Verify your Identity

How to verify your identity on Nostr and get a verification checkmark and an easier way to share your account

NIP-05 Verification

You might have noticed on Astral (and other clients) that some users have checks, just like on Twitter.

The verification process on Nostr is documented in a Nostr Implementation Possibilities (NIP) called NIP-05.

NIP-05 enables a Nostr user to map their public key to a DNS-based internet identifier. The verification mechanism is similar to how Google requires you to verify your ownership of a domain using a DNS record.

The major benefit of verification is that it allows a Nostr user to be identified by a human-readable name, instead of a long, hard-to-remember public key. This enables verified Nostr users to easily share their identity with others.

To utilize NIP-05, Nostr users add a nip05 url to their profile (most clients have support for this). NIP-05 urls look like emails – bob@example.com. Let's break down the parts:

1. Everything before the @ symbol ("bob", in our example). This must match the value of the name field in your Nostr profile.
2. Everything after the @ symbol ("example.com", in our example). This is the domain where the client can look to find a /.well-known/nostr.json file that contains the user's name & public key.

When clients see a nip05 url, they will look for a /.well-known/nostr.json file at the specified domain. This file must contain the nostr public key for the specified user. Read more specifics in the NIP-05 spec.

While it sounds technical, it's suprisingly easy to get verified. Let's see how to do it.

Option 1: Pay a provider for verification

If you don't have your own domain or don't want to set it up yourself, you can take advantage of a NIP-05 service, such as nostrplebs.com. In exchange for a handful of sats, you can add your public key to thier nostr.json.

Option 2: Self hosted verification

If you already own a domain, this is a free option. You just need to add a .well-known/nostr.json file to your domain. The contents of the file should be the following:

{
  "names": {
    "YOUR_NOSTR_NAME": "YOUR_NOSTR_PUBLIC_KEY"
  }
}

Make sure this file is served with the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header set to * as it needs to be accessible by clients.