IP Address (IPv4 / IPv6)
The numeric address that identifies a device on a network, which DNS maps a domain name to.
- glossary
An IP address is the numeric label that identifies a device on a network — 93.184.216.34 in the older IPv4 format, or a longer hexadecimal string like 2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946 in IPv6, which exists because the world ran out of IPv4 space. The whole point of the DNS is to map a human-friendly domain to one of these addresses: an A record points a name at an IPv4 address, an AAAA record at IPv6. Blocks of addresses are allocated through IANA to regional registries. Domain tokenization operates a layer above all this — it changes who owns the name, not the addresses the name resolves to.
Related keywords
- IP address
- IPv4
- IPv6
- A record
- AAAA record
- networking
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.