two very different systems share the vocabulary. On the regular internet, top-level domains like .com and .au live in root servers governed by ICANN. The .sol TLD lives somewhere else entirely: in an onchain registry on Solana, where the root domain holds top-level names and programs resolve them. Your browser does not know .sol exists, and no ICANN process created it.
SNS bridges that gap with sol.site, which provisions a matching web2 subdomain, yourname.sol.site, for eligible domains, mapping onchain records to standard DNS so a .sol name can host a website and receive email in any browser, no extension required.
The more interesting question is whether the two worlds converge. ICANN's new gTLD application window, the first in more than a decade, opened on 30 April 2026 and closes on 12 August 2026. Anyone with the fee and the operational credentials can apply to run a brand-new top-level domain on the real internet, and the applied-for strings become public after the window closes. Whether .sol appears on that list, from SNS or from anyone else, is one of the more intriguing open questions in web3 naming: a blockchain name system that also controlled its string in the ICANN root would be a genuine first, and a .sol claimed by someone else would create an awkward collision. We will know within weeks.
FIDA: The Token That Came First
FIDA launched in late 2020 as Bonfida's token, making it one of the oldest tokens in the Solana ecosystem, predating almost everything that now defines the network. Over the years it accumulated the usual roles: governance, fee mechanisms, staking, and a claim on the name service's growth.
But by 2025 the team's own verdict was blunt. Announcing the new token, SNS said FIDA's tokenomics were "not sustainable" and could no longer provide the alignment or incentive model that .sol domain holders required. FIDA still exists and still trades, but the project's centre of gravity has moved on, a reminder that a token and the protocol behind it are separate things, and that holding one is not the same as holding the other.
SNS: The Token That Replaced It
The SNS token went live on 13 May 2025 with a total supply of 10 billion. The headline number was the community allocation: 40 percent of supply set aside for .sol holders and Solana communities through the Genesis Airdrop and follow-on campaigns, with a 90-day claim window that closed on 11 August 2025. The rest breaks down as 26.25 percent for ecosystem growth on a four-year unlock, 20 percent for future emissions and community allocations, 8.75 percent for core contributors on a cliff-and-vest schedule, and 5 percent for liquidity.
Notably, there was no direct FIDA-to-SNS swap. FIDA holders were included in the airdrop as one of several eligible communities, sharing a pool alongside partner projects, rather than converting at a fixed rate. And the team has been unusually candid that SNS's utility is still being defined: owning a .sol domain does not require the token, and features like domain payments or formal governance are framed as things the community may choose to build. Depending on your temperament, that is either refreshing honesty or a reason for caution. Probably both.
What Builders Should Take From It
For builders in Australia and New Zealand, the practical lesson is that names are cheap insurance against expensive mistakes. Payment apps, tipping bots, community registries and grant tooling all get safer when users type a name instead of pasting an address, and SNS ships SDKs that make resolution a few lines of code. A .sol name is also the closest thing Solana has to a portable identity primitive: one handle that works across wallets, explorers and applications.
The token story carries its own lesson. Protocols outlive their tokens; migrations happen; allocation and utility deserve the same due diligence as reserves and redemption rights do for a stablecoin. If you are building on a protocol's token rather than its service, know which one you actually depend on.
And keep an eye on August. If .sol shows up in ICANN's applied-for strings, the boundary between blockchain naming and the internet's root zone gets very interesting, very quickly.
Explore more ecosystem stories in our articles, or get involved with Superteam to meet builders and find opportunities across Australia and New Zealand.
Written by the Solana ANZ team. Nothing here is financial advice. Do your own research.