No Registry: A Marketing Push for PKDNS

PKDNS has been part of the Pubky stack for a while. It’s how Pubky identities resolve as addresses without going through a registrar. For the Prague hackathon, Pav and Joan took two days to give it a marketing push of its own: a landing page that explains the case in two minutes, a one-line installer on npm, a public resolver anyone can point their DNS at, a pull request to Coolify so self-hosters can deploy it with one click, and a coordinated push on different social fronts.

By the end of the week, the CLI had real downloads and PKDNS had picked up a fresh wave of attention from the self-hosting and decentralized-web crowd.

Core Idea: Domain Names Without a Kill Switch

Every domain name on the internet has a kill switch. One court order, one registrar, one government sanction, and the address stops working.

The decentralized alternatives so far have mostly recreated the problem somewhere else. IPFS raised hundreds of millions and shipped, but most of its traffic today still routes through Cloudflare’s gateway. DNS over HTTPS doesn’t help either; it just moves the kill switch from your ISP to a single CDN.

PKDNS takes a different approach. The address is the public key itself. Nobody issues it. Nobody can take it away. Records publish to the Mainline DHT, the same network that has carried BitTorrent traffic for the last twenty years, with over 10 million nodes and no central operator.

What No Registry Shipped

Everything in the hackathon push is about packaging and distribution. The underlying technology was already in place.

• **noregistry.com** is the marketing site, with a seized-domains graveyard and a clear pitch for why PKDNS is different
• A public resolver lets anyone test a PKDNS address in under thirty seconds, no install needed
• pkdns-cli is on npm, installable with a single curl command
• A pull request to Coolify is in review to add PKDNS as a one-click deploy option for self-hosters

Distribution was just as deliberate. Hacker News, r/selfhosted, r/pihole, r/homelab, X, and Nostr all got coverage in the same week.

Why This Matters

PKDNS is one of the most interesting pieces of the Pubky stack. No Registry’s contribution was giving it the kind of standalone marketing surface that most parts of the stack haven’t had yet, aimed at a wider self-hosting and open-web audience.

It’s also a useful reminder for the rest of us. A hackathon doesn’t have to produce a new product. Sometimes the most valuable thing a team can ship is a clear pitch and an easy download path for something that already works.

Live at https://noregistry.com

Github repo: https://github.com/thisispav/no-registry

All projects in this series were built during a two-day marketing hackathon. They are experimental, and may or may not become actual products.