As part of the ongoing development of the Monero cryptocurrency project, we asked ourselves: how can we simplify payments for users unfamiliar with cryptocurrency? Monero stealth addresses are at least 95 characters long - memorizing them is not an option, and asking someone to send a payment to <95-character-string> is only going to lead to confusion.
At its most basic, OpenAlias is a TXT DNS record on a FQDN (fully qualified domain name). By combining this with DNS-related technologies we have created an aliasing standard that is extensible for developers, intuitive and familiar for users, and can interoperate with both centralized and decentralized domain systems.