If you’ve ever scrolled Faraland’s leaderboard or item marketplace, you rarely see a bare string like 0x9f2a…4b10. Instead you see names like ranger.bnb or alchemist.bnb. Translating a wallet address into a player name looks trivial, but it all runs through one function — domainNameResolve() — and that function just got patched
The problem: calling on-chain directly, at the cost of reliability
Before the patch, every time an address needed a name, the server spun up an httpProvider and used the @siddomains/sidjs library to call sid.getName(address) — a direct query against Space ID’s smart contract over an RPC node. Sound in principle, but it meant an ordinary Faraland API request had to wait on an on-chain call to finish, with every risk that comes with it: a slow RPC, an overloaded node, or simply no response at all.
The fix: off-chain, onto a REST API
The on-chain SDK call is replaced with a plain HTTP request to Space ID’s own REST API. Small change but we decided to settle on calling Space ID’s REST API directly for this fix — making fewer layers of abstraction, easier to debug when something breaks.
ENS: where the idea of a “named address” began
To see why this model is worth trusting, it helps to look at where it started: ENS — the Ethereum Name Service. Launched in 2017 on Ethereum, ENS solves a very human problem: nobody wants to read, type, or remember a 42-character hex string to send money to the right person. ENS turns 0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045 into a name like vitalik.eth.
Technically, ENS is made of two separate pieces:
- Registry — a single central smart contract that only records who owns which domain and which resolver is responsible for it.
- Resolver — the smart contract that actually “translates” a name into data: a wallet address, an avatar, a social profile, or the reverse — turning an address back into a name, exactly what we does at the application layer.
Owning an ENS name is, under the hood, owning an NFT: renewable, transferable, and usable as an identity across your wallet, a profile page, even a decentralized email address. Today, most major wallets and explorers (Etherscan, MetaMask, NFT marketplaces…) display an ENS name instead of a raw address whenever one exists — exactly the UX pattern Faraland is recreating for its own players.
Space ID: the multichain counterpart — and Faraland’s own
ENS is tied to Ethereum, but Faraland runs on BNB Chain, where ENS isn’t the default registrar. Space ID fills that exact role: a registry/resolver system built on the same philosophy as ENS (.bnb instead of .eth), gradually expanding to other chains.
Why a small change is worth writing about
For players, nothing visibly changes: leaderboards, trade history, and item profiles still show names instead of addresses. But for the team, the path to fetching that name is now noticeably less fragile — no longer directly coupled to an RPC provider’s uptime, with an explicit timeout, and decoupled from the smart-contract layer, which was never the right place for an API’s wait-and-respond logic. A small fix, but landed exactly on the weakest link in the chain that turns an anonymous wallet address into a name a player recognizes.
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