Spaces launches Trust Anchor to verify Bitcoin identities without a central resolver

Spaces has released Trust Anchor, a tool that allows applications to confirm human-readable identities, such as alice@bitcoin, via Bitcoin instead of using a central resolver. The release, which was also covered by Bitcoin News, solves a decades-long issue that the cryptocurrency industry has wrestled with: how to simplify address usage without having to trust a company server to identify who truly owns an address.

The idea behind the tool is to associate not only payments but also identity with Bitcoin. According to the documentation of Trust Anchor, a single number, which is called the Trust ID, represents the Trust Anchor. Once users scan the Trust ID or paste it, the appropriate software is able to validate the state of the Spaces protocol with the help of the information obtained from the Bitcoin network. The generated anchor set is then transformed into the Trust ID.

As the information provided by Spaces shows, a Trust ID can be used for 14 days. Usually, users need to rescan it only when they need to add new contacts or when a contact rotates a key.

How a phone verifies a name against Bitcoin

To obtain a Trust ID, it is not necessary to operate a full node. Spaces recommends Veritas, a macOS-based app located in the menu bar that provides the service of a local certificate authority based on Bitcoin. Veritas is capable of syncing based on a checkpoint, validating Bitcoin’s header chain, and generating the Trust ID locally.

Users of the Spaces client using Bitcoin Core can use space-cli trust, an alternative method of obtaining the Trust ID in the form of a QR code, as well as the Bitcoin block to which it is linked. Veritas currently works only in macOS, while users of Windows and Linux versions are referred to the Spaces client.

Spaces has released v0.4.2 on September 16, which brings its off-chain issuance system to the mainnet along with @bitcoin as its first production operator. According to its mainnet announcement, handles can be acquired via Nacho on iOS, Android, or the web.

A handle links a readable name to a script pubkey of a Binary Merkle Trie. The operator then commits the root of the trie to Bitcoin via a 32-byte hash periodically, after which the holder is granted a certificate off-chain that proves both inclusion and prior non-existence.

According to Spaces, there are no possibilities of later revoking, rerouting, or recovering a handle after it has been issued. The cost of @bitcoin handles is flat $25 with first come, first served distribution model. The technical aspects of the process have been made available in the project’s protocol paper.

Why the Bitcoin root differs from DNSSEC and ENS

BIP-353, written by Matt Corallo and Bastien Teinturier, approaches the issue of blockchain payment in a different way. Bitcoin payment details are published using DNS TXT records, while the validity of this information is verified by DNSSEC.

NIP-05 also uses internet domains, with identity information extracted from the domain’s /.well-known/nostr.json file. Spaces functions differently. It links both the name and the private key directly to Bitcoin, thus allowing the holder to get a certificate that is verifiable by anyone without referencing the original certificate issuers.

ENS employs a different approach. The ENS registry is based on Ethereum’s smart contracts. A March 2026 post by ENS claims that there are approximately 1.6 million registered domains and 30 million subnames in the system across over one hundred different chains. Even if names get inactive due to non-renewal, active .eth registrations cannot just be cancelled.

The importance of the event is more about crypto applications than the actual displacement of BTC’s price. To add to this, earlier Cryptopolitan published an article about Tether’s self-custodial wallet introducing human-readable identifiers for its transactions, lessening dependence on copy-pasting lengthy addresses.

The squatting problem that challenged earlier attempts

History gives us a cautionary message. A Princeton research on Namecoin found out that only 28 out of almost 120,000 registered names in its database had not been squatted and contained unique content. Scientists also established that little evidence existed for a viable secondary market for names.

This demonstrates the difficulty that Spaces faces, as simply having a good protocol design will not mean adoption. At the same time, readable identities are useful only when wallets, apps, and users embrace them.

In terms of the overall market situation, things appear to be more cautious. TRM Labs estimated that in the first quarter of 2026, the total volume of retail crypto trading around the world was $979 billion, which is 11% less than in the previous year. Coinbase Research thinks that open payment standards and agentic commerce may create better prospects for stable demand for on-chain transactions.

The existence of readable and verifiable identities justifies the above-mentioned premise. However, the success of the Spaces service will depend not so much on the cleverness of the naming scheme being used as on the extent to which wallets and applications will be adopting it.

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