Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Tieshun Roquerre: Namebase – Decentralizing DNS and Certificate Authorities

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

Namebase is a top-level domain (TLD) name registrar that operates on the Handshake blockchain. It creates an ecosystem of TLDs that may be bought and sold using an on-chain auction mechanism. It takes a different approach to other decentralized domain name systems as Namebase is compatible with the ICANN namespace, the organization governs domain names globally. Users may register TLDs that don't yet exist in the ICANN namespace, like .epicenter or .ethereum, for example, creating the opportunity for new niche domain registrars to emerge. Tieshun Roquerre, CEO of Namebase, joins us to discuss his vision for Namebase and his ambitious goal to decentralize ICANN.Topics covered in this episode:Tieshun's background and how he got into cryptoWhy and how Namebase was created and its relationship to HandshakeDomain name systems on blockchainThe history of ICANN and how it functionsDomain name censorship and security issues surrounding certificate authoritiesHow are they preparing for the inevitable fork between ICANN and HandshakeNamebase and Handshake improve on DNS and certificate authoritiesNamebase's business model and roadmapEpisode links: NamebaseHandshakeNamebase on TwitterTieshun on TwitterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/380

This is Epicenter, episode 380 with guest, Tishin Roguer. Hi, I'm Sebastian Quirio, and you're listening to Epicenter, the podcast where we interview crypto founders, builders, and thought leaders. On this show, we dive deep to learn how things work at a technical level, and we fly high to understand visionary concepts and long-term trends. If you like Epicenter, the best way to support us is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And if you're on a Mac or iOS device, the easiest way to do that is to go to epicenter. Dot rocks slash Apple. And if you're new to the show, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Today our guest is Tishin Roguer. He's the CEO of Namebase. Namebase is a top-level

domain name registrar that operates on the handshake blockchain. It allows people to register top-level domains like dot epicenter, for example. Traditionally, this is a role which has been held by ICANN. It's an international organization which governs the world's TLDs. Well, namebase wants to bring more decentralization to this existing system. Instead of creating an entirely new namespace, which is the case for ENS and unstoppable domains, they have an augmentative approach. So in namebase, one can register TLDs that aren't already captured by the ICAN system. So you couldn't take over dot com or dot I.O, but you could register dot kittens. And buying TLDs happens in an on-chain auction instead of a long and expensive application process that only

benefits ICAN. Another interesting benefit of using namebase is that it makes certificate authorities obsolete since the handshake blockchain acts as a signing authority for every request. So it's actually more secure than what we already have. When you buy a TLD on Namebase, you own that TLD and you can build a business around it. So for example, if you're into electronic music, you could acquire the Dot DJTLD and build a register company that targets musicians. Essentially, NameBase wants to decentralize ICAN by making available the platform that enables decentralized governance of TLDs. Politically, I think this is really hard. to achieve since the size of the domain name market is probably in the hundreds of billions of

dollars per year. And there are huge geopolitical implications around TLDs, specifically country TLDs. But I think it's a really noble goal, given the enormous amount of power that's held by ICANN. And of course, there's just so much untapped value in this market, since there are literally an infinite number of TLDs that are currently not offered in the ICANN system. So with that, here's our conversation with Tishin Roguer. We're here with Tyschen Roguerre. He is the CEO of Namebase, and Namebase is building a decentralized name system for the internet. We use name systems pretty much every day when you type a domain name into your browser.

You're using the DNS system, and that translates that domain name into an IP address. And domain names are organized and controlled by this organization called ICAN, which we'll get into during. in the interview, but namebase is trying to build a decentralized version of that. So thanks for joining us today. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Great. So yeah, tell us a little bit about your background and what you were doing before crypto and why you felt this was a problem that you wanted to spend your time working on solving. Yeah, I was always super interested in startups when I was younger in high school. So actually when I was 16, I did end up leaving high school. I go over to Silicon Valley and I started working at a company called T Spring.

They're this tech startup and I worked there as an engineer for about a year, actually, when I was 16. And then from there, instead of returning back to high school, I ended up starting a company. It was a recruiting startup. Ended up actually shutting it down eventually. But I started this company called Strong Intro. And we actually ended up going through Y Combinator, which is the startup accelerator. That's fairly well known if you're into startups.

They funded Reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, DoorDash, a bunch of different tech companies. So I was super lucky and was able to go through that program for my company. And then about a year into that, realized that I wanted to go to school, be closer to family. So I ended up actually applying MIT, got in and studied math and computer science at MIT for about two years before I met my co-founder, Anthony. And, you know, Anthony was also CS major, really, really brilliant, and we just started working together on different side projects, exploring crypto at a certain point. We kind of cut that bug back in 2018. And then, you know, in that kind of like random search, we found Handshake as a protocol. And that's the protocol that NameBase builds on top of.

That's the decentralized CNS protocol that we're building on top of. And given that Anthony and I are both engineers, we kind of just fell in love with it just because of the, technical improvements that Handshake makes to the existing DNS system. You know, without getting too much into it, it's fairly duct taped together in terms of how DNS works today. And Handshake just improved along, you know, security and ownership and censorship resistance. And as engineers, we both really like that. And then also just given my experience in startups before, I also really liked a lot of the

mechanics that were built into the protocol to enable adoption. And we kind of saw this potential for Handshake to become this. naming system that the internet could rely on in a really robust way. And we wanted to help enable adoption for it, which is why we ended up starting name base. So was name base the like first foray that you had into crypto? Or were you, what was some of the side projects you were working on other than name base? Yeah.

We were, oh man, this is so long ago that I'm probably going to be butchering any of the specific ideas. I think at one point we were looking at different wallets. I feel like in 2018, everyone was like, oh yeah, like the wallets are going to be like the browser for crypto and all that. So we're looking at, you know, different wallace. We're looking at like blockchain and healthcare ideas. Actually, like, shadowed a bunch of doctors, talked to them.

Had this one founder who is like, whatever you do, he called me up and he was like, whatever you do, do not go into healthcare. So many startup founders, even really successful ones, they're like, okay, like, you know, did this. Now I want to go and solve healthcare. and they just got to get burned out a few years later. So that was really funny. But for a handshake, we ended up getting really, really excited.

We were most excited about that just because the benefits of it were so concrete. And we also kind of saw this trend on the internet of basically the existing Web 2.0 internet getting more consolidated and centralized and censored over time. And this was back in 2018 when basically no one except for like cyberpunks and maybe like journalists. and a few techies cared about the issue. And then now it's something that, you know, everyone's talking about. So, you know, that thesis actually kind of started to prove itself out in the last few months, which has been really interesting.

But those are some of the older ideas. So it's not the first time people have tried to do this sort of solve this naming problem in the blockchain space. Like, you know, the earliest one is probably like name coin. And that's like, that's like basically, you know, You could even call that like the first alt coin. And it's like, you know, Satoshi talked about name coin. What was wrong with some of these earlier approaches and why is now the time for this to be happening?

Yeah, that's a great question. And you're totally right there. I've been a ton of predecessors in the naming space that Hancho's been able to take inspiration from. And actually, you know, if you go on to Bitcoin talk, you can see Satoshi even specced out. I think it was like the second use case after like cryptocurrency was he was like, oh, like bit DNS. Like we should have DNS on the blockchain. So this is something that has been kind of like a dream for a while. And, you know, the analogy is, you know, before Bitcoin, there are numerous attempts at digital currencies, right?

Like big gold and all these other ones that basically didn't have the right ingredients to succeed. And I would say the ingredients are both the technology and the mechanics themselves and also the color. moment for people to actually care about the technology. So I'll first talk about the technology first. So just looking at name coin as an example. For any naming system, the distribution of names is really, really important to get right. And it's even more important than the distribution of a fungible token like Bitcoin, for example, because a fungible token is as easily, you know, it's transferable, whereas names are

non-fungible. And what can happen if you get a distribution that's not, you know, spread out is you have, you know, early adopters that can go and claim up a ton of the namespace, of the available namespace, and they basically make it impossible for the network effect to kick in for people to adopt it because there's no incentive for new members to come in and claim their own, you know, piece of digital land and go in, uh, enable further adoption. So the challenge with NamePoint is that the distribution mechanics were not ideal. The names were one available on a first come first serve basis, and there were also priced at a flat fee that basically just kind of like went down over time.

And so what, and it was a very cheap flat fee. And so what you got was you have these early adopters that were able to just buy up all the good names. And what that creates is this dynamic where it's, you know, newer adopters, right? You're six months in. they're not going to go and adopt the namespace because all of the early adopters have already gone the names at such a cheap price that they're not going to sell and they're just whaling, you know, they want to get a payday. And that basically cripples the ecosystem. And so the thing that Handshake did that when we first, you know, discovered it and we're reading the white paper, we really liked that Handshake created mechanics that would mitigate this. They did two things here.

actually did it more than two things but the two main things were one they rolled out the names over the course of the first year so that on day one you could only register a small portion of the names and each week a new portion of the namespace became available for registration and that just enabled the early adopters that prevented the early adopters from being able to buy up all of the namespace without any competition and then on top of that and so Instead of selling names for a flat fee, they created this auction system that basically enables a true market price to be discovered for the name. So for example, if you were bidding on Sunny and you bid a thousand H&S and I bid 500

H&S, you would actually win Sunny and you would pay 500 H&S, the second highest bid price, to own the name. And actually interestingly enough, you would pay it not to some sort of like can't check foundation or to name base or anything like that, it's actually burned on chain, creating a deflationary effect. But effectively, those two mechanics, the slow rollout and the auction mechanism made it so that there's a much greater distribution of names on Handshake than some of the predecessors like Namecoin. So I'm curious if you, because you were talking about like how this compares to other name systems, I suppose you were talking about like the existing

domain name system and ICAN and the way that that was rolled out. Do you think that this particularly was an issue with ICAN? I mean, of course, with like tldees like dot com, et cetera, there's like a lot of those domain names, the very good ones were bought up early on. But what has happened in the last couple of years is we've seen like an explosion in other TLDs that has effectively opened up the namespace now into exponentially more domain names. do you feel that this remains an issue with the existing ICAN system? And yeah, what are your thoughts on how that has actually played out? Yeah, great question.

So you're talking about the distribution problem, right? Yeah, sorry, that's right. Yeah, the distribution problem. And to be clear, the distribution of NAME space, that's only relevant to, that's the only a relevant problem to new, like, startup naming systems. like NamePoint or ENS or Handshake, the ICAN DNS system as it is actually has a fairly good distribution and that is more so due to path dependency.

So when the DNS first came out, it was very non-commercialized and it was that way for a long time. And it was actually, it wasn't a few years into the existence of it that you actually had to start paying for domain names. So actually when DNS first came out, you could register dot coms of anyone get dot coms for free because basically just like hobbyists and researchers. So it was actually very non-commercial in nature. And so there wasn't really this land rush issue that exists today because now people know that domain names are incredibly valuable. You know, in the secondary marketplace, there's about a billion dollars worth of domain names turning over every year. And that's just trading hands in the secondary marketplace. And then the value of domain names

on their own, on top of just like the turnover is really the tens of billions. And so now that people know how valuable the namespace is, you kind of have this additional challenge of, okay, how do you have the distribution be fair versus the organic adoption that the ICANN system kind of had in its early days, just due to, you know, it's how early it was. Okay. I didn't realize you were talking specifically about the sort of like blockchain namespaces, but yeah, that's interesting. Perhaps it would be interesting to talk a little bit about ICANN as an organization. I think most of our listeners know that ICANN exists, they know the role that it serves.

But let me describe what that organization looks like and what role they actually play in managing the global domain name system. So ICANN is a super interesting organization because it actually started out as really this super awesome organization is all these. just like internet OGs, that really, you know, all the people who were very early pioneers of the internet, they're all kind of these like cyberpunks, they're all really into decentralization. You know, they had all these manifestos and it's very philosophically driven. ICANN over time has effectively suffered from the same problem that suffers, you know, any centralized organization that presides over a very valuable resource, which is kind of fall into, you know, corruption and coroner.

And basically the role that ICAN plays is they determine who gets what TLD. So each TLD is actually owned by a different company or jurisdiction or country even. And so, for example, dot com is owned by Veracine, which is a for-profit company. And they basically make money off of every dot com that you buy. You're actually just renting from Veracine. You know, dot I.O is owned by the Indian Ocean. And so ICAN is an organization that controls who gets what TLD. The challenge is that over time has become worse and worse.

If you go and look up the ICAN glass store, you can kind of read about how bad the management is. And then also most recently there's a huge fiasco with dot org, which is meant to be, you know, like for nonprofits and different organizations. That was actually managed by a nonprofit internet organization. and then basically in this backdoor deal, the former ICANCEO almost successfully purchased.org through a private equity fund. And it was something that was like it wasn't like an open auction or anything like that. It was just like really sneakily done. And then there's basically a huge uprising and the California Attorney General had to step in and say,

hey, I can, you can't do this. And then they were able to actually prevent the sale of dot org to this private equity fund. that was controlled by the former ICANN CEO. So that just kind of illustrates, you know, kind of some of the problems that you'll see with governance here, which, you know, really is something that's inherent to any centralized system over time. That's like the, you know, democracy versus single point of failure,

debate that always happens in governments. But that's something, that's the dynamic that plays out with ICANN. One of the concerns I always had a little bit with handshake was this notion that I hear you on all these things. that like, you know, I can. It has some, like, governance issues and stuff. But, like, the way I see it is it's on the internet. If we're moving towards the Dweb, there's all, there's so many, like, things to go do.

Like, so many giants to slay. Like, the amount of control that entities like Google have over, like, all of the internet infrastructure and stuff is just, like, out of all these giants to go slay, is ICANN really the one that, like, we should be spent dedicating this much of our effort towards? at the end of the day, they are a nonprofit and do seem to have the best interests of the internet at heart, at least relatively to maybe some of the other entities that serve as risks to the open internet. And so, like, for me, what I see handshake is as really as like a technical problem that

solves a security issue with DNS, where it's like, okay, DNS has all these security issues that I think we can get into in a bit. But why not go to ICANN? like, hey, you are well aware of all these security issues with the internet, like, DNS system. Why not convince them, like, hey, a blockchain solution is what will solve all their problems? Yeah, that's a great question. And on that strategy specifically, Handshake is very much in the boat of, so for example, ENS, you know, we know the NS team fairly well.

We talk with them. We like them. And their philosophy is very much, okay, let's. Let's work within the existing ICAN system and try to use blockchain domain names and get them adopted by ICANN. And Handshakes velocity is very much like that's like Uber going to the taxi cabs and trying to convince the taxi cab industry to adopt Uber. So ICAN really has no incentive to go and adopt a blockchain-based DNS system. Effectively, in order for them to do that, they would have to be willing to give up their power. source of making money. I can has made hundreds of millions of dollars from the TLD application fee

actually in addition to the individuals that maybe have been able to profit like the former ICANN CEO and so they actually have no incentives to go and adopt this and to give up control and then you also touch on a really good point which is the difference between decentralizing governance and decentralizing the underlying technical system itself and they're fairly a really Because if you don't have decentralized governance, then you still have a centralized system in many regards, right? If you have a single organization that can take down domains, then it's still centralized, you know, putting it onto a blockchain doesn't really do much. So you kind of need both. And we talked about the decentralizing governance.

But the thing that for me is what is most exciting about Handshake is decentralizing DNS at the technology level. And this is something, and this is why, like, you know, for example, when we first discovered at Handshake, we weren't even aware. of all the issues with ICANN. Because you're right, they're kind of behind the scenes. Most people don't think about them. And so that wasn't even the thing that got us excited. The thing that's really exciting about Handshake is that it actually can enable a new paradigm of applications that previously were not possible because of how DNS is constructed.

Effectively, the main problem that Handshake solves is it's actually a security problem. It's solving the certificate authority issue that exists in the... DNS today which is getting a little technical here but you know you can think of DNS as this tree of trust at the top you have ICANN and then you have the TLD owners like Farisine etc and then you have the individual domain you know renters right every time you get a domain name you're going through the registrar and then you're able to you know rent it from the registrar you know for a year at a time or more and it's actually fairly decentralized except

the higher up you go in the tree, it's not decentralized. It becomes more centralized as you go to the top. And there's an issue with security because the root of trust is basically a set of private keys that's locked in a safe that needs to be updated every three months. And actually the security practices for that are, there are a lot of issues with it. And because of that, you also need to rely on these third parties called certificate authorities, which is like your computer trusts thousands of certificate authorities, every time you're visiting a website and the security model is that every one of those

certificate authorities has to be trustworthy in order for your internet connection to be secure. And even a single one, and the CA's are going to be based in Hong Kong and all these other jurisdictions. So it's not just CA is based in the US, but basically if a single one is compromised, then your traffic is compromised. And effectively what Handshake does, that's so interesting, is it shifts the root of trust from this certificate authority-based model to a blockchain. base model and it makes the security much more robust for the DNS.

And then on top of that, it also makes the domain names, one, truly ownable. So now you actually have a private key that controls your domain name that gives you the right to own it versus just being able to rent the name. And also the domain names are tamper resistant and censorship resistant. So there's all those technical improvements that, and I haven't talked about what that enables, But it's those fundamental technical improvements that are really exciting about Handshake. And so we were just talking about the governance just because that's kind of the first piece that you usually want to talk about.

But it's really the technology itself. That is the most exciting. You know, you mentioned this whole like certificate authority stuff. So does Handshake have a solution for that? Like, you know, this whole like certificate authority and SSL stuff is kind of separate from DNS. So is it, and is it a backwards compatible replacement with SSL, if so, or? Is it like a have to be replaced, like a complete replacement? So like I wouldn't be using HTTP anymore.

I'd be having to create something new. Yeah, that's a great question. And yeah, it is, it is backwards compatible. It is still HTTP. And it's also really important to clarify that. Technically, it's like, oh, SSL and DNS are separate protocols. But in effect, they are completely reliant on each other. you need DNS to have a secure route of trust in order for your SSL to work.

And so they're actually intertwined. And basically what Handshik does, and just to give the listeners a bit more context on how this works, to kind of clarify it, when you go and visit a website in your browser, let's say you visit namebase.io. Your computer has never visited namebase.com before. You don't know who Namebase.com is. It could be, you know, it could be us, it could be someone else running it. Your computer doesn't know.

It's just like on the internet. And your computer is trying to establish a secure connection to name-based.a-o. The issue is that normally if you have an HTTP connection, so if you have an unsecured connection, you have no way of knowing whether Namebase.com, the Namebase.com that you think you're connecting to is actually Namebase.com. Because every time you go and try to go visit a website, your internet is basically making, your network request is making numerous hops, you know, across the world even, maybe across different countries.

And then it's coming back and saying, oh yeah, like I found namebased.com, now I'm visiting in the website. So you have this issue where you can't actually trust that you're visiting the website that you think you're visiting. And what certificate authorities, what HDPS does is it basically relies on a trusted third party, in this case the CA, to sign basically a public key that NameBase. That A.O. presents and says, hey, NameBased.O. is using this public key, and they're using this to encrypt their communications with me. And I can check that this public key is correct

against the certificate authority list that my computer already trust. So your computer shifts with the list of trusted third parties. That's basically able to verify, oh, when I'm going to Namebase.io, this is the correct namebased.com. And so you shift the trust. trust from, you know, just like trusting anyone on the internet to trusting a set of, you know, third parties that are pre-installed on your computer. And this is the security model of today. And what Handshake does is instead of having to have a set of trusted third parties pre-shifted with their computer, you actually just rely on the blockchain for those certificates that

NAMBase.O is using. So the specific model is NAMBase.I.O generates a public key. I'm calling it a public key, it's actually called a TLSA cert. So there's some technical jargon here. But in effect, it's basically a public key that NAM-Baseda-O is using to encrypt communications. And Namedase-Dal-O now pins that public key to its name on the blockchain. And this is data that anyone can go and verify, right? You can connect to the blockchain, you can verify that the records are correct.

And so now you have a high degree of confidence that that public key, even though you've never visit a name based adio before, you can verify that that public key is correct, and that is the right public key for name base I.O, which means that when you're communicating to website, as long as they are, you know, using that public key, then you're pretty sure that that website that you're speaking to is name based out of yo. And so that's, that's the, the model that shifts, but it's actually still using the same protocols. It's still HGPS. It's just using the handshake blockchain as the root of trust instead of certificate authorities. So what it does basically essentially is that the blockchain in this case, the handshake blockchain

acts as the DNS registry where domain names and all of like their DNS zones, etc., kind of live or at least their reference there. It also has the certificate key so that you can essentially to verify both things at the same place. So the IP address where the domain name is a website is hosted and also the key that you should be checking against to make sure that your connection is secure. That's pretty clear. And it's interesting. It makes obsolete then the certificate authority model from what I gather, which is a really interesting aspect of this project. I wonder why DNS itself, I mean, why DNS itself, like the DNS server model wouldn't also have this. Like, you know, when you're filling in your DNS zone,

for example, on like, I don't know, Cloudflare or whatever, if you wouldn't have like a DNS entry for your certificate public key and it would make, you know, make obsolete the certificate authority model. Does that even make sense? Yeah, yeah. That's a great question. And so you're right. You're like, okay, what about pinning these names directly onto the domain name?

So the issue is basically, ultimately you eventually need before a blockchain, the only way that you could solve trust is you eventually need some trusted third party that's saying, okay, this is valid. So even if you're not using certificate authorities as a root of trust, you're going to be using the registrar as the root of trust. Yeah, a registrar or something else. And so you have the same problem. It's just where you are shifting that trusted third party.

Is it the CA, is the registrar? But that trusted third party eventually exists, right? It's the same thing with any monetary system. Before Bitcoin and blockchain, you eventually, need some sort of trusted third party. And that was a core issue that Bitcoin was effectively obsolete. And that's the same dynamic that exists with handshank. That's why, you know, Satoshi was like, oh, you know, domain names are like the next thing.

Yeah, that makes sense. In the traditional DNS system, are there, what's the reason that like these root of trust are separate for certificate authorities versus like the DNS system? Is it just a path dependency that like, you know, this is how the system's evolved? Or is there like a reason or is there like a reason or something? like that. Yeah, yeah, that's basically path dependency. You know, when the internet first developed, HDPS wasn't a thing. And, you know, you'll probably remember browsing even 10 years ago, and a lot of websites weren't on HDPS. And even today, a lot of websites aren't on HDPS. So it's just,

it's just a matter of path dependency. The way the internet developed is, you know, they encountered all these problems. And they're like, oh, wow, it's actually stupid easy for people to go. And, you know, it capture all your traffic and scam you and capture all your credit card information and all that. It's like really, you know, you could go into Starbucks, you used to be able to go into Starbucks and just run an extension and it would just give you everyone's Facebook passwords. And basically, eventually people realize it's like, oh, in order to have commerce on the internet, right, in order to have transactions of value on the internet, we need to be able to do this securely. And so that's why, you know, HTTP was invented with the best technology that it had at the time.

But, you know, we've actually been fortunate enough to speak with Ben Surf, who's kind of like the father of Internet. And it was super interesting because we realized that I was, you know, if these designers of the initial early Internet protocols had access to blockchain technologies, you know, the technologies that we had today, they really would have designed it, you know, with these primitives in mind with, you know, using blockchain, using these technologies. But they just weren't available at the time. So, you know, the best way of solving trust, you know, until 10 years ago was by having a trusted third party at some point in the funnel. Yeah. And I mean, you mentioned something there that I think is important to remember that HGPS emerged in the 90s as a means to secure credit card information.

And I think, I remember correctly that it was built at least in some cooperation with, with like the visas and the master cards and the banking partners. sort of a, there would have been no buy-in from payment service providers and credit card companies had there not been some kind of secure layer because it was way too risky. Someone might correct me on that, but I think that's my, I think my internet history is right there. So one of the things that I'd like to talk about here, maybe we just shift gears a little bit and talk about the model, the handshake model, because it's quite unique. I mean, we've been talking a lot about ICANN here. And there's a reason for that. It's because Handshake and Namebase are, you know, they build on top of the existing domain name system.

And this is very different from like other namespaces that we know, like ENS, for example, that has its own name system. Although the use case here is perhaps different. And so many other examples of like products that try to do something similar. So there's unstoppable domains is one. Star Name, the Iov team is also working on a domain name system. you know, trying to build their own kind of like namespace and that don't overlap with ICAN. Can you explain how you've done this? Like what, what exactly does it mean to sit on top of ICAN and what does it mean for like

the user who's using namebase? You point out a very good distinction, which is handshake is different from a lot of the other blockchain domain projects and that it's actually a blockchain. top-level domain project. So the names that you register on Handshake, they're TLDs themselves. So, for example, NB, it's not, you know, if that's the name on Handshake that we have,

if that's not NB.h-N-H-Ns, it's actually just .NB. You own the domain extension every time you register a name on Handshake. And that was made, you know, backwards compatible by virtually the fact that on Handshake, all of the existing ICANTLDs are blacklist.

So for example, you know, no one can register.com, but you can register non-I-Can TLDs as your own. And so you can think of Handshank as a super set of the existing ICANTLD namespace. And the reason why it targeted that is because it's really this, it goes back to the fundamental, you know, security-oriented goals of Handshik, which is the DNS as it is today in terms of the construction. It's fairly decentralized except at the root. That's where the centralization exists and that's where also the root of trust exists. And so in order to have a secure root of trust for DNS, you need to decentralize the top level namespace.

And so that's why handshake targets that. And it's a very, of course, very ambitious goal. And I can talk about, you know, I think why now is the time for something like this to succeed. But that is a fundamental difference is that it's targeting the domain extensions versus a subdomain at, you know, a middle. up extension. Yeah. Yeah. So let's let's go into why now then. Why? Why? It's not a good time to do this. And I think it's also really important to kind of look to history here, which is, you know,

even for someone like Bitcoin, it required, right, if you think about like when Bitcoin was launched, it was launched in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, right? And that was explicitly referenced, the money printing was referenced, you know, in the first Bitcoin block. And I think that's really important to note because usually for something that's a groundbreaking technology, it's not just the technology itself, but also the cultural moment that's required for it to actually break out. And throughout history, there are numerous examples of people inventing technologies years before it broke out and then someone else I invented it again, but it was the right timing, and that's when it broke out. And that's, I think that's a dynamic that is really

important for handcheck as well. So for context, As I mentioned before, when we started Namebase, our thesis was that the centralization, the consolidation and censorship on the Web 2.0 Internet would continue to get worse over time. And that would create an increasing need for a decentralized Internet. And decentralized DNS is a core part of that decentralized Internet infrastructure. It's actually the entry point. It's a gateway, right? Every time you go onto your web browser, the first thing you type in is a domain name.

So a lot of people aren't really aware of it, but they're actually using the domain name system every day. And so the thesis was that the centralization and censorship would get worse. When we started three years ago, basically no one cared about that issue other than, you know, like cyberpunks and techies and a few journalists and whatnot. And then now, three years later, we're seeing this thesis start to come to fruition, where the issues of censorship have increased over time. You know, just in this last month, it was this lalapalooza of, you know, Trump getting banned. on Twitter, parlor, getting new platformed across the entire internet stack, even by hosting providers like AWS, you have WhatsApp's exodus to signal GME trading halting, and then the Wall Street Betts community getting banned on Discord. So we're starting to see the issues

with the Web 2.0 internet really break out. And then now there's this massive wave towards decentralization. I agree with you. The censorship is the, the, the, the, the, the topic usual, but none of the censorship, or at least not that I think of, involves domain names. Are there examples where domain names have been censored? I mean, other than FBI takedowns for piracy and child porn, I don't really think that very many domain names get censored. Yeah, so actually there are a good number of domain names that get censored. If you think about the usually the, and the people that get censored are initially these fringe users, right? Similar to how, you know, if you think about like Bitcoin, the people that initially

cared about it are fringe users. But basically it's, you know, people that are building these alternative social networks, right? Like Gab has had issues, but their DNS, uh, outside of the US. And that's, that's also a very, you know, in the Western world, it's the types of domain is, I guess, sensor are different, right? It might be like Pirate Pave or, or SciHub, for example, Syhub's, uh, uh, this general resource for reading, uh, scientific journals that a lot of scientists use and they basically have their domain names taken down, you know, every few months. And so they actually, it's funny because there's a system for existing domain name holders to claim certain names on Handshake and SciHub wasn't able to use that system because the domain name that

they had at the time of Genesis was taken away from Alexandria. And so you have resources like that having issues with their domain names. And then actually outside of the U.S., that's where you have a lot of issues with domain names. you know, in China, one and four websites actually get censored. And increasing around the world, we're seeing more and more of that happen. So it's something that, you know, in the U.S. today is like fairly fringe, but actually in the rest of the world is fairly prevalent. And the other aspect of this, that's also important, is that where does that trend point

to, right? And so the reason why I'm pointing out this is that as there is this wave towards the centralization, in order to actually have a Web 3.0 stack, you need. decentralized DNS. And in order for people to actually, you know, recognize that that's important is you need the traditional internet system to basically start failing. And it is a bit of a hedge though. So for example, one of the, a lot of the existing domainers are now really getting into a handshake from the domain of industry. So this guy, Andrew Rosner, he's like the number one dominer. And you know, these people are investors or they're speculators, right? Actually,

a lot of them build applications as well. But, you know, they're investors. And, you know, And for him, he's the number one domainer in the world. And when he discovered Handshake just a year ago, it was something that he considered a toy. He was like, okay, this is kind of fun. You know, people have really attempted these alternative D&S was in the past. I'll just take a look at it. And then now a year in, I was just on a separate podcast with him. Now he sees Handshake as an important hedge to his portfolio because of everything that's happened, you know, on the internet in the past, you know, really month.

You know, past three months leading up to this month. Now he sees this as an important hedge where he's like, oh, wow, this world where the traditional, you know, internet infrastructure just completely fails over or just becomes increasingly hostile is kind of coming into being. And so he kind of sees this as an important hedge there. And so that's, that's a trend that we're looking at, which is, you know, today it's like a pressing issue. It's important. But tomorrow, it'll be a burning issue. And in order to actually create the, you know, decentralized Web 3.0 applications that are starting to become possible to build. now. So that's another aspect that I haven't talked too much about, which is the technology

maturity across the entire stack. But even outside of that is we're starting to see this issue become more pressing. Yeah, actually, another example I do remember is during the Catalonian independence referendum, the Spanish government was actually censoring, taking down, like, the dot-cat, TLD, they were taking down any, like, pro-independence websites. Yeah, exactly. It's usually it's the, it's actually the first tool that like, you know, any censoring body or authoritarian regime uses because it's so effective. In Turkey, Erdogan, at one point, you know, blocked Twitter.com. And interestingly enough, a lot of these countries, they only block things at the DNS level

because it's so effective. Once you have, there's a great article by Slate StarCodex, which is beware of trivial inconveniences, which is if you make it trivially inconvenient to access, the website of the domain system, what happens isn't that, you know, everyone just goes and works around it. It's just people kind of settle for that. And they just now no longer access that resource. And so, yeah, it is, it is used quite heavily around the world as a tool for a sensory. The Spanish government was only able to block the dot-cat TLD because that's what they owned. And like we talked about, so Handshake is trying to basically only deal with it at the

root zone level. And you mentioned that like current D&S, is already pretty decentralized beyond the root zone. So what do you mean by that? Like, what do you mean by it's currently decentralized beyond the root zone? Yeah. So what I mean by that is that each TLD is controlled or managed by different, you know, for-profit company or government. And so, you know, dot com is owned by Veracine, as I mentioned.

Dot A.O by Indian Ocean. dot cat by the you know the kind of colonial government and that that is what I mean by its decentralized is that there's already a lot of stakeholders that at the root rely on the ICANN and in that kind of government example so it's actually not the case that the government could only censor dot cat

they probably just did that to balk explicitly dot cat but the way that DNS works is that And the way that you do DNS filtering is that you actually go to the ISPs because usually the ISPs are running your public DNS resolvers. And just to kind of make that concrete, every time you go and visit a website, so let's say you're trying to go to Namebase.A.O. Your computer is trying to find the IP address for Namebase.A.O. And it does that by making a request to a public DNS resolver that's usually, you know, like hard-coded into your network route air. So it's usually your ISP. and it makes a request to that ISP and says, hey, what is the IP address of Namebase.O?

And then the ISP returns it. The ISP behind the scenes is making a request to the root servers, and then from there, there's actually a chain. It goes from the root servers to, oh, okay, dot com is here, go to dot-com, okay, where's. NameBase, goes to that name server, okay, what's name-based is IOS, IP address, and it follows that chain. but that is how your computer gets the IP address of a domain name. Which is why a couple of years ago in Turkey, there were these images of like people spray painting, you know, the Google DNS or the open DNS IP addresses on, you know, like walls of the city, the sort of thing.

And that was like an easy way to get around it because the ISPs, okay, they've removed those domain names from, you know, their internal DNS, but they haven't actually blocked traffic to other DNS servers, which would be virtually impossible because anybody can spin up a DNS server and just like mirror, you know, Google's DNS or whatever. I mean, like, yeah, exactly, exactly. And that's also why the governments can actually block any domain name is because you're just at the ISP level, you have them block that domain name request. And then now you've, you've blocked access to any name.

On topic of censorship, I'd like to get down to the, maybe like the market dynamics in the system. So we've, we've talked about the fact that ICAN is. is the governing body that essentially decides who is able to own and register a TLD. And we haven't really talked about like what's happened in the last couple of years is that ICANN has opened up TLD level applications. So that's why in the last 10 years or so, there's been like a thousand new TLDs, you know, like dot Paris or dots whatever, dot sex or dot, you know, all these TLDs that have emerged in the last decade are because ICANN has opened that up. And there's a,

there's a fee to do that. So like, If you want to own a domain, a TLD, you have to apply. It costs like $200,000, yeah, $200,000. And then I can look at that application and they can accept it or deny it. And there's a whole industry around this. So there's a company called Donuts, for example. You guys can look this up. It's like they own a lot of these new TLDs that have emerged in the last, whatever, for 10 years. So Handshake, it decentralizes that governing body. But I think that in a way, it just kind of, moves this monopoly problem that we have in the DNS system, it moves it up a layer to the TLD level. Now, of course, because anybody can register a TLD, it just creates an unlimited

amount of TLD. There's a potential for an unlimited amount of TLDs. But for for TLDs that are shelling points, right, like words in the dictionary, for example, you know, Donuts, Inc could go up and like buy up all those TLDs and effectively still we would still have a situation where we're renting domain names and there's a monopoly at that level. So like I'd like for you to address that perhaps. The other thing is that, you know, if because like the domain name industry is monopolized by companies and they're capitalistic and they also exist in jurisdictions, I think that at some point they would also be subject to, we would also end up in a situation where there'd be censorship because, say, a government or some jurisdiction doesn't like this website for some reason,

well, they can just target, you know, the company that owns the TLD and say, okay, you need to now take down this website or implement laws that make it easier for them to do that. So maybe address the two issues. So one is the monopolistic characteristic of DNS, just kind of rising up to the TLD level, and then how we can address the censorship issue? The key here is that the monopoly issue isn't shifted. It's actually just completely blown up. And what I mean by that is because of the fact that you can register any TLD on hand check very, very easily. So for context, when I can actually opened up the TLD application program,

it's called the GTLD program, they enforce a $200,000, $185,000. application fee just to apply to register a new TLD and so you can actually apply and not get it and you're still You know paying $185,000 and then on top of that there's usually an auction so that you know the the cost of the TLD is not just that $185,000 fee as another you know a few hundred thousand dollars to actually go and win it through that auction So one is the the cost of the TLDs is prohibitive so that it's only you know very wealthy companies or you know people starting a big that are able to actually go and register a TLD. So on that level, on the cost level alone, it's actually very not democratized, right? It's only people with a lot of capital.

And then on top of that, the ICAN GTLD program is actually currently closed. So it's expected that they might reopen in the next two to three years. That's what people were saying two to three years ago when we started. It probably will eventually open, but you're still going to have that same dynamic where, you know, it's going to be prohibitively expensive to actually register a new TLD. and that cost is really important because, you know, if you look at Handshake and you say, okay, what if someone like donuts buys up a lot of TLDs? And, you know, I was saying in that regard, Handshake on its own today already has more unique

owners of TLDs than exist in the ICAN system. Over 460,000 TLDs have been registered in the first year of Handshake. And the key here is like, let's say, but let's say it was a single. company that registered all of them, right? So let's say it was a single company that registered all of them. And now you're like, oh, man, this company can just monopolize all these TLDs. I mean, not even all of them, but let's say just like they register like the top 1,000 words in the dictionary, right? Like, yeah, totally. Or whatever, like just the things that people would use. Like, they're not going to use some random string of characters, but they're, you know, they're going to use words.

Totally. So the really important key is that you can just go and register your own TLD on Handshake. So you actually have that choice. And it's also not even expensive to do that. So if you're registering, because it's through an auction system, if you're registering a name that's like a really high demand. So for example, like wallet, wallet went for 350,000 H&S, which I think at the time was about $50,000. And so that's a name that's very expensive.

But for a name like Tia Shan, right, that's like a very random name. But as my name is really important to me, I was able to register that for like a few hundred H&S, I think. So the price really varies. But the key is that if, you know, a lot of these names were registered, like these dictionary names, that's fine because you just go and register another name on Handshake that hasn't been registered. And there are, I mean, the namespace is really, really huge. And so, you know, you can still find good.coms if you're created enough that aren't registered. And so, like, it's possible you just have to be creative.

And we're definitely not at that point yet in Handshake today. and I would expect we're not going to be there for another, you know, five, 10 years, whereas like, oh, man, all the good ones or all the ones that if I think about it for 30 minutes are gone, today it's still very much like, okay, if I think about it for a little bit, I'm able to actually go and register a very good name that hasn't been auctioned off yet. So one last question I have about like sort of the, you know, this backwards compatibility is, you know, like you mentioned, right now, Handshake has already set aside all the current TLDs that I can has, like already sold off.

And so for now, it is backwards compatible. But what happens like two to three years from now when they do, ICAN does start to sell off some more TLDs? And now you have a fork in the ICANN versus handshake system. And how do you have ideas for how to resolve this? Or is the hope that, you know, by that time, handshake will become so big that ICAN will be obsolete or like, how do you deal with this upcoming fork?

That's kind of inevitable. Definitely, definitely. On the one hand, I would say, you know, in the internet today, the things that get adoption, they get adoption very, very quickly, right, as opposed to, you know, even a decade ago. And so I would actually expect by that time, Handshake is very popular, so popular and integrated that it actually just is able to supersede I can end that conflict. But also, if you look at that, the conflict itself, so I can only does a few hundred TLDs met. each year. That's all that they can kind of handle. There's a huge review process. It takes years to go through and get a TLD. And so they can only support a few hundred max. Handshake has already registered in this first year of 460,000. So, you know, if you take 500 out of 460,000, that's 0.1% of the names that would potentially conflict. And so the number of names that are actually conflicting is very, very small compared to the total number of hand-checked TLDs out there. So it's the extent that there would be conflicts, it would be very small.

And also really the issue of the conflicts changes depending on how these names are being used. So that's another aspect of the wind-out question that we actually haven't touched on, which is the technological maturity of the other protocols that you compose with the decentralized naming system. So it's only in the last year that we saw decentralized storage systems like IPFS and FilePoint finally launching. There's another storage system called SIA's Skynet that we really like. We've had them on the show. Yeah. So like, you know, now you have these decentralized storage systems that have come out.

And then also you have, you know, a cache, which is like decentralized server servers. And the key thing to note here is that it's not that these, you know, these. different protocols now enable us to take the existing web applications that have succeeded and, you know, make them decentralized. It does enable that. And that's probably going to be the first thing that happens, right? And any new, you know, technology paradigm, you take the existing world and you kind of, you know, shifted into the new world.

That's just kind of how the technology usually develops. But it actually enables new types of applications. So for example, you can actually enable a decentralized Reddit built on top of handshake and Skynet that is fully decentralized but has the same usability of Reddit.com. But it's actually possible to then go and build a decentralized Twitter or decentralized Tumblr that actually uses that decentralized Reddit's data and its network. And that's a whole separate discussion. But basically the summary of that is you can actually build entirely new types of applications.

That's only just getting explored because the technology has only just matured. that's a really key component because if you think about a decentralized naming system, it always needs to be paired with something else, right, that you're trying to access. And so if it's just decentralized names to traditional servers, that's a hard uphill battle. You know, I think it's still maybe possible, but that's really, and, you know, there is a security benefit, but that's a really hard uphill battle because the benefits of that are very hard to see, right? The issue of most security problems is that if a security engineer is doing a good job, you don't

really here, you know, nothing notable happens. And so it's actually very hard to make that concrete to people, that benefit concrete to, you know, normal people outside of a very niche security-minded folks. You know, the Handshake vision is like, you know, getting these TLDs and building the market for that. I think that there is a non-zero probability that Handshake gets adopted, but with the caveat that it will end up as a, you know, all under a single TLD. So, you know, despite me having bought, you know, dot Sunny expecting it to be a TLD, I'm, what might end up happening is like I can and like all, you know, all the web infrastructure ends up adopting it. But with the caveat that really what I ended up by was Sunny.hns or something like that. Would you consider that a win in your book or do you think that would be like a disappointment as a end result of all this?

I was, I would consider that not a loss, but I think that a handhake has greater potential. than that. And I think that, yeah, but you're totally right that there is a non-zero probability. I mean, for any of these systems, like, you know, there's a few different states that reality could go into. One is just complete failure. You know, everyone's just completely gone from the ecosystem in five years. Another one is, you know, complete success. All right, this is the system that Google and, you know, all the other browsers have adopted. And there's, there's precedent and there's reasons for that and why it's, you know, economically desirable. the desirable for them do that.

But then there's all the one, which is, okay, yeah, maybe it gets adoption. And it's under a namespace like H&S just for, you know, even further backwards compatibility. I could see that happening. How does it work for someone to actually, like, be able to access a domain in their browser? Do I need to, like, add some DNS entries to my network settings or is there a plugin? Or like, how do you access the DNS system? There are a number of ways and basically every day they kind of get better.

So, for example, right now, you know, Brennan Aik, who founded Brave, has, you know, tweeted that they have a plan for Handshake underway. And so I would say, you know, in a few months, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the easiest way is just, you know, Open Brave browser and visit a Handshake name. But outside of that today, there's Puma browser, which is like a Cryptofocus Mobile browser you can use on your phone. That supports Handshake. You can also use HNS.T.O.

It's a, you know, it's a gateway, like an IPFS gateway, but for a handshake. And so if you go and visit nb.h.h.n.s.s.t.o. That actually goes to our decentralized link tree. We call it a DLink. It's a static website hosted on SkyNet and resolved through a handcheck name. And you just visit that in your browser. And so you have the gateway. That's really easy. There's a few Chrome extensions out there.

And then now, just this month, there's now a public DNA. S. Resolver that supports Handshakes. So if you go into your computer settings and, you know, you enter in the IP addresses, in this case, it's 103.196.3.38.38. If you change your setting to that, takes 30 seconds, then you can go and visit Handshake sites in your browser. I've already remembered the IP address. So, but like, how does it work then? So that works for the browser, of course. You know, it works for HTTP traffic. But what about if I want to set up, like an email address like at me at sebastian dot Cuccio or something or what if I have a website that has an API and other services need to access a domain name they would also need to be aware

of the resolver within it yeah and so for example email the way email works is that you you would need the email server that's sending you an email to be able to resolve the handshake names. And that's actually fairly easy to do. You just need to kind of update the settings. But it would require adoption on that front. So you want to go and have, you know, different email providers support it. And similarly for APIs, right?

Yeah. And similarly for APIs. Although it's, you know, it's basically you just change the, you change your DNS resolver or you use a, you know, a JavaScript polygon and you just point the DNS resolver to a hand-chick DNS resolver and, you just use a, you know, a JavaScript resolveer and, you you're good to go there. But there is this, there is this friction involved that also is why I believe that the main source of adoption is not from getting existing services onto handshake because that's just such a uphill battle. I think it's really enabling new use cases that were

not possible before. And if you look at like Bitcoin, for example, usually for these technologies, it's a, it goes through a similar path, which is, you know, Bitcoin's initial main value prop, right? It's hedge against inflation. It was explicitly called out, you know, at launch of the money printing happening with fiat currencies. But the thing is, if you look at Bitcoin's adoption, it's only 10 years in that we're starting to see people look at Bitcoin because of that inflation, right? This year, you know, like 20% of the money supply or something like that was printed. And now you have, you know, big public companies being like, oh, wow, you know, I actually kind of need a wholesome Bitcoin as a hedge. But it's only 10 years in that are getting

that feedback loop of that value. But the thing that Bitcoin was first useful for was, you know, buying drugs on the internet. That was something that was not served at all by existing fiat systems. And so it got adoption there. And then after, you know, buying drugs, it was, you know, basically financial speculation, gambling. That was the thing that really put Bitcoin out the map, just like the crazy, you know, price swings. And then, you know, that carried it through the next, you know, the three to six years. And then now we're starting to see the true value prop being recognized by people. And I think it's a similar thing for any decentralized system, which is, you know, you really only need decentralized systems when they're targeting fringe

users initially, right? So for Handshake, it's going to go through a similar adoption. I think the real, the true value props will be seen, you know, five, ten years from now. But initially it's going to be coming from these new types of applications that weren't possible before. Yeah, that makes sense. If you wanted to have adoption of like the native handshake system, you know, servers all of the server infrastructure, right, like the AWS is and everything, like in their build packages for like the individual VMs that people are launching, they would need to have also the software to interact with that with that blockchain. I wonder if there's any value in you guys trying to address this at the standards level.

So perhaps through the W3C or trying to create standards. around decentralized domain names there? Is that something that you think makes sense or that you've approached? I really believe that for this type of technology to succeed, it needs to start with bottoms up adoption. You know, for any type, right, like looking at Bitcoin as an example, it was something that was, you know, mocked by, you know, serious investors, mocked by banks, right, written off. And it was really only individuals in the same.

the people that started using it that eventually was able to put it on the map. You know, Ethereum also was largely driven as a community effort. You know, with Handshake is a similar thing where it's like, yeah, like I think trying to go from the top down, I think it's worth putting energy into that. But I think that in order for it to any decentralized system to succeed, it needs to have bottoms up adoption. And so that's the primary thing that we're focused on, which is, okay, how can we enable new use cases and applications, decentralized applications that are not possible

today. And they're literally just now possible in the last six months. And of course, usually it's not just a matter of it being possible, but also it being accessible and easy for developers to understand what's possible and build. And so that doesn't even exist right now. Like right now, we're working on improving the developer documentation for Handshake and creating, you know, example applications that show what types of new applications are possible. But I think it's really a matter of bottoms of adoption. That's the key. And if Handshack doesn't have that, then it's never going to break out. So let's talk a little bit about some of the technical details of handshake.

So, you know, one of the interesting things is it is built on sort of its own blockchain. And what are some of the like reasons that it was done like this, like as opposed to perhaps using something like Ethereum or even if it's going to be its own blockchain, you know, somehow integrating more closely with like Bitcoin. You know, Namecoin, for example, was merge mine with Bitcoin. But also, especially when it comes to like the token itself, like, do you think that the requirement to use HNS to buy and sell domains is going to be a hurdle as a, like, you know, there were ways that you could have designed it such that Bitcoin could have been used for the purchasing of domain name? So what were some of the reasons around these decisions? Yeah. So the reason why Handshake is on its own chain. One is, there are technical reasons and also, uh, some of the reason.

path dependency, but at the technical level, you really want to have a naming system be on its own chain because you otherwise will have an issue of congestion. So for example, if Handshake was on Ethereum, you know, right now you can go and submit a bid for a Handshake name and it costs less than a cent to go and do. But to go and do that on Ethereum that's going to cost, you know, tens of dollars because it's not just a bid, but there's, you know, there's multiple transactions, you know, like five, six transactions that you need to submit across the course of an of an auction. And so to do that on another chain like Ethereum, that has congestion from other transactions, right?

So for, you know, like now Ethereum is really popping off, but let's say, you know, a lot of times the main sources of network traffic on Ethereum were these like, you know, Ponzi coins and stuff like that. And so now you have the system where it's, the cost of it is now completely linked to random other systems that are completely separate and don't benefit. at all. So at the congestion level, that's one reason why you want it. And then also in terms of the technology itself, so there was a certain type of proof that needed to be written in order for a light client to exist for Handshake. So you basically need a proof that a name like hasn't been registered or basically like a negative proof without getting too technical. And that just wasn't

really possible on Ethereum. And you know, the people behind Handshake initially, right, It's Joseph Poon, super big Ethereum guy. He's super into it. And he was well aware of the benefits of building something on Ethereum. But the issue is at a technical level. There's a certain type of proof that it's not really possible. But it is possible on handjink. And it's used in HNSC, which is a like client for resolving the names.

Yeah, like hyper-efficient like clients are important. But so I guess, Mike, the other part was about, you know, why not closer integration with Bitcoin? So, you know, you could have had Handshig be on its own chain, but you could have maybe had it, like, have a built-in light client for Bitcoin. So that way that allows me to pay for things in Bitcoin. And that triggers events on Handshank. So for context, we just recorded a episode with Blockstack last week. And so this is kind of how their Stacks system works where it has a built-in SBV into Bitcoin. Yeah, that's a great question.

So, you know, I'm not familiar enough with Block Sacks technology to be able to say whether, you know, it was possible or not. Or maybe it was possible, maybe, you know, I think it took Block Sacks a few years to get to where they are now. So maybe it would have, you know, just been launching now. One is at the technology at the time, I think that that wasn't really available. And then also, I'm not so sure even if it's, you know, you just flip the switch and make that happen, that's desirable or necessary. And that's actually why we built name base, which is, you know, we came on. learned about handshake and we got super excited about it. But we realized that in order for people to actually go and adopt it,

you would need some sort of on-ramp to make it really easy to use. And so that's why, because, you know, for developers, right, developers are fairly lazy. They don't want to go and have to go through, you know, 20 steps just to go and get a name to play with an experimental system that hasn't proven its value yet. And so what we did is we built an on-ramp so that anyone can go and buy a hand-jerk name.

They can actually buy it with Bitcoin today and buy H&S, go and bid on a name, You don't actually even need to verify your account if you're just trying to get a name. And so we built that on-ramp and we actually have a Fiat on-ramp for U.S. customers as well. We're also launching a Fiat on-ramp for international customers very soon. And basically that was what we decided needed to exist in order to enable mass adoption for handshake. So I think maybe it could have benefited if it supported that directly on-chain at launch. But just in terms of how things played out, it uses its own H&S coin.

And that's actually perfectly fine because there are these on ramps like namebase that exist that make it really accessible and easy to use. So let's talk a little bit about this like auction mechanisms and stuff. So one of the things that comes from like you're not having, you know, some sort of smart contracting on the handshake chain natively. Like you basically are kind of locked into using this like one auction design that's like built into the into the chain. Is there a way for me to like, let's say I bought a TLD, is there a way for me to use the handshake chain to like auction off my like second level domains and stuff? Yeah, yeah. So there isn't a way to do that for second level domains. And the key thing to note here is that handshake is very, very focused on the TLD issue.

Right. So it's only, the names are only for the top level domains. SLDs are managed. One is you can manage the traditional way, which is you have your TLD pointing to a name server, and then you can issue SLDs from the name server. And we actually have a service that less people create their own registry and start selling the SLDs from that registry. And then there are also efforts to bridge handshake onto Ethereum, and then now you can have SLDs on Ethereum.

And there are certain interesting aspects of that. So the SLDs are all managed off-chain. But in terms of, you know, let's say you own a name and you want to, you know, like reauction it or sell it, we actually have created a marketplace for that. And it's really nice because not only can you go and resell your name, but also as a buyer, a lot of times you might be looking for your name. You might find, oh, someone else registered it. But you can actually go and make an offer or they might have listed it for a buy now price.

And you can go in and sell that. And that secondary market activity has actually been growing exponentially. So for the past six months, it's been growing at 70% month over month. A lot of, there are even people now, the existing domainers, they're kind of like full-time getting handshake names and selling them now. They're making like a few thousand dollars a month. So that ecosystem is actually really growing on the marketplace. You know, I think it's kind of driven by this like NFT trend as well.

And if you go to name-based. You can see all of them listed for sale. So that's one way that you can do it. You can solve it with applications on top of handshake. Are there other companies or projects that are building also on top of a handshake and providing similar services to Namebase? Or do you guys have some sort of monopoly there, like either implied or not? Yeah, totally. So we definitely don't have a monopoly.

Anyone can go and come compete with us. And that's very welcome. There are other companies, this company, in Pervious, which was just started, which is really focused on core, you know, handshake development. You know, that was created just to bring a full-time dev, Matt Zipkin, to go and work on Handshake at the blockchain level full-time. And then there are also now individual domain holders. So, for example, Jihan Chu, he just bought .NFT on through the name-based marketplace, actually. We helped broker that. But he bought that for $84,000.

And it was actually a really nice return for the initial purchaser. It was bought for $500 from the initial purchaser. and then sold for $84,000 after four or five months. So that was great. But Gian True is now trying to start, you know, a registry business, a business on top of. NFT. So you kind of have, you know, businesses at different layers. You can have it over an individual TLD and then also, you know, serving the ecosystem as a whole.

But I would say it's also, you know, Handshank is still very small. The community has been growing, which has been awesome to see. But it's still, you know, even within crypto, I think it's fairly niche. and not a lot of people have heard of it. That's partly because there's no centralized foundation, doing a lot of marketing for Handshake. In retrospect, maybe some of that to a million dollars should have been spent just promoting Handshake,

but I think this organic grassroots adoption is also nice in a sound way. But it's more so due to that than there's no sort of monopoly or anything. The use case you mentioned before about the contacting existing owners is actually, I think, a really, you know, something I didn't realize, but like, so I actually did this process last night where, uh, I went and like contacted someone to, and bought their domain name. And it was, there's this big problem with like existing like thing where, like existing domain names where, you know, sometimes I want to buy a domain name and I look at it and it was like registered back in like 2002 or something, never been touched, but they have like auto renew set up already. And they have, and nowadays everyone uses like DNS. privacy stuff. And so it's really hard to see, like, there's no way for me to contact this person and, like, actually, like, even, like, make them an offer.

But with, on handshake, on name base, at least, it was very easy for me to, like, contact that. I made an offer. Then they made a counter offer. Then I made a counter offer. And then they had accept. And it was like, wow, that process took, like, an hour. And I was able to do that. I think that was a really cool.

Oh, that's great. One of the things I had questions I had about the auction, though, while I was going through the process was there's like this distinction between a like the open part of a bid and a sealed part of the bid. What is the purpose of this? Like why wouldn't I want to just put my entire amount in the sealed portion? Yeah, totally. So the reason why is because the victory auction, the way that you construct a victory auction typically is that, you know, people submit their blind bids, right? I bid something, you bid something, and then at the end of the auction is revealed, oh, I actually bid a thousand, you bid a 500, and so I went, and I pay 500.

And that's, you need that blind factor for the Vickory Auction to work. The challenges on chain, it's, you know, how do you create a blind auction? You know, it's fairly tricky to do there. One way that you can create a blind auction is by having a bid portion and a blind portion. And that's what was done with Handshake. Basically, it was created in order to obscure the true value of the bids because every bid on chain, you don't have a case where all the bidders are submitting their bids at the same time, and that data is public.

And so you need some way of obscuring your bid in order for the Bickory auction to work. And so that's why there is a blind portion so that I can, for example, submit a 500 H&S bid and a 500 H&S blind on. On chain, you'll only see a thousand H&S as a total lockup. And you don't know what the actual bid amount is. You know, it could be anywhere from zero to a thousand H&S until it's all revealed. But you need that just because of everything's on chain. I see.

So the blind isn't the portion that's being bid. That's just like the, okay, I get it now. That makes sense. Yeah. It's obscuring. Yeah. If you could force everyone to submit their bids at the same time, you wouldn't need this. But, you know, because you don't, that's why you need it.

What is sort of like the role of name base in all of this? And like what is your guys' business model when it comes to, you know, being this, you know, you guys seem to be this very important linchpin in the entire Handshake ecosystem. What do you guys get out of it? Yeah, totally. So I would, one is, I would say in terms of Nambe's role, it's just like everyone else in the community, which is we're all directors of Handshake. You know, I might have mentioned that before, but Handshake is a very community run. So there's no centralized foundation, there's no person that's like the CEO of Handshake. And if you go into a website, you'll see it basically says, oh, if you're part of the

Handshank community or if you want to help it, you too can call yourself a director of Handshake. So, you know, ultimately we are just directors of Handshake like everyone else. But I see our role as really just we're trying to do whatever we can to further adoption. And so, you know, when we first discovered Handshake, we saw the potential, but we also, you know, there are huge barriers to adoption, right? There's so much friction in it. And you guys point out a lot of really great points,

which is that it's really, you need a huge amount of motivation to adopt it, which is why I also think that it's only now that there is this, you know, Web3 movement that's so strong. And now you have these Web3 protocols and new Web3 applications that open up once you actually have, you know,

decentralized naming and decentralized storage and decentralized compute. And it's only now that I think that this thing actually has a chance I've even taken off. But ultimately, you still need really easy onboarding, similar to how Bitcoin really started to break out once Coinbase made Bitcoin accessible to the common person. You know, for us at Namebase, we're trying to do the same thing.

We're trying to reduce as much friction as possible to onboard people. That's why we created an on-ramp. You know, that's why we created the bidding system. That's why we created the marketplace so that, you know, you coming on would be able to get your name even after someone else's registered it. So that's really what we see as our role is trying to reduce the friction. and also just kind of showing, you know, people what's possible on Handshake, because, you know, we didn't get too into the specifics on the types of applications

that are possible, but it's actually really, really cool. And that's a good discussion for a separate time, maybe, or we can just show you because we're releasing a few things in the next month. But basically, it's just to support the ecosystem. And then in terms of monetization, so we're not primarily focused on monetization at the moment. It's really just on helping to grow the ecosystem. system, but on the on ramp, that makes money as a traditional on ramp similar to Coinbase. So it's just selling and buying the coin with a spread.

And typically we try to target around 1 to 3%. And so that brings in a little bit of revenue. It's basically, you know, it's very, very small at this point, right? Just because the ecosystem is so small. And then on the marketplace, there's also a 3% transaction fee on the marketplace, which, you know, again, is quite small. So what we're looking to do, although I will say that we, in terms of that transaction volume, we helped to process, you know, since launch, we've helped to process, you know, tens of millions of dollars.

Or I think, yeah, over $10 million in, you know, bidding volume, right? So we help people actually place a lot of bids on handshake. But effectively, those are our current revenue streams, but we're primarily focused on growing the ecosystem. So tell us what's coming up in your roadmap and what's the future for name base? Like where do you see yourself in the next 10 years? Yeah. So right now, we're really focused on improving the utility of handshake names. So the interesting, one of the interesting applications that you can actually use with your handjack name is, yeah, you can use it as a

a decentralized website. Right? So I shared nb.h.h.com. It's a fully decentralized website using Skynet for the storage. And you can actually also use your handshake name. for decentralized login. And so we actually just designed a protocol so you can actually go and authenticate to a website, using your handshake name, no passwords are transmitted, you control your name,

and you're just able to authenticate and prove that you own the name. And so we just are releasing a forum, NameRew News. If you go to News on Naveaveh.W.O, it should actually be up there already. But the cool thing about the forum is you're able to use your handcheck name to authenticate.

And the really neat thing is we also, and you're using your handcheck name as your username, we also detect when that handshake name resolves to a website. So for example, if I make a post, you'll see my name highlighted, which indicates it's also a website. And you can go and click on my name and you're actually brought to my decentralized link tree page. And so the really cool thing about that, and then also if you go on Twitter, you'll see my name

is tishan slash. And you'll see all the people in the handshake community, they change their names, their name slash. And that just indicates that they have that name, they have a website at that name. And you can kind of think of it as this, you know, insurance for my digital identity. Basically what that's saying is, you know, if anything happens to my Twitter account, if I move or if it gets taken down, you can always go to Tieshan on Handshake, right? Or even if you're not using a resolve or you go to Tishan to H&S.T.O. And you can see my list of links.

And not only I have the ability to, you know, update those links, right? Only I have the ability to update my name. And so you always be able to find me online. And that application of the login, that's the next thing that we're releasing, which kind of shows some of the different applications they can use for your hand-check name. I don't know if you guys have thought of doing this or if this exists, but it would be really cool if there was this kind of scaffolded sort of repo that would allow anyone to just like deploy their website to some decentralized service like SIA

or IPFS, have that website be behind a name-based domain. And it's just like this is your decentralized web stack. you know, sort of repo or like a package and it allows you to, you know, create your, like, your own personal homepage at that points all the different places where you are. Like, though, I don't know, does that exist? Because I would love to like do something like that. Totally. Yeah.

So that's, that's why we've created this product called D-Links, which basically lets you do, uh, that for a, uh, you know, a list of links that you want to point to. It's basically like link tree, except it's using, you know, handshake names and, uh, Skynet, uh, for stories. And that actually has gotten some really cool adoption. This guy, Vange, Fran, he's like one of the top rappers in the Netherlands. And actually one of the community members gifted him his name. And now he has a DLink page set up.

And so that's one of the really cool things of the community is a lot of the community members. They are also trying to, you know, further adoption to their protocol. And they'll go out and gift names to people that they think are relevant. And then on top of that for general websites, actually this company called Fleek, which is built on top of IPFS. they're supporting handcheck names to now. And so that's another company in the ecosystem. And soon you'll be able to deploy, you know, any type of website using Fleek to your handcheck name.

And so you're starting to see kind of some of the building blocks coming out. Really before, you know, and we only released D-Links in the last like month or two. And so really before the last, you know, two months, all of the benefits and all of the, you know, interesting things about hand-shake that you could do were very theoretical. A lot of the community members were playing and experimenting. it was really, really hard to explain handshake and kind of show the utility because these applications just infrastructure was being built out.

Now we're seeing that, you know, starting to see some of it come into existence, which is really excited because people are actually using it. You know, over 400 people have created D-Links now already, which is pretty big if you think about, you know, like decentralized applications, right? Most of them only have like a thousand users max. And so a lot of people have actually started creating these decentralized websites and, you know, As fleet comes on board, as this handshake login comes out, and there's a few other things in the pipeline too.

I think we're going to see more and more usage and adoption. Cool. Well, it's a really interesting project, and I hope you all the success. Because, yeah, as we've talked about today, this is a huge problem to tackle, and it's very much needed, I think. Thanks, thanks again for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

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