Stellar Federation Server - Part 1/2

The Stellar federation protocol maps Stellar addresses to a unique name spaced string. It’s a way for Stellar client software to resolve email-like addresses such as name*your_domain.com into account IDs like: GCFFPIFOYY7Z...TK6T32V37KEJU. Stellar addresses provide an easy way for users to send and receive payments by using a syntax that interoperates across different domains and providers. When sending a payment, you contact a federation server first to determine what Stellar account ID to pay. Luckily, the bridge server does this for you.

To explain it simply, a Stellar Federation Server is a database with the following table structure which maps a Stellar address to a string(friendly_id).

| id | first_name | last_name | friendly_id         |
|----|------------|-----------|---------------------|
| 1  | Tunde      | Adebayo   | tunde_adebayo       |
| 2  | Lightrains | Tech      | lightrains          |

Where Lightrains Stellar address would be lightrains*your_domain.com.

Stellar Federation Server architecture

Source: stellar.org

Here, your front-end app/website will be talking to a intermediate server called bridge server which will be talking directly to a federation server. Bridge server is responsible for querying the federation server and get corresponding address and send transaction or operation to a stellar core via stellar Horizon server.

Current federation workflow

Currently, in order to resolve a federation address, the client needs to do the following:

1. fetch the stellar.toml file from https://<domain>/.well-known/stellar.toml and read the FEDERATION_SERVER entry from it
2. fetch the response from the federation server using secure HTTP GET and required parameters
3. proceed with the payment

TODO: How to set up Stellar Federation Server - Part 2/2

This article originally appeared on lightrains.com