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deep dive — web3 demo

Mint your own .ape domain on Polygon

Ape Name Service is a playful domain registrar I built while learning Web3 — a place to mint your own '.ape' domain as an NFT on Polygon and record information about your apes on-chain. It's an early demo rather than a product, but it's still live, and building it is how I got my hands around domains-as-NFTs and on-chain record storage.

Web3 Developer

SolidityNext.jsPolygonEthers.jsIPFS
Visit live siteView code / docs
domains minted as NFTs
.ape
ENS-like record storage per domain
On-chain

01The connect gate

One wallet away from a .ape domain

The front door leans into the theme — "The CHIMPion domain service on the blockchain!" — and, like a lot of dApps, gates the real flow behind a wallet. Until you connect, the badge simply reads Not connected; once you do, you're minting a domain that lives on-chain rather than in some registrar's database.

It's a small, self-contained page on purpose. The idea I wanted to make tangible is that a domain here isn't a record you rent — it's an NFT you own.

Ape Name Service landing page with a banana emoji, the CHIMPion domain service tagline, a hanging-monkey illustration, and a Connect Wallet button

02Under the hood

Domains as NFTs, records on-chain

Each '.ape' name is minted as an NFT by a Solidity contract deployed to Polygon, a low-fee Layer 2 that made an experiment like this cheap enough to actually play with. Owning the domain NFT means owning the name — transfer the token and the domain goes with it.

Beyond the name itself, the contract stores ENS-like records, so a holder can attach information about their apes to the domain and have it live on-chain. A Next.js front end talks to the contract through Ethers.js, which is where I learned to wire a React app end-to-end to a deployed smart contract.

Ape Name Service, a .ape domain registrar demo built on Polygon

outcome

An early lesson in ownership on-chain

Ape Name Service is honestly a learning project — a tutorial-shaped demo with its own branding — but it's a complete one: a Solidity contract on Polygon that mints '.ape' names as NFTs, stores records against them, and hands ownership to the holder's wallet. It's still live, and it's part of how I moved from reading about Web3 to shipping it.