Zone File (Glue Record)
The text file holding all the DNS records for a domain, including glue records for its nameservers.
- glossary
A zone file is the text file on a domain's authoritative nameservers that holds all of its DNS records — the A, MX, TXT, and other entries that define how the domain behaves. A glue record is a special case: when a domain's nameservers live under that same domain (e.g. ns1.example.com serving example.com), the parent registry must publish the nameserver's IP address directly in the parent zone to avoid a chicken-and-egg lookup. Editing the zone file is how you configure a domain's DNS.
Related keywords
- zone file
- glue record
- DNS zone
- authoritative records
- nameserver
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.