Introduction

TIP (tagwise identity protocol) resolves a short @tag to a Solana wallet address, so paying someone means sending to @daniel instead of copying and checking a 44-character base58 address. A tag is registered once by its owner and then resolves the same way everywhere: through the public API, through the SDK, or directly from the chain.

Mental model

The Solana program is the source of truth: it owns registration, ownership, and the wallet a tag currently points to. Postgres is a fast mirror of that on-chain state, kept in sync by an indexer watching the program for account changes. Redis is a fast cache in front of the mirror, invalidated the moment the mirror changes. Every one of these layers can be bypassed: if the API, the mirror, or the cache is unavailable, a tag can still be resolved by reading the Solana account directly, because the program, not the service, is authoritative.