Terms of Use

Last updated: 27 October 2026

1. Who we are and how to reach us

handles.link is operated by GROUNDED SYSTEMS - FZCO, a free zone company registered in the IFZA free zone under the Dubai Integrated Economic Zones Authority (DIEZ), licence number 57418, at Building A1, Dubai Digital Park, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean GROUNDED SYSTEMS - FZCO. "You" means the person using the service.

Notices under these terms, and any complaint about the service, should be sent to GROUNDED SYSTEMS - FZCO at contact@handles.link.

2. Definitions

Handle. A human-readable name made from the name of your account on a supported platform, in the form alice.x.handles.link, that resolves to a wallet address. The handle includes both the platform and the account name on it.

Supported platform. A third-party service whose accounts can be linked through handles.link. At present these are X, Google and GitHub.

Linked wallet. The wallet a handle resolves to. A linked wallet belongs to its owner. It is not created, held or operated by us.

Fingerprint. A one-way hash of an account or of a handle, written to the blockchain in place of the value itself. A fingerprint is pseudonymised data, not anonymous data: anyone who has or guesses the original value can compute the same fingerprint.

Unlisted. The way every handle is linked. The blockchain holds a fingerprint of the account and a fingerprint of the handle, not the handle itself. Unlisted does not mean private, hidden or anonymous: anyone who has the handle, or guesses it, can resolve it to the wallet.

Pending transfer. Value sent to a handle that nobody has linked yet. It waits in a smart contract on a public blockchain, assigned to that handle, until the person the handle belongs to links it, or until the sender takes it back as described in section 3.

libID. The open protocol underlying handles.link. libID is published as open source and is governed by its own licence and documentation, not by these terms.

Bridge. An implementation built on libID that links and resolves handles. handles.link is one bridge. Others may exist, operated by other people.

Gateway. The service that answers resolution requests through ENS. We operate a gateway. Others may operate their own.

Resolution. Looking up the wallet address a handle points to.

3. What the service does

handles.link lets you link an account you already have on a supported platform to a wallet you already own. Your handle then resolves to that wallet's address, so other people and applications can send to the handle instead of to a hexadecimal address.

A handle resolves to exactly one address. One address can carry more than one handle.

You can use any EVM-compatible wallet. The networks currently supported are shown in the interface.

Sending to a handle. There is a page on handles.link for sending value. You type the recipient's handle, choose the platform it comes from, the wallet you are sending from and the network, and confirm. The value moves through a smart contract on that network. It never passes through us, and nobody here can hold, delay, release or redirect it.

The recipient is recorded on the blockchain only as a fingerprint of their handle. The sending page does not offer a way to record it in readable form.

If somebody has already linked that handle, the value goes to the wallet it points to, in the same transaction.

If nobody has linked it, the transfer waits in the contract, assigned to that handle. When the person the handle belongs to links it, the waiting value goes to the wallet they link, as part of the same step. They can do that at any time until the value has been taken back.

If nobody links the handle, the value stays in the contract until you take it back. Thirty days after you send, a Return button appears beside that transfer in your history. You press it and you pay the network fee for that transaction, and the value goes back to the address it came from. Nothing happens on its own: we do not press Return for you, and we cannot send the value anywhere else.

A handle typed wrongly cannot be corrected. There is no cancel and no edit. If the handle you typed is already linked by somebody, the value goes to them at once. If it is not, the value waits as described above, and you can take it back once the Return button appears, unless somebody links that handle first.

The sending page shows the transfers you have sent. That list is read from the public events your transfers wrote to the blockchain, and anyone following the chain can assemble the same list.

Value can be sent to a handle nobody has linked only through handles.link itself or an application that integrates it directly. An application that resolves handles through ENS can reach only a handle that has already been linked.

4. What the service does not do

We do not hold your funds. We do not hold, generate, store, reconstruct or have access to your private keys. Every action that moves value happens in your own wallet, and you authorise it there.

We are not a custodian, a wallet, an exchange, a broker, a payment service or a money transmitter. We do not take possession of anything belonging to you at any point.

We do not send, receive, hold, delay or redirect funds. A pending transfer is the one case where value waits before it reaches anyone, and it does not wait with us: it waits in a smart contract on a public blockchain. Value leaves that contract in only two ways: to the person who links the handle, or back to the sender when the sender presses Return and pays for that transaction. Nobody at this company can release it, return it, or stop either from happening.

5. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to use handles.link, and old enough to enter into a binding agreement under the law that applies to you if that age is higher.

There are no accounts here and we collect nothing when you link, so this is not something we can check. By using the service you are telling us it is true.

It matters more here than in most places. Linking writes a fingerprint of your account and a fingerprint of your handle to a public blockchain permanently, and nobody can remove them afterwards: not you, not us, not anyone. If we are told a handle belongs to someone under 18, we will stop showing it in our own interface and stop serving it from our own gateway. What is on the blockchain stays there.

6. Your account on a supported platform

To link a handle you must have an account on a supported platform and sign in through that platform's own sign-in flow.

Your relationship with that platform is governed by the platform's own terms, not by these terms, and you are responsible for following them. We have no control over a supported platform, its terms, or its decisions about your account.

If a supported platform suspends, deletes or transfers your account, or changes its rules, that can affect your handle. Section 7 explains how.

7. How a handle is allocated and controlled

A handle is a pointer. It is not property, not a token you hold, and not something we can give you exclusive possession of.

A handle goes to whoever proves, through the supported platform's own sign-in, that they control the matching account. Control of a handle therefore follows control of the platform account. Only someone who can prove they control that account can change what the handle points to.

Relinking a handle to a different wallet takes two things, and neither works alone: signing in to the platform account through the platform's own flow, and a signature from the wallet the handle is to point at. We are neither of them, and there is no third step that we control.

Relinking takes the handle off the old wallet from that moment on. The earlier record stays in the blockchain's history. There is no way to unlink a handle altogether.

Because of this, a handle is in effect controlled jointly by you and the supported platform. In the worst case a platform can remove your access to your account, and whoever then controls it can relink the handle to a different wallet. A platform cannot reach your wallet and cannot move anything in it. What can change is where the handle points.

We cannot relink a handle on your behalf, and we cannot remove one. That is not a policy we have adopted. It is not something we are able to do.

8. What is permanent and what is public

Read this section before you link a handle. It describes effects that cannot be undone.

A handle cannot be unlinked. You can relink it to a different wallet. You cannot remove the link altogether.

The record is permanent. Linking writes a fingerprint of your account and a fingerprint of your handle to a public blockchain, together with the wallet address they point to. Neither you nor we can erase it.

Your platform account and your wallet become findable together. Your handle itself is not written to the blockchain, but a fingerprint is not a secret. Anyone who has your handle, or guesses it, can compute its fingerprint and find the wallet it points to. Handles are easy to come by, because the platforms publish them. From then on, activity associated with that wallet can be connected to that platform account by anyone who looks, permanently, without any further involvement from you.

On Google the handle is your email address. Only its fingerprint goes to the blockchain, like any other handle, and the same applies to it: anyone who has or guesses the address can find the wallet.

The service offers no option to write a handle to the blockchain in readable form.

Value sent to your handle is visible before you know about it. If someone sends to a handle you have not linked, the pending transfer sits on a public blockchain, assigned to the fingerprint of that handle. Anyone who has or guesses your handle can see that value is waiting for it, before you have taken any action and before you know the transfer exists.

If you do not want a findable connection between a platform account and a wallet, do not link that pair. Use a wallet you are willing to have associated with that account.

9. If you lose access to your platform account

Your wallet is unaffected. It was yours before the handle existed and stays yours afterwards, and losing a platform account gives nobody access to it.

The handle is a different matter. Because control of a handle follows control of the platform account, whoever controls that account can change where the handle points. If you recover the account, you can relink the handle.

Recovering a platform account is a matter between you and that platform.

10. Acceptable use

You must not use handles.link to impersonate another person or organisation, or to create a handle meant to be mistaken for one belonging to someone else.

You must not use it to link a handle you do not intend to use, in order to stop someone else from using it or to sell it to them.

You must not use it to facilitate fraud or theft, or to solicit payments under a false identity.

You must not use it in breach of the terms of a supported platform, or in breach of any law that applies to you, including sanctions law.

We have no power to act on a handle ourselves. If we learn of a breach, what we can do is described in sections 11 and 18, and we may report it to the supported platform concerned.

11. Names and trademark disputes

A handle reproduces the name of an account on a supported platform. It is linked automatically on proof of control of that account. We do not review handles before they are linked and we do not assess whether a handle infringes anyone's rights.

A dispute about who is entitled to a name, or to the underlying account, belongs with the platform that issued it, under that platform's own process. If the account changes hands there, the handle follows.

If you hold rights in a name and a handle reproduces it, write to contact@handles.link. What follows is the whole of what we can do, stated plainly so that nobody writes in expecting more. We cannot alter, reassign or remove a handle; that is a limit of the system, and it applies to us exactly as it applies to you. We can stop presenting a handle in our own interface and decline to serve it from our own gateway. Neither removes it: the record stays on the blockchain and other software can still resolve it.

12. Fees and network costs

Linking a handle is not free. Linking, and relinking to a different wallet, are transactions on a public blockchain, and what you pay is made up of up to three parts.

The network fee, charged by the blockchain itself. It varies with network conditions, it is outside our control, and it is paid to the network rather than to us.

Our fee, a fixed amount that we set, charged for each handle you link.

A verification fee, a fixed amount that we also set, charged for verifying the link where the platform requires it.

All of these are paid from the wallet you are linking. The total depends on the network and on the platform the handle comes from, so there is no single figure to publish here. The fees we set are denominated in the network's own currency, so their value moves with the exchange rate. The interface shows you the total before you confirm, and that is the amount that applies to your transaction.

Sending value to a handle carries no fee from us. You pay only the network fee for the transfer, and, if you take a pending transfer back, the network fee for that transaction.

We do not set, receive or refund network fees. The fees we set are not refundable either, because what they pay for happens on a public blockchain and cannot be undone.

We may charge businesses that integrate handles.link. That is a separate arrangement and does not affect you.

13. Blockchain risk

Public blockchains behave in ways that we cannot undo or override.

A confirmed transaction cannot be reversed, cancelled or recalled, by you, by us or by anyone else.

If you send funds to the wrong address, they are gone. If you send them to the wrong handle and somebody has linked that handle, they are gone too. We cannot recover them, trace them for you, or compel their return. The one exception is a handle nobody has linked: there the value waits and you can take it back after thirty days, as described in section 3, unless somebody links that handle first.

A pending transfer goes to the first link the handle receives, and to the wallet linked at that moment. A later relink does not redirect it.

Resolution depends on the blockchain networks the service uses. Those networks can be congested, delayed, forked, reorganised or unavailable, and can change through upgrades outside our control. Any of these can affect whether a handle resolves, or how quickly.

The contracts behind the service have not completed an independent security audit.

14. Third-party services

handles.link depends on services we do not operate: the supported platforms, the blockchain networks, the wallet you use, and infrastructure providers.

The infrastructure providers we use are Cloudflare, which serves this website, delivers the contact form and its emails and stores the technical record of linking attempts, Amazon Web Services for the backend and key management, Grafana for monitoring, Plausible for site analytics, and Google Workspace for the contact-form spreadsheet.

We are not responsible for those services, their availability or their decisions. Their terms apply to your use of them, and we cannot change or waive those terms.

15. libID, open source, and running it yourself

handles.link is one bridge built on libID, an open protocol. libID is published as open source under a dual MIT and Apache-2.0 licence, in the libid-org organisation on GitHub, and in the standard public package registries.

Nothing in these terms restricts what that licence permits. You may run your own gateway or your own bridge under that licence. If you do, these terms do not govern it: your rights and obligations come from the licence and from libID's own documentation, and we are not responsible for a bridge or a gateway we do not operate.

16. Intellectual property

The handles.link name, logo and site design belong to us. Nothing in these terms gives you a right to use them, except to refer to the service by name accurately.

The software is covered by section 15.

Your handle is not licensed to you by us, because it is not ours to license. See section 7.

17. Privacy

How we handle data is set out in our Privacy Policy, published at handles.link. In short: what we receive when you link a handle is almost nothing, because the proof is assembled in your browser and goes from there to the blockchain. The only piece that reaches a server of ours is a one-time sign-in code, which that server neither uses nor keeps. What goes to the blockchain is a fingerprint of your account and a fingerprint of your handle. We hold one database, a copy of public blockchain events kept so the site can show them back to you. We do not record who looks up which handle, except that a failed request is logged with its error, and that log can contain the handle that was looked up but no IP address and no cookie. Site analytics are provided by Plausible, which uses no cookies. The linking page also keeps a technical record of each attempt, which can include the text of an error, for three months.

What becomes findable as a result of using the service is described in section 8.

18. Suspension, availability and termination

What we can do is narrow, and this section states it exactly rather than reserving rights we do not have.

We can stop operating the handles.link interface, and stop accepting new links through it, at any time and without notice.

We can stop operating our gateway, or decline to serve a particular resolution request through it. This does not remove a handle and does not stop anyone else from resolving it: existing handles live on public blockchains, and anyone can run their own gateway or bridge.

You can stop using the service at any time. Doing so does not remove your handle, for the reasons given in section 8.

We cannot alter, suspend, reassign or remove a handle that already exists. Only the platform a handle comes from can act, and it acts on the account rather than on the handle.

If we decide to stop operating the handles.link interface altogether, we will say so at least thirty days beforehand wherever that is practical.

19. Disclaimers

The service is provided as it is and as it is available, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely or error-free, or that a handle will resolve at any given moment.

We do not verify who is behind a handle beyond the proof of platform-account control described in section 7. A handle tells you which platform account controls it. It does not tell you that the person is who they claim to be, and it is not an endorsement or a guarantee by us.

20. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of or connected with these terms is limited to the greater of two amounts: the fees we received from you in the twelve months before the claim arose, and one hundred United States dollars.

To the maximum extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss of funds from a transaction you authorised; for loss caused by a blockchain network, a supported platform, a wallet or any other third-party service; for loss caused by someone else gaining control of your platform account; or for indirect or consequential loss of any kind.

21. Indemnity

You are responsible for your own use of the service. If somebody brings a claim against us because you used handles.link unlawfully, in breach of section 10, or in breach of the terms of a supported platform, you will cover what that claim costs us. This does not apply to anything caused by us.

22. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. The current version is always the one published at handles.link, with the date it took effect.

There are no accounts and no mailing list, so we have no way to write to you about a change. For a change that materially affects what you pay, what becomes findable or public, or what we can and cannot do, a notice appears in the interface where you link, which is the one place everyone who uses the service passes through.

23. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates as applied in the Emirate of Dubai, and the courts of Dubai have jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of them.

Nothing here takes away a right you have under the law of the country you live in, where that law says the right cannot be taken away.

24. Sanctions and restricted jurisdictions

You may not use handles.link if you are, or are acting for, a person subject to applicable sanctions, or if you are in a jurisdiction where using the service would be unlawful.

We do not screen users. This is a condition of use that you are asked to observe.