SNS Domain Upgrade: Your .sol Becomes .sns, and a Free New .sol Is Coming

Solana Name Service (SNS) has begun the SNS domain upgrade, migrating every existing .sol domain to .sns and sending holders a free new .sol domain built on different infrastructure. If you owned yourname.sol before registrations paused on August 17, 2026, you end up with two names. yourname.sns is your current domain, with all its records and subdomains intact. yourname.sol arrives as a fresh domain on the Solana Record Service.

There's no claim page, no signature, and no fee. SNS has warned that anyone asking you to claim, verify, connect, or pay is trying to steal from you.

The domain sitting in your wallet right now doesn't move. It keeps its owner, its records, its primary-domain setting, its subdomains, and its sub-registrars. What changes is the suffix it displays, and it changes gradually, as each wallet and app updates its SNS integration.

What .sol holders need to do

The upgrade is automatic and the snapshot has already been taken, recording which wallet held each .sol domain shortly after the August 17 registration pause. That snapshot decides who's eligible and where each new .sol domain gets delivered.

Delivery follows a set of rules, applied in order.

Listed for sale: The new domain goes to the wallet that listed it, not the marketplace escrow wallet. You didn't need to delist.
Held in a sub-registrar: It goes to the sub-registrar owner, not the escrow wallet.
Tokenized as an NFT: It goes to whichever wallet held the NFT at the snapshot.
Everything else: It goes to the wallet holding the domain.

Subdomains follow the parent, so sub.parent.sol resolves as sub.parent.sns, but subdomains don't get their own matching .sol. Non-English and emoji domains keep working as .sns and are eligible for the airdrop like anything else.

There are no renewal fees on SNS domains today. That could change if .sol becomes an ICANN top-level domain, and SNS says it would give notice first.

Why the Solana Record Service?

SNS is rebuilding .sol on the Solana Record Service because the program the current registry runs on can't be changed to fit. Today's .sol domains live on SPL Name Service, a shared public program used by plenty of applications beyond SNS. Modifying it for one project's needs isn't an option, so SNS built a new registrar on SRS, a program written specifically for domain names.

In July 2026, SNS endorsed the Solana Foundation's application to ICANN for .sol as a generic top-level domain, which would make .sol work as an ordinary web address alongside everything it already does. That process runs on ICANN's timetable, takes years rather than months, and the decision belongs to a third party. Sending and receiving by name keeps working on .sns regardless of how the ICANN application goes.

Feature parity isn't there yet either. Your .sns domain supports the full SNS feature set. The new .sol domains arrive without records, primary-domain settings, or subdomain support, and those capabilities come in a later phase.

Migration timeline

At slot 452,825,395 .sol resolution pauses in the official SNS SDKs, expected mid to late October 2026. From that point, existing SPL Name Service domains resolve as .sns only, and .sol names stop resolving for payments until the new SRS-based domains activate.

August 17, 2026: .sol registrations paused and the snapshot was taken shortly after.
Now: Registrations have reopened for .sns domains.
Late September to early October: New .sol domains are airdropped to eligible wallets. They won't resolve or support records yet.
Mid to late October: .sol resolution pauses at slot 452,825,395.
Q4 2026 into Q1 2027: SRS-based .sol domains begin activating across wallets and apps as partners add support.

SNS notes that all of these are targets and may move.

Apps update on their own schedules, so the same name can behave differently depending on where you look. Use your .sns name for payments, and when the amount matters, confirm the destination address with the person you're paying instead of trusting the name.

How do developers migrate?

Developers need to make two changes. Upgrade to an SNS SDK version that resolves .sns, then replace .sol with .sns everywhere the frontend displays a domain name.

First, the SDK. The JavaScript SDK goes from v3 to v4, the JS Kit SDK from v0.10 to v1, and the Rust SDK from v1 to v2. Each version has its own migration guide covering installation and API changes. Support for resolving SRS-backed .sol domains lands in a later SDK update.

Second, fix display strings. Search the frontend for hardcoded .sol suffixes, including formatters, components, and anywhere a cached value is displayed. Pay attention to the code that formats names coming back from primary-domain and wallet-domain lookups, since that's where the suffix usually gets bolted on.

For most .sol holders the SNS domain upgrade is automatic. Your domain becomes yourname.sns and keeps working, a matching yourname.sol arrives on its own, and the only real decision is to start using the .sns name for payments before .sol resolution pauses in October.