If you’ve used IOTA Names inside a wallet or an explorer, you already know why they matter. They make addresses human again. Instead of copying long strings, you work with something you can recognize, share, and remember.
But there’s been a gap: outside of wallet and explorer UIs, names often revert back to being “just text.” You’ll see them in messages, docs, websites, or chats—and the moment you want to verify what a name actually resolves to, you’re back to manual steps: open an explorer, paste, search, compare, repeat.
INR Name Resolver was built to close that gap.
INR Name Resolver is available for desktop browsers only. Most mobile browsers do not support extensions, so it is not intended for mobile use.
Most of the time, you don’t encounter IOTA Names inside a wallet interface. You encounter them:
In all these places, the name is useful only if it can be resolved quickly and reliably. Otherwise, the user still has to “leave the context” to confirm where it points.
That context switching is a surprisingly large friction point. It doesn’t just cost time—it makes name usage less trustworthy, because people stop checking.
INR Name Resolver makes IOTA Names usable in the place you already spend your time: the browser.
When you encounter a .iota name, the extension can resolve it via the IOTA JSON-RPC method iotax_iotaNamesLookup and show you what it points to—without requiring a wallet or explorer tab as the intermediary.
The guiding idea is simple: a name is only as useful as the speed at which you can verify it.
So the extension focuses on two things:
That’s why the UI centers around an “Overview” and places deeper technical detail behind collapsible sections.
Not everyone needs the same level of detail. Sometimes you just want to confirm, “Is this the right target?” Other times you want to inspect records or verify the raw response.
INR handles that with a simple structure:
The intent is to avoid the classic extension problem where everything is shown at once and the useful part gets buried. The extension should feel lightweight even when it exposes advanced information.
Some people want .iota names to behave like “normal links.” That’s where auto-redirect comes in. If enabled, the extension can redirect to a configured website based on resolved results.
But redirect behavior is also something that should never feel surprising or uncontrollable.
Two principles guided the implementation:
So INR includes a deliberate one-way control: you can mark a link so that it will not auto-redirect, even if auto-redirect is enabled. This is useful for documentation, blog posts, or any “safe link” context where you want to ensure the reader stays in place.
Examples:
?inr_no_redirect=1#inr-no-redirectWhat you can’t do is the opposite: you can’t force redirection through a link. That’s intentional. Extensions should not allow external pages to override user preferences.
The original goal was straightforward: make IOTA Names usable outside wallets and explorers.
That matters because names are an ecosystem feature, not a wallet feature. If names only “work” when you’re already inside specialized tools, they don’t reach the everyday places where adoption actually happens—web pages, docs, communication, commerce, support, and community.
A browser extension is a natural place to solve this because the browser is where people encounter references and make decisions:
When resolution is one click away, names become more than a convenience feature. They become something you can safely use as part of normal internet behavior.
INR Name Resolver is fully open source. If you want to inspect the code, report issues, or contribute improvements, you can find the repository here: https://github.com/pandabytelabs/iota-names-resolver
Extensions are at their best when they make something obvious that used to require effort. INR is not trying to replace explorers or wallets. It’s trying to remove the unnecessary steps between “I see a name” and “I understand what it points to.”
In practice, that does two things:
That’s the real reason this plugin was implemented. Names are meant to be used broadly. INR helps them behave like the human-friendly layer they were always supposed to be.
If you’re already using IOTA Names, this extension makes them usable in more places. If you’re not, it’s a good way to see how much smoother names feel once they follow you outside specialized tools and into the open web.