On The Brink with Castle Island - Tieshun Roquerre (Namebase) on the Prospects for Decentralized DNS (EP.185)

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Namebase founder and CEO Tieshun Roquerre joins us for a discussion of Handshake, decentralized DNS, and issues with the current system of domains. In this episode:  The core technical problem with DNS today Why a blockchain for a decentralized DNS system makes sense How Satoshi anticipated blockchain-based DNS with BitDNS Could a global PoW blockchain system accommodate all of the world's domains? How Handshake learned from Namecoin, ENS, and other attempts from blockchain based DNS and alternative root zones The distinction between ENS and Handshake Handshake's origin and launch – and how it ended up with such diffuse governance Where the nexuses of control are in the Handshake ecosystem How Handshake PoW security works The merits of embracing ASICs How the distribution of domains works What you can actually do with handshake domains The growing interoperability between handshake and decentralized storage like Sia

Hello and welcome to On the Brink with Castle Island. In today's episode, we invite the founder and CEO of Namebase, Tieshan Rocare, on the show. Namebase is the largest domain broker for Handshake names and probably the largest Handshake Exchange, period. So Handshake is this pretty interesting project, which is focused on decentralized DNS, so decentralized domains, specifically creating a new alternative root zone. So handshake names are actually the equivalent of dot com. They come after the dot. I was intrigued by the project because I see it as kind of a spiritual successor to Namecoin. Namecoin, of course, was the outgrowth of an idea that Satoshi had for blockchain-based DNS, and it was probably one of the only times Satoshi talked about a non-monetary use of a blockchain.

So there have been a few attempts at this. Namecoin really didn't get any way. where ENS exists, blockstack sort of pivoted away from their name service. And Handshake has really actually gained critical mass, if you look at the data. So I picked up a few domains just to experiment with them. So I own Nick Carter. If you want to go visit my DLink, that's nickcarter.h.hns.to. I think decentralized DNS does make sense as a concept.

There's just more creativity and more freedom. potential. And if you look at how websites actually get censored on the internet by governments, DNS is one of those attack vectors that they go after. So there is a need for an alternative here. Handshake is proposing one solution. Well, I'll keep my eye on it. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, let's dive into the episode with Tishan Rooker. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping

it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. So Tia Shan, you're the founder and CEO of Namebase and one of the most important fixtures in the Handshake ecosystem. So we're going to unpack what's going on with Handshake today. Tia Shan, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Nick.

So before we start, maybe obligatory question, tell us a little bit about your history in the crypto industry and your background. And then maybe also how you got interested in Handshake itself. Yeah, totally. Honestly, my history in the crypto industry kind of got started with Handshake. Because just for context, my backgrounds in engineering and I was working in Silicon Valley on various startups. And it's kind of atypical. So I actually dropped out of high school when I was 16 to work at a tech startup called

T-Spring. That had gone through Y Combinator. And they were doing really well. and I had the opportunity to work with them as an engineer. So I basically just left Boston where my family's from and moved to San Francisco and started working there. And then a year later, I actually started a company recruiting startup that went through YC, which was really fortunate because YC is this startup accelerator that invested in Reddit and Stripe and Dropbox, Airbnb, and DoorDash. and they're very renowned in Silicon Valley.

And so I had this amazing opportunity and was able to go through YC and kind of learn how startups work. And then about a year into that, I wanted to go back to school and learn a little bit more. So I ended up going and applying to MIT. Fortunately enough, I got in and I ended up studying there for two years. I studied math and computer science. And that's where I met my co-founder, Anthony, who was our CTO, and a really brilliant engineer.

We basically started exploring a bunch of different ideas. This was in 2018. We were looking at crypto. We were getting interested into that. It was actually kind of on the tail end of the crypto boom. So kind of a bad time to get into crypto. But while we were exploring another Boston, you know, like crypto investor, Eric Meltzer, he goes by Weepon on Twitter.

He actually introduced us to Handshake. and he showed us the white paper, and we got super excited about it because, you know, Anthony and I are backgrounds both in engineering and computer science, and we, you know, we're familiar with how DNS works, the domain name system, right? So like, you know, Google.com, name based out ofio, these are all different domains, and they're controlled by the domain name system or DNS for short. And effectively, we found Handshake and Handshakes of Protocol that actually decentralizeds, and we both got super excited about it from a technical perspective. And the more we kind of researched it and figured out how the mechanics work, the more

excited we got about it. And then that's when we decided to start Namebase to make Handshake easy to use. And we've been working on NameBase for the past two and a half going on three years now. So when you were getting interest in Handshake, was it that you found Handshake itself to be a really elegant solution? Or did you have that? like a particular animus against the way that domains work and you wanted to sort of help fix that. Yeah. So it's a little bit of both, but it's primarily the solution that Handshake creates is very elegant. And then it also very correctly addresses the core technical problem with DNS.

And so, for example, like there are governance issues. There's a censorship issues. All those exists, but they're basically a corollary to the root issue, which is around the security of the DNS. And what Handshake does is, and if you go on, you know, Handshake.org, it explicitly says this, is trying to create a decentralized certificate authority. And so just for context, basically what Handshake does is it shifts the root of trust from the existing ICANBAS system, which is, you know, fallible to a blockchain-based route that is much more, has much better security properties.

And, you know, this might sound a little bit like jargon and I can go, you know, into more depth and clarify this a little bit more. But basically, you know, for an engineer, if you actually speak to any engineer that's, like, familiar with DNS, they pretty much all hate how the certificate authority system works. It's just like a very, like, shoddy system. It's not ideal at all. And it's actually, the security properties of it are just like very not good. And Handshake attacks that directly and solves that through a blockchain.

So it was one of the most elegant use cases of a blockchain that I had that I've ever seen. And actually, if you look at, you know, like a lot of Satoshi's forum comments back when he used to do them, or, you know, they, whoever they are, used to do them. DNS on blockchain was one of the next use cases that Satoshi was exploring after, you know, like Bitcoin as digital currency. So it's a really good use case. Domain names on a blockchain is a really good use case for blockchain. And then Handshakes Construction was very elegant. And then on top of that, just the fact that, you know, the more research did, the more we found, you know, issues with censorship around the world. And then, you know, when I was younger, I actually was fortunate enough to travel to Turkey.

And in Turkey, I had gotten a personal experience of trying to go on Wikipedia and having it be blocked. And that was very shocking to me just because, you know, Wikipedia is just such a good neutral information source. And it's so important for people to be able to access that. If you think about, you know, how systems work. Information flow is one of the most important sources of the control in the system. And I got to see that in this entire country basically just couldn't access Wikipedia. And so kind of looping that back into Handshake, it was understanding at a technical level that Handshake was actually a much more better way to run DNS than the existing infrastructure. Plus there being a need for it in the world that made, you know, both Anthony and I very excited about it.

Okay, there's a lot in there. We've got to unpack a little bit. I want to start with BitDNS. So as you said, Satoshi, this was the one additional, maybe not the only, but definitely one of the most promising uses of a blockchain that Satoshi themselves championed. And then I guess Bit TNS became name coin, which was, I guess, really the first outcoin that was merged mine with Bitcoin. Maybe still is. So I guess the question is, like what?

Is it about blockchains to make them good for DNS? And why does DNS benefit from a blockchain, you know, blockchain infrastructure? That's a great question. So the core reason is really around the security and the censorship and the ownership that you get from DNS. And if you think about, you know, domain names, they're actually basically. like the original NFT, right? Like, they're like NFTs before NFT became a thing. And they're actually one of the first, you know, digital assets that ever became valuable, right? Like domain names are scarce. And, you know, even, you know, 20, 30 years ago, people were discovering that they add value. People

will pay more for certain names than others. And so, you know, they actually have all the properties of NFT, except they're not on a blockchain. But the reason why you want to have them on a blockchain is really around the security. So the key thing for a domain name is that you have a record associated it with it, right? You have data associated with it that you need to be correct because if you go to your bank account, right, and you're getting like incorrect records for it, then you can be going to, you know, a fishing site or a scamming site and you can basically just, you know, get your bank account wiped out, for example.

And so you really need the data integrity to be there. And blockchains are one, like basically the best solution in the world for having data integrity and a distributed system. That's very provable, right? You can go and verify the data associated with a name on a blockchain, for example, is correct. And the really important thing is that it's even, it has even better security properties than for like normal, like coin usage. because sure, you might have like a double span attack on a blockchain, but if you have a domain name, you know, think about the domain name records, usually you don't change them that often. So you have a domain name and then, you know, the more and more blocks that are mined on top of that

change that was on a blockchain, the more reliable that record is. Right. So like a day after someone's made their change for their domain name records on chain, Now you have a ton of security built up around that change. And then also, if you think about like, okay, what if they just like undid a whole day's worth of blocks, even then the security model is very good because the only person who's actually able to insert and edit records is a person who controls private key for the domain name. So it comes from, you know, just from a security perspective, actually, a blockchain is a much better database for, you know, domain name records than the current construction,

which is like basically literally text files. And on top of that, you have the control being put into an actual owner's hands versus having to delegate to, you know, a domain registrar or registry or ICAN. And then also you have from a consumer perspective, you have the ability to prevent the domain name system from being censored. So today, it's actually super easy for, you know, any authoritarian government to censor DNS. actually one of their first go-to tools for censorship. And at a consumer level, it's very, very hard to censor blockchain, actually. And so for both the security and the control and then also the censorship, you have very, very

desirable properties that arise when you put domain names on blockchain. So I'm going to sound stupid asking this, and I'm sure you have thought about this, But if the whole internet moved to blockchain-based DNS, could a single blockchain accommodate that in terms of throughput and sort of scalability? Yeah. Yeah, it could. And that's actually one of the reasons why Handshake was created on its own proof-work-based blockchain. It's actually very similar in construction to Bitcoin. But effectively, Handshake as is can support 50 million top level level domain names. And for context, top level domain names are, when you think of a domain

name like Google.com, it's what's to the right of the dot. It's the extension. So dot com. Dot a.o. Dot net. These are all domain extensions known as top level domain names. And this is the root of the DNS. And that's what you need to be decentralized because all the decentralization kind of spawns down from there. It's like a tree. And basically on handshake, you can have 50 million TLDs. And for context, currently in the ICANBase system, there are about 1,500 TLDs. So actually, even in its current construction,

without any scaling whatsoever, Handshake could basically accommodate the entire world using decentralized DNS. So I guess it's just a matter of persuading everyone to use it now, huh? Yeah, that's the... It's just that... That's the easy part. Yeah, exactly.

So maybe before we get into the history, can you briefly recount some of the other blockchain DNS systems? Because Handshake isn't the first. In a sense, it's got like that second or third mover advantage that sort of learned from maybe the failures. I don't want to be too harsh of some of its predecessors. But tell us about, you know, like the history of name coin, ENS, and some of the other systems that tried to do the same thing.

Yeah, totally. So, you know, there have been numerous previous attempts at, you know, DNS on the blockchain. And then actually, if you even go further, there have been a lot of attempts at alternative root zones, which is what, you know, alternative DNS systems are called. So there have a lot of alternative root zone attempts in the past, too, even before blockchains came around. And they all fail, actually. And I would think of this, the analogy is, is, you know, before Bitcoin came around, there were numerous attempts at digital currencies, right? And they all failed because there are two primary reasons that I see for them failing. One is the, you know, you need the technology to actually have the right mechanics in order for it to succeed.

So a lot of the previous attempts, right, maybe for, you know, for cryptocurrencies, maybe they were like easy to censor or they just, you know, didn't have the right incentives in play. And so they just didn't work out. And then also you need the cultural impetus for it to. exist. You know, Bitcoin was launched in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. And so there's actually a really strong need to get people to start looking at this. And you need a cultural movement like that because otherwise it's like, you know, if people don't pay attention, you're not going to get adoption. If you're not going to get adoption, then it doesn't matter how good the technicals are. It's just not going to work. And just for just a little bit of background there. But then in terms of the

naming systems. So one is all the, you know, previous non-blocking based alternative root zones, there's really no technical reason for you to switch over to that because the only benefit is, you know, you get new names, which when you think about DNS, it's like, yeah, like new domain names are nice, but that's not a strong enough, you know, a compelling enough reason for people to switch over and, you know, basically beat out the inertia of the existing domain name system. And then the other thing is once you start getting into the blockchain base of main names, so if you look at Namecoin, for example, one thing that's really important in the naming system, because the primary assets are non-fundable, it really, really matters how the distribution of those names occurs.

So, for instance, on Namecoin, the names were all available at once and sold for a set price. And that mechanic created a dynamic where early adopters were able to flood in and just get all the good names. We actually know a bunch of, you know, we know people who are super excited about NamePoint. They were obviously excited about Handshake 2. They're like, oh, yeah, like when Namecoin first came out, I just registered like all the trademark names and squatted on them. And then I wasn't able to do that on Handshake. And I can talk about, you know, what Handshake did differently. But basically on Namecoin is very easy for people to just go and squat on names.

And that's an issue because then, you know, imagine six months or a year into launch, people might be looking at, you know, Namecoin, they might be trying to get into it. But if there's no good names available, if there's no, you know, real estate that's valuable for them that they can capitalize on, there's no incentive for them to adopt it. And if the protocol hasn't gone adoption by the time that the names have been, you know all squatted on then it's never going to get adoption because there's not going to be newcomers coming into the system and trying to take it forward so you have uh it's really really important to get the distribution of the names right yeah the the one that i've seen that has had some enduring

adoption would be ens though i mean i ns is still sticking around like i see those dot eth domains being used to qualify its success today? Yeah, ENS is great for well-naming. And we've actually spoken with the E&S team at some various conferences and whatnot. And I think the work that they're doing is great. And ENS is actually, it's usually confused with Handshake a lot in terms of, you know, because it's like blockchain domain names. And so there's a lot of similarities.

But its purpose and its function are very different. So ENS is primarily a decentralized registry. Every domain name is a .Eath domain name. And so they sit at different levels of the DNS stack. Handshake is at the top level, domain name level, and then ENS is at the domain name level effectively. And that's the same with Unstoppable and some of these other attempts. And so basically where they sit in the sack is different.

And the other thing in terms of the purpose, is ENS is primarily focused on wallet naming. I mean, specifically the Ethereum naming system. And we've spoken with their team, and they've also shared with us, it's like, you know, their primary goals for ENS is in wallet naming, and it's not DNS. And the reason why that's important is because associating a name with a record is just the first step in creating a decentralized domain name system.

the infrastructure on top of that to actually do all the things that DNS needs to do. You need resolvers, you need gateways, all this infrastructure is actually really needs to be baked into the protocol, not only on layer one, but also layer two. And so in terms of the purpose, it's not really going in the direction. If you think about where the ecosystem is going, it's not really going in the direction of where it needs to be for a decentralized DNS that the world can be using. It's primarily being used for the wallet names. There's also a different model in terms of what's being decentralized and,

how does the governance work? So for example, Handshake is the issuance of the TLDs of the names is completely decentralized. So there's no central authority that can take away a name or prevent you from registering a name. With ENS, there's, you know, the root key holders, I think it's like five or seven and it's like a multi-sig. And they can actually, they basically have full control of the system. So the governance of ENS compared to Handshake, they have different models. And for ENS, that works because that's, you know, it's just going for wallet names and, you know, they need to be able to update the system.

I think they changed the pricing of the names at one point from being like a fixed price to, you know, like yearly renewal. And so a bunch of people stopped registering their names after that. And like, that's okay because that's a dynamic system. You're using it for wallet naming. But for DNS, you want it to be, in order for it to be secure, you need not only the names to be decentralized and the ownership to be decentralized, but you also need the governance to be decentralized. And so they have very different models there.

Yeah, that's a great point. And that actually brings us to our next question, which has to do with the history of Handshake, which is quite unique, I would say. And, you know, one thing that I've noted looking at a lot of blockchain-based projects is what Angela Walsh calls decentralization theater, where, you know, there's an illusion of decentralization to achieve some sort of strategic objective, whether it's regulatory or just a marketing objective. In the case of Handshake, arguably, I don't know if Handshake fans will like me saying this, but there's arguably too much decentralization. It's sort of highly distributed in its current state. And there's not really that much concentrated leadership.

So maybe just tell us about the history and the launch and then how it got to its current state in terms of it being a very loose association of entities and a very kind of distributed governance model. Yeah, that's a great question. And you're right, it is incredibly decentralized. And a lot of the ethos of Handshake really took inspiration for basically how, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto handled Bitcoin. So for context, the original people behind Handshake, it was Joseph Poon, who is, you know, of the Lightning Network,

Andrew Lee of Persadio. And then also there's actually another Andrew Lee from private internet access, which is this. privacy-focused VPN. And then there's the developer, Christopher Jeffrey, and a bunch of other developers, of course. But those were kind of the three people spearheading Handshake. And what they did is they actually raised $10 million for Handshack through a foundation at the Handshake Foundation. And they raise it from, you know, Silicon Valley investors like A16C, Z, Greylock, Sequoia, founders fund, et cetera. And they actually donated all that money away to different nonprofit internet organizations.

So they donated it to Ganoo, Apache, Free Software Foundation, numerous others. And then actually, once they launched the protocol, the foundation completely dissolved. So the only purpose of the foundation was to basically be a vehicle for raising money for the token to give it a price that was, you know, like legitimate. And then from there, launched the protocol and basically just completely disappear after that so that a community could form around Handshake and a decentralized vander without there being any, you know, single figurehead, single source of failure. So, you know, people would mistake this all the time, but like Namebase, we didn't create Handshake.

We just discovered it, got super excited about it and, you know, decided to build Namebase to help adoption. It's very similar to, if you read about Brian Armstrong, he was just reading about Bitcoin. I think it was like over Christmas one time, and he got super excited about it, and then they decided to go and build Coinbase. So name base actually did not build a handshake.

We just discovered it and wanted to create a tool to further adoption for it. And then the initial handshake, you know, creators. They don't even call themselves the creators. They just call themselves contributors. so that there's no really sense of authority to anyone in the ecosystem. But they were all decentralized and the foundation disappeared at launch. I'm sure people have told you this before, but are you familiar with this concept of the tyranny of structurallessness?

Oh, actually, I haven't heard of that before. I love to hear about it now. Yeah, so it's this idea that even in organizations that ostensibly lack structure that can actually be, it can conceal real power structures that just aren't overt. And so removing explicit hierarchies doesn't necessarily remove nexus of control. So it's been applied a lot to actually to Bitcoin and to other sort of blockchains to point out that, okay, there's no explicit hierarchy here. But like there still are individuals with control.

Now the only thing we've accomplished is we're just, we've made it obscure where the power structures lies. Is that is that something that sort of is that something that makes sense in the context of handshake? I mean, presumably there are still nexus of control in the handshake system, right? Yeah, yeah, totally. That's a really great point. You know, really you can see namebase as one nexus of control, right? Because for context, what name base says is we are an on ramp for a handshake. So not only can you buy the H&S coins on name base,

but you can also go and register handshake names because there's an auction system. And so we make it very easy for you to go and participate that. And then we have a marketplace. So actually a lot of people are getting their names through the secondary marketplace that we run as well. And so you see name base as like a nexus of control. there, which is no potentially a risk, actually. I think something that's really key for Handshake is, you know, in a lot of ways, have you heard of Eugene Way?

He's a technologist, and he talks about how he's a cultural determinist. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. And basically his theory is that, you know, like culture determines a lot of the outcomes that we see in the world more so than, it has a lot of explaining power, more so than a lot other factors. And I think for communities, it's very much, very much cultural determinism is at play. So a key thing for Handshake is because, you know, the people initially behind it, you know, Joseph, Andrew, Andrew Lee, and the others, they really, really cared about

instituting the ethos of Handshake and essentially like the decentralization, kind of like caretaking of the network. So, for example, if you go on to Handshake.org, they say, you know, if you're trying to, you know, further handshake, you two can call yourself, can call yourself a director of handshake. So we're all directors of handshake is all equal, but we're all moving forward. And if you join the community, you're a director of handshake. And so for us at name basis, okay, yeah, like in one world, we could become this, you know, nexus of control. But also, we really respect that culture as well. And so we work really hard to not basically take advantage of that and not corrupt that into a bad state.

And so, you know, when other members come into the community, we also are very explicit about saying, you know, that we didn't create handshake. And then also now there are more and more companies forming around handshake. So there was like a mining company called Oracle Labs. And that was kind of at launch, a company that existed. But now there's also another one called impervious, which is created by the founder of park.a.o, which is a very popular domain backboarding service. So basically the way I see it is in the early days, namebase had potential for more control, but as long as we kind of manage that effectively, then as more and more players come into the ecosystem, the community actually becomes a lot more powerful overall,

and then namebase and individually has a lot less. potential for that nexus of control. But then, you know, along that journey, we're also very cognizant of the Handshake ethos. And so we're very careful not to, you know, overstep, you know, overstep our position. One thing I wanted to touch on was the eardrop of Handshake to the sort of open source community. So, I mean, the Handshake launch really was quite peculiar, I would say. I mean, it was very different. There was a lot of, no sale, really. I mean, there was an enormous eardrop. There were also tokens that were earmarked for large players in the kind of domain registrar space, just trying to induce them to get

involved in the handsheet cocaine system. But in particular, that eardrop to open source contributors, tell us about that. And then also, now that it's sort of largely concluded, can you maybe give us your diagnosis of that and whether you'd consider it to be successful? Yeah, so the AirDrop basically was made to developers, and the qualification was if you had a GitHub account, which is a very popular website for developers to host their code. So if you have a GitHub account and you have over 15 followers in 2018, then you were eligible or are eligible to actually go and claim about 4200 H&S, which is. is about like $800 worth of H&S. And this air drop was done in order to incentivize developers to basically take a look at the protocol and get into the ecosystem.

And it was largely taking advantage of at launch and then has trickled off since then. So basically, I think within the first, you know, a few months, there were like a few thousand air drop claims. We actually have a tool at namebase. Namebase.io slash airdrop that kind of walks you through it if you're a developer. There are a few thousand. And then since then it's basically just like all trickled out. And one of the reasons why it's all trickled out is to an extent it could be like a marketing thing, but really it's also because developers, the way that it works is that if you were a developer included, you had your public key basically like hard coded into the protocol at

launch and if for developers they often times swap out their private key private public key pairs every few months it's just good security practice and so a lot of developers even if they wanted to claim even if they were eligible they're not going to actually have access to those keys anymore so and all effects the air drop is kind of you know no longer applicable in terms of the success i do remember a lot of devs at um at launch were tweeting about handshake and being like, oh, you know, like I'm getting into hand check because of the air drop. And actually one of, you know, some of the our most prolific community members are developers

who ended up referring a bunch of their friends to use the, to get the handshake air drop. And they got really into handshake because of that reason. So I've seen the positive effects. I don't know if, you know, maybe, maybe it was negative because, you know, some developers be a super into handshake, but then also some developers would just go and be like, oh, like a free $800 now just go and sell that. But the price of the coin basically is as always hovered around 10 cents. And now it's at 20 cents.

And it hasn't really gone below the 10 cents that it was valued at at launch really for too long. So I don't actually think it had too many negative effects. And I've seen some of the positive effects. So I would say it was a success, although I wouldn't qualify it as like a, you know, resounding, you know, blows everything out of the water success. But I think it was a net positive. Yeah. So the other thing that was curious about Handshake is that it was a proof of work launch. And it was almost a bit of an archaic thing, you know, like a vestige of a prior time in the crypto industry.

I mean, the heyday of proof of work launches was really like 2014 to 2016, I would say. Obviously, there were some before that too, but of sort of differentiated proof work launches. And then Handshake launched, was it in 2019 that he launched? Yeah, yeah, a year ago. Yeah. And it was actually, yeah, 2020. 2020. Yeah.

So it was like a throwback for me. It was like, wow, proof work launch. This is so exciting. Talk us through why the system is proofwork. I know you touched on it before. And then the purpose of having a distinct blockchain and then how the actual token plays into this whole system. Yeah, totally.

And this might like ruffle some feathers, but I think there's really only like two use cases of that makes sense for a proof of work chain. And it's really just naming and money. And the reason why Handshake chose to use a proof of work-based protocol is because, well, there's a number of factors. Part of it is also path dependency. But really for proof-work-based chain, at the time, you could also have looked at Ethereum. And, you know, Joseph Poon was, you know, very evolved in the Ethereum ecosystem and, you know, deliberately made Handshake a proof-of-work-based chain.

The reason for that, and I'll share real quickly for not Ethereum, is because for DNS, they also need to create a light client that can trustlessly resolve handshake names. It's a light SPV resolver is what it's called. And basically there's a specific type of SPV proof that you need in order to create a light client securely that wasn't possible on Ethereum. So that was one of the core reasons why it wasn't done on Ethereum. But then the other aspect was in terms of the security model, also at the time, you know, Bitcoin is really the, that Provenwork model has been proven out over the decade as, you know, incredibly robust and secure. And using that model, Handshake basically, for Handshake, they realize it's like, okay, we could also do, I think they're exploring like cuckoo cycle. Like there's all these other like algorithms at the time and, you know, ASIC resistant stuff that you can do to kind of make, you know, Handshake, you know, more scalable or more private or whatever. And they realized that all they needed was a Proble Work-Based, simple proof of work-based protocol in order to have a secure network.

And in terms of the security of Handshake, the double spend attack actually isn't really that applicable to the network, which is also why it's okay. for it to be on a proof of work base protocol. For contacts, normally with a double spend attack, you have, you know, you have coins like Bitcoin, right? You don't want someone to be able to spend their coins on Coinbase and then like undo their transaction and go spend their coins on another exchange. And that problem normally exists, you know, when you're using a proof of work base chain for money, but when you're using it for naming, so you can potentially use, you know, you can still do a double spend, attack on the coins, but in terms of being able to attack the names themselves, an approved

work-based model, it's very, very difficult to do that. The reason why is because I think I alluded to this earlier, but if you have a name and you update the record, one, no one's able to go and, you know, like change your records, right? Because you have the private keys to those records. Yeah. So only you are able to change them. And then on top of that, at most what they could do is, Maybe they could undo your change, but also in handshake, a name change at the root level,

that takes six hours worth of blocks to propagate. It's 36 blocks. So that's actually a really large number of blocks to roll back in order to just undo a single change. And then on top of that, right, every time the miners are mining a block and you've made that change, you know, every block that's added, you know, three days in after you've made that change, It's basically like impossible for someone to go and undo your name change. So the security of proof of work for naming specifically is very, very desirable. Even though usually for proof of work, you don't want, you know,

you can't really support that many proofwork-based chains in the world if you're using it for money. Because, you know, whichever one is the number one chain, if you use that hash power to like go and attack the second chain. So like, you know, you normally actually have that dynamic where you can't have too many proof work-based chains. But prove work-based chain for naming actually makes a lot of sense. And then also at the time, it was the most robust, the most proven out, the most secure model. You know, even Ethereum right now is still undergoing a lot of changes.

And so in terms of, you know, constructing a DNS system for the world that, like, literally the entire world you can work on, you know, you can place your bet on some other chains. But in terms of something that's been proven out and works as is and can scale as is and also has like a basically a proven security. model, proof of work based chain is the best thing you can use. Yeah, I mean, you know, you don't have to sell me on proof of work. I'm, uh, I'm like the number one fan of proof of work probably. Um, but this is fascinating because, you know, in Bitcoin, we talk about probabilistic settlement and, you know, you have to be careful and make sure that you have sufficient blocks, but like, I guess what you're telling me is that

handshake names, it's sort of a public key infrastructure of the blockchain itself. And you're not. really as reliant on blockchain settlement to you know for the integrity of the system to be upheld that's not as as relevant i mean it certainly helps but you're just you're sort of more protected by cryptography than you are by mining incentives is that sort of a fair way to characterize it yeah yeah although you still need the mining incentives right like it still needs to be hard for someone to just you know completely redo the history of the chain but uh

It can be, you don't need as rigorous integrity as you normally need for a preferred based chain being used for money. And then in terms of the risk of, you know, hash power being fungible, that's also not applicable with Handshik because Handshik is mostly A6 today, is that correct? Yeah, it was actually done, it was specifically used a like a very simple, like a modification of like Shah 3, very simple hatching algorithm, just so that it would be very easily asicable. And then, yeah, most of the hash power is A6. That's as far as I'm aware. The classic debate, which has rumbled for years and years, like do you, if you're launching

a proof of work chain, should you embrace A6 so that you can differentiate yourself from other chains so that you can't get nice hashed? Or do you try and, you know, like Minero, I think has random acts? Or do you try and. building an ASIC resistant hash function so that you can be more decentralized in your mining. It's honestly one of the most fascinating debates that people don't talk about anymore because proof of work is completely out of fashion, but I still love to think about it. Do you have a stance or do you think that Handshakes model is sort of just good enough? Yeah, I think one is I think Handshakes model is good enough, but I also think it really

depends. I don't think I would be able to say, oh, there's a a clear winner and there obviously isn't if that debate's been going on for so long. But I think it's also based on the community model. So in order to have, you know, be ASIC resistant, usually you have to have a cat and mouse game, you know, like forever. So like, you know, David at Siacoin, he had to fight this battle a lot where they, you know, had to change the network to go and, you know, break the ASICs and all this stuff. And so in order to do that model successfully, you basically need a,

like centralized authority or like a driving force in that community that can, you know, push through those changes. For Handshake, it was, you know, from day one, the initial creators were meant to step back and just completely decentralized themselves. And so, you know, they wouldn't actually be able to continue that cat and mouse game. And so for Handshake, it, by necessity, needed to be asickable because you can't really have that cat and mouse game. But in terms of like which one's better, I don't, I think it could really just be a matter of

if your community has a, you know, like a founder, right? So like Moneros has their initial team, right? Or Ethereum has Vitalik or whatever. Then if your community has that like kind of like almost central authority, then you can play that game. But if your community is really decentralized, you probably are going to have a hard time playing that game. And so you should go the other route.

Yeah, that's a great point. So you have a, if you want to, you know, really commit. to decentralizing the governance of the project, you have a higher upfront burden. You have to define all those conditions that you're happy to keep fixed for a long period of time. So I guess that's why it makes sense. There's a lot of details on like the auction system

and how the initial issuance worked. Maybe just like talk us through very brief. There's sort of a lot, like kind of endless steps there, but maybe just briefly talk us through the initial issuance and what Handshake did that was different from the other sort of blockchain-based DNS systems. Yeah, so the mechanics that we really liked in Handshake, and this is something that I think has plagued the previous blockchain systems, like I mentioned with Naincoin, is the issuance was really, really deliberate. So what was done is, one, is all the names are registered through an auction

system. So if you bid 1,000 H&S on Nick Carter and I bid 500 H&S, you, you're a new. you would win and you would actually pay 500 H&S. You pay the second highest bid price for the name. And you're not actually paying to name base or a handshake foundation or anything like that. Those coins actually get burned. So there's a deflationary effect on the network. And so that's the first thing. And that's really important because different names are worth different amounts.

Some names you can get literally for free if no one else bids on them. You know, some names might cost about $100 worth of H&S. All the way to the most expensive names, you know, Dot wallet went for 350,000 H&S, which is around, you know, like $50,000. So that was actually the most expensive auction of all time. And then actually, you know, dot NFT recently was bought on the secondary market through namebase for $84,000. And so, you know, different names have different, are worth different amounts.

And if you just have all the names sold at a set price, what that incentivizes is it just incentivizes, you know, whales and early adopters to come in and just buy up all the good names. So an option system makes it so that the names are at least distributed to whoever, you know, wants it the most. And in this case, wants it the most is measured by, you know, paying the most. And so you want that for the distribution. On top of that, they also, you also want to prevent early adopters on day one from being able to get all the good names because, you know, day one, there might be only 20 people using the network. Now there are thousands, but on day one, if there's only 20 and you're able to auction all the names, then that means that you're basically going to get a ton of names for free

because you're just not going to have that much competition. So what Handshank did to prevent this was over the course of the first year, it actually just finished that rollout because Handshank launched about a year ago in February. So over the course of the first year, the names were rolled out where every week a new set of names was available for bidding. And so if you came on week one, you only had a limited number of names that you can go and bid on. And some of the names you had to wait months for in order to be able to bid on it.

But that enabled people who came in, you know, 11 months in, to still have access to a lot of good auctions that the early adopters wanted, but they weren't able to start bidding on yet because the names were withheld from being bid on. So those two aspects for Handshake were really important because that ensures much more distributed, you know, name distribution effectively. And then Handshick also earmarked, was it the top 100,000 Alexa domains so that squatting would be prevented for like the marquee names and they could claim them? Exactly, yes.

So like only Google.com can claim dot Google. And there's like this decentralized on chain way for Google.com to do that using this thing called a DNSGroof. That's fairly technical, but basically only, you know, for the top of the Alexa top 100K, you know, those brands, they can still claim their name on Handshake without competition. And that was done in order to enable these brands to actually, you know, I don't know if this has happened immediately. But I say three years from now, handshakes getting a lot of adoption, now brands are looking at it. If Google was looking at handshake and getting excited about it, but someone else had dot Google and they're just squatting on it, then Google is going to be much less inclined to actually go and adopt the protocol. But now they actually can adopt the protocol because they can go and get their name.

And not only were the Alexa top 100K names reserved, but also all the existing ICANTLDs were reserved. So when you're using Handshake and your browser, your normal internet just works. All the traditional ICANTLDs just work. And it's just you just get access to all the additional Handshake TLDs as well. So it's funny that you brought up Nick Carter. So I do own Nick Carter on Handshack. I bought it through Namebase. So thank you.

It's a great service. Yeah. Yeah. Someone actually bid against me. I hope it wasn't you when I was buying. it and I had to up my bid, which I thought was very rude, honestly. It's like, come on. Like, I am Nick Carter. I should own it. How could anybody else presume to bid on my name? So what would I then do with it? Like, what do I, you know, what's next for me? Like, if I want to use that,

that, that, that handchecked domain. Yeah. Oh, I'm so, I'm so happy you have that name. I mean, we could we could set you up while we're on this podcast. There's three immediate things they can do that I think are really interesting use cases. One is you can, we have this product called D-Links, which is basically like a decentralized link tree on Handshake and SkyNet. And so the naming is done via Handshake and the storage is on the Skynet network. And actually a lot of people, like around 400 people have already created D-Links, which is, you know, if you think about D-LAPs, they only have like a thousand, like, even the top ones only have like a thousand apps. And so, you know, for only one month to launch, the fact that around 500 people have used D-Links, that's been pretty excited to me.

And we also had Lange, Franz, who's one of like the top rappers in the Netherlands also has a D-Link randomly enough. So that is one use case. The other use case is you can easily set up redirects on your name. So that's nice just because if you have your name and you have like blog. dot Nick Carter, for example, it's just an easy way for you to share links. Like I actually use that into my day-to-day. It's just a really nice convenience function. You can also connect your WordPress.

I know you have a blog. You can connect your WordPress to your name so that Nick Carter, people can visit that. and Handshake. And the other use case that we just released is Handshake Login, which is you can actually use your Handshake name for Decentralized Login. And this is super cool because it actually enables you to create a fully decentralized social network. And we're actually working with David at Skynet for a spec that I'm pretty sure it's going

to be fairly groundbreaking because you can actually create a decentralized social network with the functionality of, you know, Reddit.com and Twitter.com, except the infrastructure is completely decentralized and anyone can build on it. But without getting ahead of myself, we created a forum, name or news. So if you just go to news.names.com, you can actually use your handshake name to log into that. And you should definitely go and introduce yourself on that forum. And it's cool because that name that are using to log in, you can use it and log into any other site that chooses to support it. And so that's a new primitive that we're working on sharing with developers, because you can use that to create a really cool decentralized applications, you know,

including the decentralized social networks. So it's awesome that there's a synergy, especially between two Boston-based projects. Let's go. For the decentralized web, do you have a shorthand? Do you call it Web3 or D-Web? Like, what would you call this new sort of like territory that were that were you know this new frontier yeah i usually call it dweb uh or decentralized web um i i actually i've been wondering what like a better short name would be because like dweb and like web three like sounds pretty good uh but i like defy as like a short name just like that's like the perfect uh shortener for decentralized finance um so i was trying to think of if there's like a better one for the d web but yeah it's

It's basically the decentralized web. Yeah, maybe we should rebrand it because it looks like we're getting critical mass now. Like a lot of these things work, you know, and they didn't work in like 2017, I would say, when we had like the first, you know, big, the big run up and like tons of attention. But like quietly, a lot of these things work and now they're interoperating. And so like you've got SIA for storage and handshake for authentication and credentials. It's pretty awesome to see them interoperating. In terms of...

Oh, yeah, and I would just add, Nick, like not only do they work, but also now people care. Like when we started this, when we started NameBase, our thesis was that, you know, as a traditional internet continues to become consolidated and censored, the need for decentralization and decentralized DNS would grow even stronger. And at the time, like literally no one cared about these issues. No one cared about censorship resistance.

You know, it was like a few techies and a few like cyberpunks and whatnot. But like for the most part, no one cared. And now for better for worse, you know, especially after the events of the last few months, now a lot of people, you know, I would say half of America even, right? If you look at, you know, what usually conservatives online are saying, now so many people, are actually aware of the issues of, you know, consolidation and censorship on the internet. And they're really looking for these alternative platforms.

And the issue has been that none of these alternatives like Macedon and these other attempts, none of them actually could ever get the usability right because they, you know, in a federated system, just with the technologies available, you just couldn't really solve the U.S. issues. But now these decentralized protocols like Handshake and Skynet and, you know, you have decentralized compute with a cache and all this other. stuff is actually reaching technical maturity to the point that you can create these decentralized web applications that are just as good as the predecessors. And they're actually even more powerful.

And that's a whole separate tangent that I'm happy to get into, but they're even more extensible and powerful than the existing paradigm of a, you know, server client model. And so that's just starting to become technically possible. And it's kind of crazy to me that for whatever reason, it's also become culturally important because without that, then no one would go and use it. So for whatever reason, the stars are kind of aligning. And I think we're going to see some really crazy applications in the next six to 12 months. Yeah, I have that exact same intuition, which is why for our second fund, we specifically called out the Dweb as one of our main focuses. As you say, like we've reached maturity here, you know, a certain stage of maturity where,

these are now viable from a mass market perspective or they're getting there. And there's a lot of like political and cultural salience. Like there's a real urgency there. It kind of, it's a little bit like Bitcoin launching in the financial crisis. Now we have a bit of a internet infrastructure crisis. So it seems very, very relevant. In terms of actually getting handshake over the next threshold, getting it over the next hurdle, What are the big steps remaining?

Like what, what, you know, is it browser integrations? What, like, what takes us to there from here? Yeah. So on the one hand for using handshake sites for like normal decentralized DNS, browser integrations are the next steps and their efforts in the community for that. And that's, and just going back to the community point, one of the interesting things about decentralization is that the community has basically had to learn and develop a muscle for pushing initiatives forward, even though there's no, like, you know, central ring leader.

And so the community is actually becoming a lot more competent and capable over time. Now a lot of community members are, you know, evangelizing handshake in a way that they weren't able to before because they're also getting better at understanding handshake. And now with the use cases, it's a lot easier to explain handshake. So that's kind of developing. But basically the next steps are for normal DNS, the browser integrations are important. For the decentralized web applications, actually, that's just a matter of developer documentation and showing developers what's possible. So what we're working on heavily at Namebase is really fleshing out these use cases and

creating documentation for developers. It's actually a playbook from Twilio because we got to speak with really early employees at Twilio, and they have an explicit method of basically their strategy is inspire and equip. They inspire developers with, you know, example apps that are really cool, and then they equip them with documentation and tools that they need to basically get started really easily. And in Handshick right now, you know, you might have experienced this, like a lot of the documentation and the onboarding, just very opaque. And especially for developers, if you're actually trying to build a decentralized website or a decentralized login or a decentralized social network,

there's actually really no documentation walking you through the process. So what we're working on right now is creating that documentation. And I think that that's really the key because once that's available, then we can start sharing that with developers and start incentivizing and inspiring them to go and create these decentralized web applications. And I really think that that's it. Like once we have one of these decentralized web applications that actually hits, I think that a handshake and basically all of these like decentralized web technologies like Skynet and some of these other ones, they'll be seeing a lot more interest and adoption. And that's something that I think we'll start to see come to fruition within the next

six months. This is really, really exciting. I'll confess. that buying domains on on handshake is really dicting and and pretty fun the auction process too although I don't like it when people bid against me in the auctions oh yeah I don't know who that was but I'm glad that you want it very cheeky yeah do you have any what are some metrics that you'd point to to show traction or like you know what do the charts look like in terms of you know utilization or or people acquiring I mean is there like a adoption of domains? Like what's the, what's the state of affairs there? Yeah, totally. So if you go to namebase.io slash stats, we actually just created this stats dashboard

for the community. So people could actually see the adoption. But it's been fairly remarkable. So for example, there's one growth loop of just, you know, the more users there are, the more valuable handshake names become to the existing users and the more valuable they are the more users you get but effectively what we've been seeing on the secondary marketplace is it's been growing at so people are you know buying and selling the names that's been growing at 70% month over month which has been crazy to see and just last month in January the marketplace cross 1.2 million million H&S in transaction volume, which is about, you know, like $200,000 in transaction volume for the month. And then in terms of the registered names over time, that's been growing significantly.

If you go to the chart, you see it's just up into the right. So now they're about 600,000 names registered. And we also track the number of handshake domains in use. And we define that as if you register the name and you change the DNS settings, then that's a name in use. And that's been growing 20% month over month. And now there are over 8,000 of those handjake domains in use. And it's actually kind of a non-truple problem to map out what other domains are being used for. But we just created a showcase at NameRay News.

If you go to News, that namebase. You can see that showcase. And it kind of shows some of the websites that people are, you know, creating some of the applications that people are creating with their handshake name. But basically, these are some of the metrics that we look at in determining the health of the network. And it's been growing in pretty much all the dimensions exponentially, which has been amazing. Really, really interesting.

Yeah. I'm sure some of the bit corners are going to grumble at me for, you know, spending time on this project. but I find it absolutely fascinating and and and and domaining is is really addicting as well so Tishon thanks so much for coming on man obviously name base but where can where can people find you and and follow you yeah so if you go to my d link which is if you're if you're not resolving on handshake which most of you aren't and go to tashon.h.h.h.h.h.h. h.m.t.t.t.m.m.m................................................................

. ................... just a gateway for Handshake. I have the Tashan name and all of my links are posted there. You can also find namebases dlink at nb.h.h.m.m.m. And you can find links there to our community. We have a Discord that's fairly active. I'm active on Twitter as well.

Tashan R, but you can just find that through the D link. And yeah, that's probably the best way to get in touch. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on today. This has been really, really interesting. Thanks for having me, Nick. It's been great.