A small TON DNS feature you may have missed

TON DNS has been part of the ecosystem for a while — the first auctions launched four years ago. Since then, .ton domains have become human-readable wallet names, entry points for TON Sites, and collectible assets in their own right. But honestly, they still have not found a major everyday use case: most of the time, a domain just sits in someone’s wallet.

Still, TON DNS has one small but useful feature: subdomains. If you own example.ton, you can add separate addresses such as main.example.ton, v5.example.ton, xrocket.example.ton, or savings.example.ton and link them to different wallets. One can be your main address, another can point to a new wallet version, and a third can be used for an exchange deposit address. And if you want to use the domain more broadly, a subdomain can also point to a TON Site or a bag in TON Storage.

Technically, subdomains are configured through a separate smart contract: TON documentation provides ready-made manual-dns and auto-dns options for this. But regular users are unlikely to dive into smart contracts just for that. This is where a community-built interface comes in: at howtorunsite.ton.run/subdomains, you can connect your wallet, choose a domain, add a subdomain, and specify where it should point. Better yet, adding a subdomain costs almost nothing, while a single domain can store up to 2^256 DNS records.

What is especially nice is that this is not limited to .ton domains. Collectible Telegram usernames from Fragment are also compatible with TON DNS, so if you own something like name.t.me, you can add subdomains to it as well and use them inside the TON network.

The practical value here is not just convenience, but also security. A year ago, in our #antiscam series, we wrote about address poisoning: scammers send a tiny transaction from a lookalike address and hope that next time the user copies the fake address from their transaction history. Using subdomains instead can significantly reduce the risk of that mistake.

Once configured, subdomains immediately start working in popular TON wallets and explorers: in a wallet, you can send funds to a subdomain instead of a long address, and in an explorer, you can open the corresponding wallet directly. If you already own a nice domain, stop letting it sit there like a collectible — it is time to make it do something useful.

@thedailyton