Recent development in Distributed Hash Tables has opened a huge landscape of possibilities. DHT has been used for storage and retrieval of an enormous range of information kinds. One of this kind of informations is network names. A lot of alternatives to DNS has been proposed and sometimes even deployed, providing registration flexibility and ease of use. But most of that solutions deviated from DNS original standard, settling into to vertical application niches which lead to dead routes.


DNA tries to depart from this tradition learning from errors and wants to develop e new compatible standard able to smoothly interoperate with existing DNS server network. Basically, using DHT to route informations through participant nodes, DNA is able to resolve unofficially registered TLDs (Top Level Domains) as well as official ones. Zones are managed in a delegated way as already done for usual domains, but TLD registration will be bureaucracy free and will be anonymous.


If a DNA TLD will clash with an official one, DNA network will simply drop registering request and will serve query requests as normal DNS ones. For the end user, using DNA means just selecting a DNA node as resolver. Disabling DNA is as easy as substituting DNA resolver with a traditional one, probably provided by user ISP.


Actual DNA implementation is called RNA (Rhizomatic Name Archiver) and is entirely written in Perl, released as free software under GNU GPL v.2. For further informations please refer to http://www.dna-project.net/