Terminology - Soran

Names and people

Term	Meaning
Namespace	A top-level name such as `nova`, operated by an organization or other namespace owner.
Name	An issued name such as `alice.nova`, held under the namespace’s rules.
Subname	One child beneath a name, such as `shop.alice.nova`, controlled by the parent holder.
Namespace owner	The account authorized to configure namespace issuance and supported features.
Holder	The address that controls a name under its namespace policy.
Recipient	The address receiving a payment. It can differ from the holder.
Operator role	An owner, admin, or issuer role in the console. Console access and on-chain ownership are separate.

Contracts

Term	Job
Registry	Records namespace ownership and routes readers to namespace contracts.
Allocator	Handles namespace applications, claim windows, and objection outcomes.
Registrar	Applies namespace rules and records name ownership and lifecycle.
Resolver	Stores and supplies payment destinations, profile records, and other supported records.
Universal Lookup	The shared read entry point that follows and validates a name’s current records.
Primary	Stores a preferred name across namespaces for supported account types.

See how the contracts fit together →

Identity and addresses

Profile is the set of holder-published text records associated with a name: for example, an avatar, description, website, and social links. Display name is an address’s elected name within a namespace, verified against forward resolution. A primary name is its preferred name across namespaces. Payment destination is the complete instruction needed to route a Stellar payment: the address and any required memo. A muxed address includes its routing ID inside the address itself. Network address is a receiving address for an explicitly selected additional blockchain network. A name can have different addresses on different enabled networks.

Ownership and availability

Claim window is the public objection period for a namespace application. A successful application awards the namespace. Username registration inside that namespace is a separate process. Ownership policy describes whether and how names expire, can be reclaimed, or can obtain a permanence guarantee. Read the actual policy; zero expiry alone does not prove permanence. Generation is an ownership counter. It prevents records from a previous holder or an earlier child-name instance from being reused as current records. Storage TTL is Stellar’s ledger-entry availability clock. Archival and ownership expiry are different events; restoring stored data does not transfer ownership. Resolver assurance describes contract provenance and the checked Resolver configuration. It does not freeze a holder’s records or prove that a payment destination belongs to a particular person. Indexed discovery finds candidate names or events through a hosted index. Results can be incomplete; direct verification establishes the current state of a returned candidate.

​Names and people

​Contracts

​Identity and addresses

​Ownership and availability

Names and people

Contracts

Identity and addresses

Ownership and availability