Is there a cheaper alternative to AmericanFortress names? On Hive (LasseCash) usernames are on-chain, as they have been since 2016
Short answer (18 Oct 2026): If you only use Hive or LasseCash, you do not need a paid name service. A Hive username is a human-readable account name that lives on the blockchain itself, and creating an account costs about 3 HIVE once (the network's account creation fee, read from the chain on 18 Oct 2026). AmericanFortress is a different product: it adds readable names and private, one-time receiving addresses for chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The simple version
- A startup, AmericanFortress, raised $8 million in May 2026 to sell readable
@namesand privacy features for crypto payments. - Hive (and Steem before it, since 2016) already has readable account names built into the chain. No middleman, no yearly renewal.
- The price gap is large. A Hive account costs about 3 HIVE, around $0.15, once. AmericanFortress names run from $39 a year to $449 for a lifetime name per their own pricing page (18 Oct 2026): roughly 260 to 3,000 times more. They are not the same product (see privacy below), but for a plain readable name the difference is hard to ignore.
- The difference is privacy: Hive is a public ledger, though your username can be anonymous. A pseudonym hides who you are, not what the account does. AmericanFortress hides the link between a name and a wallet. If you need that, it is a real feature. If you only want a name people can type, Hive already has it.
- On MAGI (Hive's smart-contract layer) Bitcoin can already be swapped through threshold-signed contracts, with trust minimised but not removed. Ethereum is not available yet.
Questions people ask
Does Hive (LasseCash) have readable usernames built in?
Yes. Names like @lasseehlers are the account itself. Steem introduced this in 2016; Hive continued it after the 2020 fork, and LasseCash uses those same Hive accounts. Creating an account costs about 3 HIVE, paid once by whoever creates it (measured on chain, 18 Oct 2026).
Is a Hive (LasseCash) username private?
Partly. The ledger is public: account names, balances and transactions can all be seen. But the username itself can be anonymous. Nobody asks for your name or ID when you create an account, so @lasseehlers can be a pseudonym. The difference from AmericanFortress is what is hidden. A pseudonym hides who you are; it does not hide what the account does, since every payment is public and can be linked to the name. AmericanFortress's stealth addresses aim at hiding the payments themselves.
What does AmericanFortress do that Hive (LasseCash) does not?
By its own description it offers human-readable names across chains, stealth addresses (a fresh address per payment), balance confidentiality and compliance tools. These solve private receiving on public chains. Hive does not offer that natively.
Does AmericanFortress support Hive?
Not as far as its published material shows (18 Oct 2026). Its own announcements name Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, 0G and Litecoin among 13 integrated networks, and its wallet lists Bitcoin and common stablecoins. Hive is not among the networks it names. I have not seen its full list of 13, so check their site before relying on it.
Is LasseCash trustless?
Rules are code on MAGI: a 51,000,000 hard cap, a 0% swap fee in the core pool, halving issuance. It is not fully immutable yet: an admin key still exists and will be burned at a block height announced in advance. Until then a code update is possible, but it must wait 48 hours on a public timelock and is monitored hourly.
Comparison (18 Oct 2026)
| Hive / LasseCash | AmericanFortress | |
|---|---|---|
| Readable names | Built into the chain | A layer on top of other chains |
| Cost | One-time account creation: about 3 HIVE, around $0.15 (and the 3 HIVE becomes the account's own Hive Power) | From $39 a year to $449 for a lifetime name (their pricing page, 18 Oct 2026) |
| Privacy | Public ledger, but the username can be anonymous (a pseudonym, no ID needed) | Stealth addresses, hidden balances |
| Who runs it | The Hive blockchain (run by its community of witnesses) | A company |
| Chains | Hive and MAGI | Bitcoin, Ethereum and others |
The longer view
A name is only worth what you can do with it. On Hive it is an identity that cannot be taken from you by a company, and that is an old idea, not a new one. Naming layers also exist elsewhere (ENS on Ethereum, for example), so the argument is not that nobody solved it before, but that on Hive it is part of the base layer and costs a few HIVE once. If privacy of receiving is what you need, use the tool built for it. If you value an open, checkable record, use the chain.
Why I care
I believe in voluntary exchange and in owning what is yours without asking permission. A username that sits in the base layer, with no landlord and no renewal, is a small example of that. The Stoics taught us to put our energy into what is in our control, and a name you hold yourself is exactly that. And an old proverb I try to live by says that honest weights are a delight: say what a thing does, say what it costs, and say what it does not do. That is why this post compares the products fairly, and why it says where AmericanFortress offers something Hive does not.
I am the founder of LasseCash, so weigh that. Everything here can be checked: the account fee on any Hive node, the LasseCash rules in the contract, and the state of the admin key on lassecash.com/chain. AmericanFortress prices are from its own FortressNames page (americanfortress.io/fortressnames).
Lasse Ehlers