What is payment name resolution?
Payment name resolution turns a human-readable name — like pay:yourname — into the executable instructions needed to send money: the rail, address, routing, and an ISO 20022 hint. It's how DNS://Money lets a person or AI agent pay a name instead of a raw account number.
What it is not
The term collides with two unrelated things — so to be exact:
- Not Microsoft PNRP. The Peer Name Resolution Protocol is a 2000s IPv6 peer-to-peer name system. It has nothing to do with payments.
- Not confirmation of payee. That bank check matches a name to an account and returns yes/no to catch fraud. Payment name resolution returns where and how to pay — the rail and endpoint to actually execute.
How does it work?
- A name is queried. A sender or agent asks the protocol to resolve
pay:vendor.alpha. - An instruction is returned. The protocol responds with rail, address, routing, fee estimate, and an ISO 20022 hint — everything needed to pay.
- The optimal rail is selected. The same name can resolve to XRPL, FedNow, or ACH.
- The payment settles on that rail. DNS://Money never holds the funds.
Why it matters for AI agents
Autonomous agents can't paste wallet addresses or remember routing numbers. They need to resolve a stable name into a payment instruction at transaction time — across whatever rail is best. That resolution layer is exactly what's missing from agent protocols like AP2, A2A, and x402, and exactly what payment name resolution provides.
Has it run live?
Yes — on 2026-03-13, two AI systems resolved pay: names and paid each other on XRPL mainnet, autonomously and on-chain. View the genesis transaction →
Related terms
- pay:
- The namespace for payment names, e.g.
pay:agent.compute. - FAS-1 (Financial Address Standard)
- The open spec defining how a pay: name resolves to a payment endpoint.
- rail
- A settlement network (XRPL, FedNow, ACH) a resolved name can point to.