Create an alias

See Aliases for what an alias is and the automatic self-alias spoof guard that mailbox create already gives you. This page covers the sithbit alias create command.

Creating an alias

sithbit alias create <alias> [--keypair <keypair>] [--skip-preflight]

For example:

sithbit alias create john_doe

This registers john_doe as an alias pointing at the address of the signing keypair (defaulting to your configured default keypair — see CLI Quickstart).

Registration fee

Registering a name pays a claim fee to the postoffice on top of the account rent, and the fee is length-tiered: names of 5 or more characters pay the flat fee (0.01 SOL default), while 1–4 character names carry a scarcity premium — by default 10 SOL (1 char), 1 SOL (2), 0.1 SOL (3), and 0.05 SOL (4). See Economics for the schedule, its caps, and how the postmaster tunes it.

Before submitting, the command prints what the run will pay — one line per premium short name plus a total, so a premium price is never charged silently:

Premium short name 'ab' (2 chars): 1000000000 lamports
Total registration fees: 1010000000 lamports

When the signing wallet is the postmaster delegate the preview prints Registration fee: waived (delegate reservation) instead — reservations are fee-free at every length (see Reserve aliases in bulk).

Note: sithbit mailbox create already registers your wallet’s own address as a self-alias automatically — a spoof guard, since an unclaimed address string could otherwise be registered as someone else’s alias and intercept your mail (see Aliases). Use alias create for additional friendly names beyond that automatic one.

To register many names at once (e.g. the postoffice delegate reserving names for resale), see Reserve aliases in bulk.

Allowed characters

Alias names are validated at registration — both client-side and by the on-chain program, so the rules hold even for hand-rolled transactions:

• Lowercase ASCII letters, digits, and the separators ., _, - (uppercase input is accepted and lowercased before storage and PDA derivation).
• Must start and end with a letter or digit.
• No consecutive dots.
• At most 64 bytes.

Non-ASCII names are refused outright: this shuts out homoglyph (e.g. Cyrillic а), zero-width, and Unicode-normalization look-alike spoofing.