Overview
The Monero project created a simpler way to share your Monero public address. For example, our Monero.how donation address
is:
4JUdGzvrMFDWrUUwY3toJATSeNwjn54LkCnKBPRzDuhzi5vSepHfUckJNxRL2gjkNrSqtCoRUrEDAgRwsQvVCjZbRx8NCvspxJMRJcG69H
but OpenAlias allows us to configure our domain so that people can donate to us simply by entering:
as the address to send to from a Monero wallet.
If you'd like to create your own OpenAlias address, you must own or control your own domain name. You cannot currently
request that e.g. a gmail.com address have an OpenAlias associated with it. However, as the standard becomes popular,
we are optimistic email providers will support this standard.
Configuring your DNS for OpenAlias
Let's say your email address is alice@example.com. OpenAlias automatically replaces the '@' sign with a '.' - which
means that the configuration we are about to show you will allow payments to be sent to you at either 'alice@example.com' or at 'alice.example.com'.
Locate the DNS configuration for your domain name at the registrar you purchased it at, and add a TXT record for the host 'alice.example.com' with
the following value: (enter it all on one line without line breaks)
oa1:xmr recipient_address=4JUdGzvrMFDWrUUwY3toJATSeNwjn54LkCnKBPRzDuhzi5vSepHfUckJNxRL2gjkNrSqtCoRUrEDAgRwsQvVCjZbRx8NCvspxJMRJcG69H; recipient_name=Alice Lastname; tx_description=Donate to my cupcake fund!;
If you are unfamiliar with DNS, note that if asked for a TTL value, it's fine to leave it at its default value. The TTL specifies the maximum number of seconds that your new DNS record will be cached for by people that query it.
Once you have configured your TXT record, it may take a few hours to propagate. You can check it is working correctly by using
this tool to check
the status of your TXT records.
Note that if you want to add a Bitcoin donation address as well, you can do this by adding another almost identical record except that it would start with 'oa1:btc' instead of 'oa1:xmr', and would
obviously contain your Bitcoin public address instead of your Monero address.
DNSSEC
Because of the lack of integrity checking with the DNS system, we do not recommend you use OpenAlias unless your registrar (or third party nameserver provider if you use one) supports a standard called DNSSEC,
which allows people requesting your DNS records to be confident that the DNS records have not been tampered with. DNSSEC is most probably not something you will need to configure yourself - your
DNS provider will either automatically support it or not. At the time of writing (January 2017), our own DNS provider does not quite yet support it, and Google Cloud DNS has only alpha support for DNSSEC
which you will need to opt in for.
Again, we do not recommend you share your OpenAlias address with people unless your registrar supports DNSSEC. To check if it does, you can enter your domain into
this tool.
monero.how