The single biggest advantage of an XRI (i-name) is that it is a single identifier which can be used for many different services. There is no more need for separate e-mail-, website-, skype- and other addresses and for dozens of different username/login combinations to log in to different sites.

Technically speaking, XRIs have a number of features that make them attractive:

• URI- and IRI-compatibility: XRIs can be used wherever URIs or IRIs are called for.
• Cross-references: An XRI can contain another XRI (or a URI), to any level of nesting. This enables the construction of structured, "tagged" identifiers that enable identifier sharing across domains the same way XML enables data sharing across domains.
• Global context symbols: These are single-character symbols (=, @, +, $, or !) that provide a simple, human-friendly way to indicate the global context of an i-name or i-number. These are not required, but may be used within communities of interest that agree on their meaning and how they are resolved.
• Peer-to-peer addressing: XRI syntax supports the ability for any two network nodes to assign each other XRIs and perform cross-resolution. That is, a top-level namespace authority can be referred to by names assigned by other parties. This aids in federating namespaces between organizations or communities of interest.
• Decentralization: XRIs can be rooted in either centralized addressing systems (e.g., IP addresses or DNS domain names) or private/decentralized root authorities.
• Delegation: Namespaces can be delegated to other namespace authorities.
• Federation: Namespaces defined separately at any level can be joined together in a hierarchical or polyarchical fashion, and made visible and resolvable.
• Persistence: The ability to express the intent that parts (or all) of an XRI are permanent identifiers that will never be reassigned.
• Human-friendly and machine-friendly formats: XRI provides syntax both for identifiers that can be created and understood by humans easily, and those that are optimized for machine structuring/parsing.
• Simple, extensible resolution: XRI offers a lightweight resolution scheme using HTTP and simple XML documents.
• Trusted resolution: the XRI resolution protocol includes a trusted version that uses SAML assertions.
• Multiple resolution options: XRI resolution can be independent of DNS.
• Fully internationalizable: leveraging Unicode and IRI specifications.
• Transport independent: XRIs are not bound to any specific transport protocols or mechanism.