FIO Crypto Handles — No More Renewal Fees or Expiration Dates, They’re Now Yours for Life

The Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO) is excited to announce the completion of FIP-31, an improvement proposal implemented to upgrade FIO Crypto Handles from requiring yearly renewal to no longer expiring.

FIO Crypto Handles are human-readable wallet identifiers that replace traditional, long-string public wallet addresses. They are formatted as username@domain, and allow users to send, receive, and request any type of cryptocurrency to and from these easy-to-read wallet names instead of copy and pasting complex public addresses. This ease of use is built to mitigate loss-making errors associated with incorrectly entered public addresses or blockchain type, as well as provide protection against man-in-the-middle attacks.

FIO Crypto Handles were originally envisioned to be valid for a period of 1 year. If not renewed within 90 days of the expiration date, the FIO Crypto Handle and all associated content would be permanently burned. The rationale was that a valid FIO Crypto Handle provides value to the user and incurs hosting costs to the block producers, whereas an invalid FIO Crypto Handle does not.

However, additional usability research in combination with community feedback on the requirement of yearly renewal, at the risk of automatic burning, expressed a few key concerns:

• Renewal notification was executed by the integrating wallet or exchange, which was a challenging requirement for integration partners who do not collect contact information from their users
• Users were not able using their wallets often enough to notice the renewal notification
• Users feared that their FIO Crypto Handle expiring could compromise their security in the event someone else were to re-register it

With the completion of FIP-31, all of the above concerns have been addressed and FIO Crypto Handles will no longer expire; users can now rest assured that the name they claim is theirs for life.

Read more in full FIP-31 documentation here, and grab your lifelong FIO Crypto Handle from one of our integration partners today!

About FIO:

FIO, the Foundation for Interwallet Operability, is a decentralized consortium of blockchain organizations and community members supporting the ongoing development, integration, and promotion of the FIO Protocol. The protocol is an open-source, decentralized usability layer solution that works across all blockchains, and uses human-readable Crypto Handles to replace the complexity, risk, and inconvenience that comes with blockchain-based transactions using public addresses.