About Fistbump

Fistbump is an open protocol designed to replace the DNS root zone with a public blockchain. It is not a company. There is no pre-mine, no ICO, and no founder reward. Everything about it — the consensus rules, the reference software, the name registry, the DNS server — is open source and operated by whoever chooses to run a node.

What Fistbump is

Fistbump is a permissionless, memory-hard blockchain whose sole purpose is naming. Every transaction output carries a covenant — a typed data structure encoding a naming operation (open, bid, reveal, register, update, renew, transfer). The chain is a public registry of human-readable top-level domains, with standard DNS resource records (A, AAAA, NS, MX, CNAME, TXT, TLSA, CAA, and others) stored directly on-chain.

Every full node is an authoritative DNS server. Point a recursive resolver at any fbd node and it answers standard DNS queries using on-chain state. There is no registrar, no certificate authority dependence, and no party that can revoke a name without the private key that controls it.

Mission

Replace the DNS root zone with something no single entity controls. The Domain Name System today is managed by IANA and delegated through ICANN-accredited registrars and certificate authorities. Governments seize domains. Registrars suspend accounts. Certificate authorities get compromised. The entire naming layer of the internet runs on trust in institutions that can revoke any name, at any time, in any jurisdiction.

Fistbump exists because that trust model is a foundational vulnerability of the internet, and because the previous attempts to replace it — Namecoin, ENS, Handshake, Unstoppable Domains — each left critical corners unresolved. Fistbump is an attempt to ship a production-grade replacement in one piece: memory-hard mining, on-chain DNS, market-driven auctions, renewal-funded development.

Principles

• No founder allocation. The genesis block reward is burned. There is no pre-mine, no ICO, no airdrop, and no founder reward. Every FBC in circulation was mined by someone running the same software available to everyone else.
• Mining on commodity hardware. Proof of work is Balloon Hashing, a provably memory-hard function. The 512 MB scratchpad makes ASICs and GPUs economically pointless, which is how mining stays broad.
• Standard DNS everywhere. Names resolve through the existing DNS stack. No browser extension, no proprietary resolver, no bridge servers. If it already understands DNS, it already understands Fistbump.
• Anti-squatting by design. Auctions price names by demand. Annual renewal fees create a carrying cost for unused names. Premium (≤6-byte) names require DNSSEC proofs of ownership of the equivalent ICANN domain.
• Open source, open participation. The reference node is Swift, distributed under a permissive license from fbd.dev. Anyone can run a node, mine, register a name, or build alternative clients.

Project structure

Fistbump is a decentralized project maintained by a group of core contributors. Contributor identities are pseudonymous by default — the protocol's security does not depend on who wrote the code, only on the code being auditable and the consensus rules being enforced by the network.

The reference implementation, fbd, is a full node written in Swift. It handles P2P networking, chain validation, mempool, CPU mining, the authoritative DNS server, and a wallet, and exposes a JSON-RPC API. Source and releases are hosted at fbd.dev and mirrored at github.com/fistbump-org/fbd. Binaries are distributed from the project websites; GitHub is the source-of-record for source code.

Alternative clients, wallets, and explorers are encouraged. The protocol specification is in the whitepaper; the JSON-RPC API is documented at fbd.dev.

Funding

Fistbump has no outside investors and no token treasury. The project is funded by on-chain name economics:

• 50% of every name registration fee is sent to a development fund multisig controlled by core contributors. (The other 50% is burned.)
• 100% of annual renewal fees (1% of the registration price) is sent to the development fund.
• For subdomain registrations, 25% of the fee goes to the development fund, 25% to ancestor owners, and 50% is burned.

The development fund multisig is a governance parameter, not a consensus rule. Its signer set and threshold are published by the project and can evolve without a hard fork. Name holders are not exposed to multisig risk for their names to keep working — development funding and consensus are separated by design.

Contributing

Ways to contribute:

• Mine. Run fbd on commodity hardware to participate in consensus.
• Write code. Patches, alternative clients, libraries, wallet integrations, and developer tools are all in scope. Start at github.com/fistbump-org.
• Run infrastructure. Operate a public node, a DNS resolver, a seed node, or a block explorer.
• Document. Translations, tutorials, and reference documentation benefit the whole ecosystem.
• Discuss. Protocol design, economics, and client behavior are debated openly. Join the Discord.

Contact

• Discord: discord.com/invite/JgejsFYFGJ — protocol discussion, dev coordination, community.
• GitHub: github.com/fistbump-org — source code, issues, releases.
• Reference node: fbd.dev — downloads and developer documentation.
• Explorer: explorer.fistbump.org — chain data, stats, name lookup.
• Atomic swap: swap.fistbump.org — BTC ↔ FBC peer-to-peer trading.