Substrate's SS58 address registry was archived in April; a community fork now takes requests
Victoria Shinder2 min readThe registry that Polkadot SDK and Substrate-based networks use to claim their SS58 address prefix has been archived, and a community continuation was announced on the Polkadot forum on 4 October.
What SS58 is. Substrate chains encode account addresses in the SS58 format, and a numeric prefix in each address identifies which network it belongs to. So that two networks do not end up with the same prefix, and wallets display addresses correctly, prefixes have been registered in a shared list maintained by Parity, paritytech/ss58-registry, from which wallets and libraries read.
What changed. GitHub shows the repository as archived, with its last code push on 13 April 2026; the forum post gives 16 April as the archive date. An archived repository is read-only, so new networks currently have no place to register a prefix. The post's author, MADAR Network, says it ran into this while trying to register its own.
The continuation. MADAR has forked the registry and set up a site where developers can search prefixes, check availability with suggestions for the nearest free values, convert addresses between prefixes, and request a new prefix through a public GitHub issue. It says all 149 original entries are kept unchanged and credited under the Apache-2.0 licence, and that registry.json keeps the upstream format so existing tooling can read it as a drop-in. MADAR says it will hand everything over if Parity or the Polkadot Fellowship designates an official successor. The fork was created on 4 October and, at the time of writing, the post had no replies.
What it means
A registry is only useful if everyone agrees it is the registry. A continuation run by one network solves the immediate gap for new chains, but wallet and library maintainers decide whether its entries count, and without a designated successor two lists can drift apart. The open question for the ecosystem is who owns this small piece of shared infrastructure now that its original maintainer has stepped away.