What is "DNS for money"?
"DNS for money" is a system that resolves a human-readable name — like pay:yourname — into the correct payment instructions across any rail (XRPL, FedNow, ACH), the way DNS resolves a domain into an IP address. DNS://Money is the protocol that does it, for AI agents and people.
It's not about monetizing DNS
To be clear: this is not about making money from running DNS servers or flipping domains. "DNS for money" is an analogy. The internet gave every server a name so humans didn't have to memorize IP addresses. DNS://Money does the same for payments — one name that works across every rail, so neither a person nor an AI agent ever pastes a raw wallet address or routing number again.
How does payment name resolution work?
In four steps:
- Register a name. A person or agent claims a
pay:name (e.g.pay:agent.compute). - Resolve it. A sender's app or agent queries the name. The protocol returns a complete payment instruction: rail, address, routing, and an ISO 20022 hint.
- Pick the rail. The same name can resolve to XRPL, FedNow, or ACH — whichever is optimal for that payment.
- Settle. The payment executes on the chosen rail. DNS://Money never touches the funds — it only names and resolves.
Is this the same as "payment name resolution"?
Yes — that's the technical term, and it's worth disambiguating:
- It is not Microsoft's Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP), a 2000s-era IPv6 peer-to-peer name system.
- It is not confirmation of payee — the bank check that matches a name to an account to prevent fraud. That returns a yes/no; payment name resolution returns where and how to pay.
How is it different from x402, a bank alias, or ENS?
| Approach | What it resolves | Rails | Agent-native |
|---|---|---|---|
| DNS://Money (pay:) | name → full payment instruction | XRPL, FedNow, ACH (multi-rail) | Yes |
| Bank alias (FedNow/RTP/Pix/Visa+) | phone/email → one bank account | Single rail | No |
| x402 (Coinbase) | HTTP 402 → settlement on a crypto address | Crypto | Partial |
| ENS | name → one Ethereum address | Ethereum only | Partial |
The short version: x402 settles a payment; DNS://Money names and resolves the destination — the layer above every rail. The two are complementary, not competing.
Has it actually been used?
Yes. On 2026-03-13, two AI systems paid each other autonomously on XRPL mainnet using pay: name resolution — policy-bound, on-chain, no human in the loop. It's a verifiable transaction, not a demo: view the genesis transaction →
Glossary
- pay:
- The namespace scheme for payment names, e.g.
pay:vendor.alpha. - FAS-1 (Financial Address Standard)
- The open (CC BY 4.0) spec defining how a
pay:name resolves to a payment endpoint. Not to be confused with FASB accounting standards. - payment name resolution
- Turning a human-readable name into executable payment instructions (rail, address, routing, ISO 20022 hint).
- rail
- A settlement network — e.g. XRPL, FedNow, ACH — that a resolved name can point to.