Terms of use

Last updated: 27 August 2026

These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your access to and use of the website at ethernames.com, its subdomains, the gateway we operate at ipfs.cc, and the services behind them (together, the "Interface"), operated by Dinosat Inc. ("Dinosat", "we", "us", "our"). The Interface is a convenience for interacting with Ethernames, an ownerless naming protocol on Ethereum (the "Protocol"). By accessing or using the Interface, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Interface.

1. The Interface and the Protocol are different things

The Protocol is a set of immutable, ownerless smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain: the NameNFT registry, the SubdomainRegistrar, and the NameCard renderer. The Protocol is not owned, controlled, or operated by Dinosat. The contracts have no owner, administrator, or upgrade path, and no one, including Dinosat, can alter, pause, reverse, censor, or override them. Every rule of the Protocol is enforced by the contracts, and the Ethereum blockchain is the sole source of truth.

The Interface is a mostly static, informational website we provide as one of many possible ways to read from and send transactions to the Protocol. It is mostly pages served straight to your browser, plus a small service we operate that passes your read-only blockchain queries to node providers we pay for, and a gateway we operate at ipfs.cc that serves a name's website from the content its record points at. It is a convenience, not the Protocol itself and not a necessary part of it. The Protocol operates independently of the Interface: if the Interface is modified, malfunctions, is discontinued, or disappears entirely, your names and every function of the Protocol continue to work, and you can interact with the contracts directly (for example through a block explorer such as Etherscan) or through any other interface. You should trust the contracts, not the Interface. Do not rely on the Interface as authoritative; independently verify the contract addresses, transaction details, and on-chain state before you act.

2. No custody, no accounts, no intermediary

The Interface is non-custodial. We never take possession or control of your funds, private keys, names, or other assets, at any time. There are no accounts, no logins, and no server-side profile. Every action you take is a transaction that you construct and sign in your own wallet and broadcast to the Ethereum network. We are not a party to your transactions and cannot execute, cancel, reverse, modify, or recover them.

We are not a broker, dealer, exchange, marketplace operator, custodian, wallet provider, money services business, or financial institution, and we do not hold, transmit, or exchange assets on your behalf. Where the Interface presents subname sales, those sales are executed peer-to-peer by the Protocol's SubdomainRegistrar contract; any funds are handled entirely by that contract under its own rules and never by us. Listing a name for subname sales moves the token into that contract, which holds it until you withdraw it, and proceeds accumulate there until the payout address collects them.

3. Eligibility

By accessing or using the Interface, you represent and warrant that:

• you are at least 18 years old, or the age of majority in your jurisdiction if higher, and have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms;
• you are not identified on, and are not owned or controlled by any person or entity identified on, any sanctions list maintained by the United States (including OFAC), the United Nations, the European Union, the United Kingdom, or any other applicable authority, and you are not located in, resident in, or organized under the laws of any country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions or embargo;
• you are solely responsible for compliance with the laws that apply to you, and your access to and use of the Interface is not prohibited by, and does not violate, any law applicable to you.

These representations are made each time you use the Interface. If any of them ceases to be true, you must stop using the Interface.

4. Wallets, transactions, and irreversibility

You are solely responsible for your wallet and for the security of your private keys, seed phrases, and devices. Anyone with access to your keys can take your funds and names. Loss of your keys is permanent and irrecoverable, and we cannot restore them or reverse any resulting loss.

Transactions on Ethereum are irreversible once confirmed. They may fail, may be delayed, may be reordered or front-run by others, and generally cost network fees ("gas") whether or not they succeed, none of which we control. Before signing anything, you are responsible for verifying, in your own wallet, the contract you are interacting with, the amount, and the effect of the transaction.

You are solely responsible for determining, reporting, and paying any taxes, duties, or similar charges that apply to your use of the Interface or the Protocol. We do not withhold, collect, or report any taxes on your behalf.

5. The Protocol's rules are enforced by code

Name registration (a commit and reveal flow), fees, the registration term, the grace period, renewals, the post-grace premium, subnames, records, and transfers are governed entirely by the contracts. In particular, fees paid to the Protocol are burned: they are locked in the contract permanently and are non-refundable and unrecoverable by anyone, including us. The one exception is the referrer share, described next.

A referrer is optional: a registration can name one or name none, and a registration that names none burns 100% of what it pays. Where you reach the Interface through a referral link, that link names the referrer; the link is remembered in your browser for 30 days, per browser, and the most recent one wins. Other interfaces to the Protocol make their own choice.

The referrer is fixed into the commitment before you sign and cannot be changed for the life of that registration. While it stays active it earns 20% of the registration fee, of any post-grace premium, and of every renewal, including renewals paid by a later owner, sent to the address that referrer resolves to at the moment of payment. The other 80% is burned. If the referrer is not active when a payment is due, nothing is sent and the whole amount is burned. None of this changes what you pay: the price is the same either way.

We cannot waive, discount, or refund fees; extend, restore, or recover an expired name; reverse a registration; take a name from anyone; or intervene in any on-chain outcome. Name availability is first-come and enforced by the contract. Token identifiers are reused: a name that lapses through its grace period may be registered by anyone, which wipes its prior records. You are responsible for renewing your names on time.

6. Not advice; names are not investments

Nothing on the Interface is financial, investment, legal, tax, accounting, or other professional advice, and nothing on it is a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset. The Interface is provided for general informational and utility purposes only. Names are utility identifiers, not securities or investment products; you should have no expectation of profit from acquiring them. Digital assets are volatile and you may lose their entire value. You are responsible for your own decisions and should consult your own professional advisors.

7. Third-party services

The Interface depends on, and may link to, services operated by third parties that we neither own nor control, including your wallet software, Ethereum RPC and node providers, the WalletConnect (Reown) SDK and relay, IPFS gateways and pinning services, block explorers, price oracles, and the hosts that serve avatar and NFT artwork, which a name's owner chooses and your browser loads from directly. Your use of any third-party service is governed by that party's own terms and privacy policy, and we are not responsible for the acts, omissions, availability, security, accuracy, or content of any third party. We separately operate ether.page, which serves a public page for every ethername under its own terms.

8. Names, records, and on-chain content

You are solely responsible for the names you register and for any records, content hashes, avatars, and other data you publish through the Protocol. Such data is public, permanent, replicated across the Ethereum network, and outside our control; we cannot edit, hide, or remove it. Content you make available over IPFS (including anything a name points to) is hosted by you or your chosen providers, not by us. We operate a gateway at ipfs.cc that serves that content at name.ipfs.cc, reading the pointer from the chain and fetching the content from public IPFS gateways; any other gateway the Interface links to is a third party we do not control. Content served through either is user content that we neither host, review, nor endorse.

You represent that you own or are licensed to use any content you publish, that it does not infringe the intellectual property or other rights of anyone, and that it does not violate any applicable law.

The Interface also shows you other people's names, records, links, and avatars, read from the chain. We do not write, verify, or endorse any of it. A name is not evidence that its holder is who they appear to be. Where the Interface shows that an avatar is held by a name's owner, the only thing checked is that the owner holds that token, not that the collection is the one you think it is. Names can expire, be transferred, and be repointed, so what a name says today is not a promise about tomorrow.

9. Acceptable use

You agree that you will not:

• use the Interface for, or to facilitate, any unlawful activity, or in any way that violates any law applicable to you;
• infringe the intellectual property, privacy, or other rights of any person, including registering names to impersonate, deceive, phish, defraud, or pass yourself off as another;
• publish or distribute malware, or content that is illegal, or use a name or record to direct users to such content;
• interfere with, disrupt, overload, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Interface or its infrastructure, or circumvent its security, origin restrictions, rate limits, or other access controls (including those on the query service we operate);
• scrape, harvest, or use automated means to access the Interface in a manner that imposes an unreasonable load, or otherwise misuse the Interface beyond its intended purpose;
• use the Interface where doing so is prohibited by these Terms or by any law applicable to you.

The availability of a name on the Protocol confers no trademark or other legal right in that name. You are responsible for your own trademark clearance and rights.

We may restrict, suspend, or block your access to the Interface, including the query service and the gateway we operate, at any time and with or without notice, if we reasonably believe you have breached these Terms or any applicable law, and without limiting our other rights. We may also refuse or stop serving any name, page, or request through the Interface, whether or not you are the person who breached anything, where we have acted on a report under Section 10, or where it is needed to keep the Interface working. Blocking a name also blocks its subnames. Some names are never served at our gateway, including a handful of labels reserved for our own pages and hosts. None of this affects your names or any function of the Protocol, which remain accessible directly on Ethereum and through any other interface.

10. Intellectual property

The Protocol's contracts are published under the MIT license on GitHub, and their verified source is on Etherscan. The names "Ethernames" and "Dinosat", together with our logos and branding, are marks of Dinosat or its licensors; the MIT license covers the code, not the marks.

Ethernames is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with the Ethereum Foundation, and it is not an official Ethereum project. "Ethereum" and "ether" appear here only to describe the public blockchain the Protocol is deployed on. The .ether namespace is defined by the Protocol's contracts alone and is not an official Ethereum namespace. Marks referred to on the Interface belong to their respective owners.

If you believe content on the Interface infringes your rights, contact us at info@ethernames.com with enough detail to identify the material and your rights in it. For something served at ipfs.cc, write to abuse@ipfs.cc with the hostname and the problem. We will look into a report promptly and tell you what we did. What we can do stops at what we run: we can stop serving a page or a name through the Interface or our gateway. We cannot alter, remove, or block data that lives on the Ethereum blockchain, on IPFS networks, or on any gateway we do not run, and a name we stop serving keeps resolving everywhere else.

11. No warranties

The Interface and the Protocol are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, to the maximum extent permitted by law. We disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and any warranty that the Interface or the Protocol will be available, uninterrupted, secure, accurate, or error-free.

We do not warrant that the Interface or the underlying contracts are free of bugs, vulnerabilities, or errors. Smart contracts carry inherent risk; audits reduce that risk but do not eliminate it. Information the Interface displays, including prices, availability, gas estimates, and statistics, may be inaccurate, incomplete, delayed, or wrong; the contracts and the blockchain are the only authoritative source, and you should verify against them.

12. Assumption of risk

You understand and accept the risks of using blockchain-based systems, including: software bugs or exploits in smart contracts, wallets, or the Interface, which can lead to total and irreversible loss; the irreversibility of confirmed transactions; loss of keys; the volatility of digital assets; network fees, congestion, delays, reorganizations, and forks; transaction reordering, front-running, and other maximal-extractable-value activity; phishing and counterfeit websites, applications, and contracts (always verify the official contract addresses); evolving and uncertain law and regulation; visually confusable or homograph names that can be used to deceive; and the mechanics of expiry, the grace period, and the post-grace premium. You use the Interface and the Protocol entirely at your own risk.

Subnames carry risks of their own. A subname lives at the parent owner's discretion: the parent's owner can reclaim the label at any time, and if the parent expires every subname under it stops resolving. A subname cannot be renewed on its own, though renewals are permissionless, so anyone can pay to renew the parent. Buy only from parents you trust. If you sell subnames, listing a name moves the token into the SubdomainRegistrar contract, a listed name that lapses past its grace period can no longer be renewed or withdrawn, and proceeds wait in that contract until the payout address collects them.

13. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, in no event will Dinosat or its directors, officers, employees, agents, or contributors be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, funds, names, data, goodwill, or opportunity, arising out of or relating to your use of, or inability to use, the Interface or the Protocol, whether based in contract, tort, strict liability, or otherwise, and whether or not we were advised of the possibility of such damages.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms, the Interface, or the Protocol will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amounts, if any, you paid to Dinosat for use of the Interface in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) USD 100. We charge nothing for the Interface itself. The fees you pay on a registration or renewal go to the Protocol, which burns them apart from the referrer share described in Section 5. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations or exclusions of liability, in which case they apply to you only to the extent permitted.

14. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Dinosat and its directors, officers, employees, agents, and contributors from and against any claims, demands, losses, liabilities, damages, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or relating to your access to or use of the Interface, the names and content you register or publish, your violation of these Terms or of any law, or your infringement of any right of any third party.

15. Release

The Protocol, other users, and third-party services are outside our control. To the maximum extent permitted by law, you release Dinosat and its directors, officers, employees, agents, and contributors from any dispute, claim, or liability arising out of the Protocol's operation, the conduct of other users, any third-party service, or any on-chain outcome, and you waive the benefit of any law that would otherwise limit the scope of such a release.

16. Governing law and dispute resolution

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of or relating to them, the Interface, or the Protocol, are governed by the laws of the Republic of Seychelles, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Informal resolution first. Before starting any formal proceeding, you agree to try to resolve the dispute informally by reaching us at info@ethernames.com with a description of the dispute and the relief you seek. If it is not resolved within 30 days, either party may proceed as set out below.

Binding arbitration. Any dispute not resolved informally will be finally settled by binding arbitration seated in Victoria, Mahé, Seychelles, before one arbitrator, conducted in English, under the arbitration law and rules applicable in Seychelles. Judgment on the award may be entered by any court of competent jurisdiction. The arbitration and its outcome will be kept confidential except as needed to enforce the award or as required by law.

Individual basis only. You and Dinosat agree to bring disputes only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative action. To the extent permitted by law, you and Dinosat waive any right to a jury trial.

Exceptions. Either party may bring an individual claim in a small-claims forum for disputes within its scope, and either party may seek injunctive or other equitable relief in a court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual property or to stop unauthorized access to or misuse of the Interface.

17. Changes to the Interface

We may modify, suspend, or discontinue the Interface, in whole or in part, at any time and without notice or liability. This does not affect the Protocol, which is independent of the Interface and remains accessible directly on Ethereum regardless of the Interface's status.

18. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will post the revised Terms on this page and update the "Last updated" date above. Changes take effect when posted (or on a later date if we state one). Your continued use of the Interface after changes take effect means you accept the revised Terms; if you do not agree, stop using the Interface.

19. General

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, it will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest will remain in effect. Any provision that by its nature should survive will survive the end of these Terms or of your use of the Interface, including Sections 11 through 16 (no warranties, assumption of risk, limitation of liability, indemnification, release, and dispute resolution). Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of it. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Interface. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them freely. Nothing in these Terms creates any agency, partnership, or joint venture. There are no third-party beneficiaries except Dinosat's directors, officers, employees, agents, and contributors, who may directly enforce the limitation of liability, indemnification, and release provisions above (Sections 13 to 15). Neither party is liable for delays or failures caused by events beyond its reasonable control. Section headings are for convenience only. The English version of these Terms controls.

20. Contact

Dinosat Inc.
Suite 9, Ansuya Estate, Royal Street
Victoria, Mahé, Republic of Seychelles
info@ethernames.com