The Pomp Podcast - Tieshun Roquerre, CEO of Namebase: The Decentralized Web Explained

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Tieshun Roquerre is the CEO of Namebase, a secure and easy platform to interact with Handshake. In this conversation, Tieshun and Anthony discuss what Handshake is and why it’s important, how the decentralized web is coming fast, and how Namebase empowers people to buy, sell, and hold Handshake coins while also buying and selling domains. TRAVALA.COM-----Travala.com is the world’s leading blockchain-based travel booking platform trusted by thousands of customers worldwide as their preferred online travel agency. Book over 2 Million hotels and accommodations and pay with 25 cryptocurrencies or credit and debit cards.  -----If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Check out Off the Chain newsletter by visiting offthechain.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Tayshaun Roquer is the founder of Namebase, a secure and easy platform to interact with Handshake. In this episode, we talked about what is Handshake, why is it important, how the decentralized web is coming fast, and how namebase empowers people to buy sell and hold handbase while also buying and selling domains i really enjoyed this conversation and i hope you do as well but before we get into it i want to talk about the sponsor for today's episode travel up travel is the world's leading blockchain based travel booking platform trusted by thousands of customers worldwide their value proposition is They've created a frictionless travel booking experience that incorporates next-generation blockchain technology and tokenized incentives.

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Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital all opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management you should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy

but only as an expression of his opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys bang bang i've got taishan here uh lots of stuff going on um we invested in namebase a while ago uh pre handshake uh namebase launching and uh it's live yeah it's on it is on game on um but let's first talk about your background and kind of uh what you did pre-crypto and then we'll get into uh into what's going on with the handshake yeah totally um i have a bit of a

non-traditional background. Basically, I got my career started at a company called Teespring, which was really big a while ago. It's still pretty big, actually, but they're a custom apparel selling platform. I was an engineer there and actually left high school to work there. Left high school? Left high school, yeah. After sophomore year. You left high school after your sophomore year? I didn't know that. Yeah. Oh, I didn't share that before. No, I didn't know that. All right. What was the logic behind leaving high school as a sophomore?

more yeah so they were it was it was pretty crazy because i'm from boston but i i'd emailed the ceo and i got an internship there for the summer and at the time they were doing a million dollars in revenue every day yeah so it was just blowing up like most of that was coming through facebook i think mostly through facebook yeah so it was just an insane amount of revenue and growth uh and it's just like empowering people to be their own like entrepreneurs effectively uh so i i saw that opportunity as like i really wanted to work there and get the experience uh so convince my school let me take like a gap year effectively between my sophomore and junior year. And then I worked at Teespring for that year, full time. What was the biggest takeaway?

Yeah, I mean, big takeaway was that I can do something that I want to do that is ambitious. And so we pretty good at it. It was pretty, you know, it's pretty non traditional kind of some people kind of thought I was crazy, like they didn't think it was a good idea. And then ended up working out. So I think, like taking the bet on myself was something that I kind of internalized. that's uh that's one of my favorite things to tell people is just bet on your fucking self man yeah like it's one of these things where when you bet on yourself if you succeed you win if you bet on yourself and you fail you can sleep at night yeah right like the worst thing in the world would be to be in that situation want to go do it not do it and then every night be worried about you

know damn should i have done it and so uh what what year is this that you do this was 2014 okay so 2014 i'm at facebook i'm running uh the growth team oh facebook pages yeah and teespring was absolutely killing us because they were doing all kinds of crazy shit on facebook and it was one of those things where like it's good because someone's super excited about facebook but they were also doing things uh i think teespring was the one who was taking people's last names yeah yeah facebook hated teespring that was huge at the time so what uh teespring was doing which was very smart was they would basically run an ad and in the ad they would pull the user's last name and then insert that last name onto the t-shirt image and then put that in the ad all dynamically so i would

see like pompliano family rocks t-shirt yeah and i'm like oh shit like that's a cool t-shirt right the problem is that not everyone is dumb like me and some people are like hey dude that's creepy and so facebook was like i think we had to like literally change the rules on the advertising system uh to prevent using last names and all kinds of stuff but teespring was very very innovative and cutting edge when it came to a lot of stuff yeah that was uh and it wasn't necessarily teespring specifically it was the uh the entrepreneurs on teespring a lot of them were these like affiliate marketers and those guys were really creative in terms of what they uh what they could do because the teespring system if i remember correctly is uh essentially allows me to

come up with a design post the design i don't have to touch t-shirts i don't touch supply chain i don't have to touch payment processing anything i can just put my design up and then people can come in and buy it and teespring takes care of everything exactly yeah super smart um all right so you do that uh would you do it again uh oh yeah 100 everything i mean everything really worked out. So I think in a parallel universe, things wouldn't have worked out. And that risk was pretty capped in terms of what would happen. If I didn't like it, I would go back to school after that year. I'd be a year older, but I would still go down the traditional path. But I didn't have to do that because at the end of that gap year, I ended up starting a company with my friend who

was a Teal fellow at the time. And we got into Y Combinator. What was the company? Strong Intro. So that was a recruiting startup. We basically helped tech companies grow their engineering team through employee referrals. It's probably the best way to grow your early team. And then we ended up getting into what was, you might've remembered the YC Fellowship, which was like a short experiment that they started. And we were in the first batch. We were actually the first company accepted into that. It was like 20 out of 6,500 applicants. And from there we got into the core Y Combinator program. And that's when I officially dropped out of school, uh, to do that because, you know, people try multiple years in a row to get into

YC. It was like a once in a lifetime opportunity. To me, YC is probably actually better than high school. If you know that you want to go build companies, right? Like, like that education that you get and kind of practical application is going to be much more applicable to your life than going in, sitting in 11th grade math. Right. Like what, uh, I was talking to somebody recently and uh i was in like the uh the basic classes but uh somebody was like yeah like you remember anything about trigonometry no right like maybe some algebra you remember but other than that there's a lot of education that goes uh that's kind of more generalized and for people who don't know what they want to do that's really valuable right but for people who know hey it's what i

want to go do something like a yc is probably actually more valuable to them right i agree 100 yeah um all right let's get into uh what you're doing today is all built on and around handshake uh but before we talk about handshake i want to talk about kind of the legacy website domains uh and kind of technology stack so walk us through how do these naming services work how do dns's work like how do you think about that infrastructure um that currently is based in the web that we know as today. Yeah, it's really fascinating, actually, because DNS, the domain name system, it's infrastructure that powers the entire internet, right? Every time you type in google.com or facebook.com, you're using DNS. But it's basically technology that was

duct taped together and barely works effectively. The reason why is because when it was started, no one really assumed that the internet would get as big as it would get, right? There was that famous Nobel Prize winning economist who was like, yeah, yeah, there's a, you know, it'll never get that big, it'll be like one company or whatever. But anyways, and then it blew up. So the internet DNS infrastructure has basically not scaled with the usage of the internet and the importance of it. The way it works today is, it's basically a tree hierarchy, you have TLDs, and the root zone TLDs are top-level domain names. So an example of that is .com, .org, .net.

And then each of those TLDs are owned by an organization or an entity. VeriSign, for example, owns .com. So let's go real slow here because I think this is a really important part. So a TLD is a top-level domain. That .com, .org, whatever is actually owned by somebody, right? So VeriSign, for example, is a private company? Yes. All right.

So VeriSign owns .com. And so they just – when they bought .com or how did they come into ownership of .com? Yeah, it was kind of a weird situation, but they basically had ownership over .com. And then when I can try – like there's some like controversy and then they like sue them to like get the rights to it or whatever. So there's a lot of controversy, but basically there's a long history. But now they own .com and they basically are able to charge everyone who buys a domain name. a few dollars, like $5, $10 every year. So the top level domain is the .com.org.edu.whatever, right? When I buy google.com, facebook.com, etc., the Google, the Facebook, whatever comes before

the .com, what is that called? Yeah. So that is a second level domain. Okay. A second level domain. Yeah. And those are what you get to buy normally. Got it. And so if I buy – let's say all of a sudden I found Google.com through one of these website services that sell domain names. I could buy Google.com from Google, kind of the person who currently owns the second-level domain, or if no one has ever owned it before, I would be buying it from VeriSign. Is that right? Yeah, it's actually an intermediary in front of VeriSign. So there's another ecosystem participant called a registrar, a domain registrar. And they basically work with VeriSign and they're able to register .com domains. And they pay VeriSign a cut and then they usually charge a little bit of margin on top of that. Okay. So when I'm buying through GoDaddy or one of these domain services, I'm either buying from the person who currently owns it, who's another corporation individual, whoever, or I'm buying it through a registrar who is basically acting for VeriSign and they're splitting the revenue from that sale. Yeah, exactly. And GoDaddy would be the registrar in that case. Okay. So as that system has worked for decades now, who comes up with more top-level domains?

So there's .com, then there was .co. Now you can pretty much buy all kinds of top-level domain or second-level domains for those top levels. Who comes up with those? So it's this entity called the ICANN, and they effectively assign the new TLDs, and they decide who gets which TLD. It was actually – it used to be run by the U.S. government, and then they basically spun that out as like a nonprofit because other countries were uncomfortable with the U.S. government having that much power. But the ICANN is still a U.S.-based organization. They're based in L.A., and they decide who gets which TLDs. Got it. Uh, so I'm already seeing some issues here with, uh, the registrars, I can't, et cetera. I'm assuming that they have a pretty good oversight and governance over this system,

even after you've bought the second level domain. Um, yeah, yeah, there, there are basically, there's like a significant number of rules that each of the, uh, TLD owners have. And then the, uh, TLD owners are able to basically extract, uh, enforce policies on the, uh, domains that are sold, and they're able to revoke them or seize them or shut them down. And then ICANN as well has a lot of discretion in terms of how they manage the issuance of new TLDs and also existing TLDs. So for example, ICANN recently lifted the price caps on .com domains. This happened just two days ago. And those domains are now going to become 70% more expensive over

the next decade. When you say a price cap, what does that mean? So before, there was a limit on how much VeriSign could charge for each domain, and that was just removed. What was that limit? Do you know? I forget the exact – Like $5, $10, or like $100? It's a percentage cap on how much you can increase the percentage price per year. Got it. All right.

And so in this system, when ICANN hands out the top-level domains, how do they choose who gets to own the top-level domain? That seems like a situation ripe for either corruption or influence or something. It's really funny you point that out because it is a corrupt system. It sounds like there's a nonprofit that's handing out a basically free product to somebody and that person could turn around and make a lot of money with it. And so I can imagine there's jockeying for who receives it. So there is this huge controversy recently because I can try to sell dot org, which is, you know, obviously one of the most popular TLDs in the world. and they basically sold it for a very cheap price to a private equity firm

that had no other participants in the auction. It was just a private deal with that private equity firm and it was run by the ex-CEO of ICANN. So the private equity- Oh, the private equity firm that bought it is run by the ex-CEO of ICANN. Yeah, we're strongly affiliated. It was partners of the ex-CEO.

So it basically just reeked of corruption. There is a huge uproar on the internet about it. And it's still not settled. They still might be able to sell .org to that private equity firm. Okay, so let's say that worst case scenario, it's corruption. Best case scenario, it's favoritism, right? Is that probably accurate? Yeah, but it's a hard pitch to even frame it as favoritism.

Okay, why? It's pretty corrupt because the entire deal, basically, it was like everything was done behind closed doors. There was not a period for other bidders to come in. It was just done with that one private equity firm as a deal. So it's pretty hard to even frame it as favoritism. And ICANN previously owned .org? They basically get to determine – it's a complicated situation, but they kind of help determine where it goes effectively.

Okay. And so do you remember what the purchase price is? It was around like a billion or something. So for only a billion dollars, you could own .org, and every time somebody buys a .org domain, essentially you're getting a cut of that transaction. Exactly, yeah. I'm assuming that they make more than a billion dollars a year doing that. It's actually less than a billion dollars per year, but you basically do the discounted cash flow. But the thing that they did not include in it was right before the private equity firm bought it, they got ICANN to lift the price caps on the .org domain.

So the valuation was based on the previous revenue, and then they lifted the price cast, and then they got it for an extreme discount effectively. Got it. Yeah. Sounds pretty sketchy. Yeah. All right. So the old world, we understand. We all use it.

Some of us understand the technical components. Some of us just have the user experience by typing in a kind of human-readable URL. And then Handshake comes along. Talk to me about what exactly is Handshake? What are they trying to build? Who's behind it? All that. Yeah. So Handshake is a new protocol that is effectively putting these TLDs on a blockchain.

The easy way to think about it is functionally, it's actually very similar to Bitcoin. It's a proof of work based chains. It has UTXOs and all that. But instead of using the coins as money, use the coins register names on the Handshake blockchain. And these names are TLDs. So anyone can register their own TLD on Handshake. It works through this Vickrey auction completely on-chain. And the benefit of having this TLD on-chain is that one, the entire issuance process is decentralized, right? So you don't need an ICANN to determine who gets what. It's just an open system. And the TLD being on-chain makes it very, very difficult for these names to be seized or censored. It also makes the issuance very private. You don't need to go and reveal your identity when

or buying these domains effectively. And then it also improves, it provides a set function improvement in the security. And that I'd have to get a little bit more into the technical details. But basically when you type in like HTTPS into your browser, there's an entire system that manages that.

And that system is not very secure today. And Handshake is effectively providing a more secure system for this. Okay, so Handshake has rebuilt the domain system that is going to be based on a blockchain and that domain system has a couple of key differences right and you just name some of them so one of them is uh now there's a decentralized um kind of assignment process so uh i can can't go to the ex-ceo of i can and say hey you get that org Right. And that decentralized process really is this Vickry auction. Right. And as I've learned more about this, what's interesting to me is that rather than say, hey, handshakes launching, which it just did, here's every single name that could possibly be available.

what they're doing is they're essentially just releasing a kind of infrequently a couple at a time right and so uh you may like let's say for me if i want uh you know dot um i don't know dot bitcoin right i can't just go today and buy it i've got to wait for dot bitcoin as the top level domain on handshake become available but that may not happen for months or whatever right yeah Yeah, exactly. So Handshake basically learned from predecessors and previous naming attempts. And there are a few key differences that basically helped me build a conviction that Handshake could succeed. One is it's not replacing the entire DNS system. It's just replacing the root zone. So just the hierarchy at the top. Everything else is actually pretty decentralized already.

But basically, it's very focused in terms of what it's trying to improve. And then the other issue is early adopters getting to bid on all the good names in previous attempts. and basically squatting on an every good name. So the names are rolled out over the course of 52 weeks. Any name is available for bidding and will be available for bidding at some point over the 52 weeks. But if you come on day one,

you only have one over 52 of that entire namespace. Got it, okay. And so in this auction process, let's say that .Bitcoin name in week 14 becomes available. All right, I'm making this up. But in week 14, you and I both want it. We essentially are going into a system. we'll get to what those systems can be um and we're gonna bid a monetary amount to get it whoever

has the highest bid wins uh yes exactly got it and so this is a pretty good way to do price discovery yes right yeah and then remind me a vickrey auction is basically i put a here's the most amount of money i'm willing to pay and every other participant does that and then i if i'm the winning bid i just pay one dollar more than the last the second highest bid uh you just pay exactly the second highest bid okay so i would so let's say i say i'm willing to pay ten thousand dollars for dot bitcoin everyone else is less than ten thousand the second highest bid was nine thousand five hundred i'd pay nine thousand five hundred because i was willing to pay more but i just have to pay what exactly yeah got it very interesting um okay so why exactly does the dns

need a blockchain, right? As kind of you think about what Handshake's built, like why is a blockchain necessary? That's a great question. And there's a few reasons why blockchain is helpful in this case. Honestly, when you're talking with developers and those are probably the people

that you really most strongly need to convince with something as technical as Handshake, the key reason is actually security. So blockchains, at least today, are like pretty inefficient. They're difficult to use. There's a lot of negatives when it comes to using them

in comparison to a normal database. But the thing that they're really good at is basically trust, right? They are trust minimizing and in systems where you don't want to have a single entity in control of that trust, they're really good at solving that. So in the traditional system, the way that security is on the TLS, which determines HTTPS, basically that system is managed by this group of entities called a certificate authority. So these certificate authorities basically determine the security of the internet today. And those certificate authorities are very vulnerable to hacking, and they can be compromised very easily.

Because the way it works is that when you visit a website with HTTPS, if any one of the certificate authorities that are involved in that system gets compromised, and there are thousands of them, then your internet traffic is compromised. So it's like a one of many failure system. Instead, what Handshake is saying is instead of using these certificate authorities, let's shift the trust to this distributed blockchain. And instead of this one of many system, you need the entire blockchain to basically be compromised in order for the security to be compromised. So that is the key insight for Handshake of why it's providing a set function improvement in the security.

It's shifting the root of trust from a certificate authority based system to a distributed ledger that is basically backed by the blockchain. Got it. And so do I prove my ownership of the root domain or kind of top level domain? Like, how does that work? Yeah. So it basically works like owning Bitcoin. You have a private key and a wallet. And as long as you control the private key for that domain, you own that domain and only you can update the records or move it or do anything with it. So, you know, outside of security, there are additional benefits that come from being on the blockchain, which is that you can truly own your domain name. You know, most people don't realize that they're only renting

domain names when they buy them today. So you're effectively only a renter, you're not an owner. And that's why you have to keep paying on an annual basis. Exactly. With Handshake, you can truly own your domain name and no one can seize that from you. And also for the end users that are trying to resolve it, right? You're trying to type in google.com. Google.com doesn't work in every jurisdiction. It's very easy to basically do DNS censorship. China. Yeah, exactly. And Handshake just makes that significantly more difficult to censor. So you, by being on the blockchain, you get this sense of true ownership, you get the privacy,

but you also get access because now end users anywhere around the world can access your name effectively. Got it. And so part of this system that's interesting to me is if I can now be that private equity firm that owns .org or I can own .com or .bitcoin or whatever, and I truly own it, Can I sell you as somebody else a second-level domain? So if I own .Bitcoin, could I then turn around on Handshake and sell somebody else like Pomp.Bitcoin or Tayshaun.Bitcoin, etc.? Yeah, you totally can. Got it. And so really, by getting a top-level domain, I could essentially be getting a business, right, where I'm able to kind of cut up the second-level domains and then sell those off as individual assets to people who want to use those.

Do they own the second-level domain or are they just renting the second-level domain? Yeah. So in that system, it actually depends on how you construct it. Okay. There's a world in which you even create a sidechain effectively on top of your top-level domain that you own. And that can be its own completely decentralized system because this is all managed on a blockchain. You can basically write technology that makes it very decentralized. Or you can go to traditional route where you say, okay, I own .Bitcoin or let's say I own .Pomp and I want to sell all these second level domains.

And there's basically a system that you can plug into that makes that very easy. And you can go and sell those domains. So you can run that own business. And what we've seen is that, you know, there are other companies in the space that are selling these, you know, specific extensions for those domains and they're doing very well. So effectively what Handshake enables is anyone can build their own business like that and start selling these domains. How long ago did Handshake launch? A week ago. A week ago.

Isn't there a rap song? A week ago, a week ago. What's the highest price someone's paid for a top level domain so far? Yeah. So we've yet to see that because right now we're still in the mining period of Handshake. Basically, the network has a limit on transactions for the first two weeks to allow for a sufficient mining capacity to come on to Handshake. And right now it's great because there is significant interest in Handshake. So I think the current mining rate is something like 15 like Tera hashes. I know CoinMine, which people know I'm quite fond of and an investor, they actually enabled, I think they were one of the first ones, they enabled their consumer devices to mine Handshake right on day one.

Exactly, yeah. They support it as well. So basically after this two-week period, then the registrations open up, and that's when you can start bidding on these domain names. And so what we have for all of our users is they've already started adding these names to their watch list so that they get notified and they can automatically go and bid. uh so there's a lot of excitement there all right you're not part of the name of the handshake business right you're not on their engineering team you're building a completely separate company called name base uh what does that do yeah totally so name base is i know the answer just so everyone's clear we are investors uh i'm just leading him it's actually the first time i'm

explaining the business to anthony i just invested blindly um yeah so basically name base is uh What we do is we built a domain registrar on top of Handshake and an on-ramp for Handshake. So in order to participate in these auctions, you need to use H&S to do it. And that's the Handshake token? That's the Handshake token. And the actual process is kind of difficult to do. It's kind of annoying. You have to be a developer.

So what we realized is we saw the potential of this technology. We want to make it spread as fast as possible to as many people as possible. So we built tools to make it easier to use. So we have an on-ramp so you can come on to Namebase and buy H&S anywhere around the world. And you can use that H&S and Namebase to bid on any of these domain names. So we have a GUI that makes it really easy. An easy way to think about Namebase conceptually is we're kind of like a combination of GoDaddy and Coinbase. Got it.

So right now, if I want to buy H&S, which is the handshake token, and I need H&S to buy a top-level domain, are you guys the only place I can get it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the only place I can get it right now is on name base. Once I get HNS after this two week kind of waiting period for the mining capacity to come online, then I can actually go buy dot Bitcoin or whatever top level domains are available. Exactly. Yeah. And I, and I would also note that, uh, the way that we enabled that, uh, right now we're the only liquid exchange for HNS, uh, is basically we, we were aware of this two week, uh, mining only period. And so we partnered with, uh, miners actually, uh, mining pools that they mine directly into a name base.

And so we're able to sell that HNS now, even when it's not available anywhere else. Got it. And so if I buy that topleveldomain.bitcoin, can I then turn around and sell my second level domains to other people through Namebase or will I have to go somewhere else? Yeah, you will eventually be able to do that. Right now, that infrastructure hasn't been built out. Got it. Okay.

And so what does this become, right? Like when I think about kind of the web infrastructure, it makes a ton of sense to have domains that are hard to censor, that are hard to take down, et cetera. And there's a number of people working on this, right? Handshake and name base. There's unstoppable domains, et cetera. What is kind of the end game here? Do we replace the entire internet with these kind of decentralized domain systems or is there kind of coexistence? How do you think about that?

Yeah, the way that I see this adoption happening is there is a sense of coexistence. Basically, what I expect is that Handshake is going to eat TLDs. Handshake is going to be how new TLDs get issued. Pretty much everyone in the world is going to be on it eventually. Even if you talk to existing DNS people, they kind of see the potential here just because it's very hard to solve the problems that Handshake solves without a blockchain-based technology. So even if it's not Handshake, eventually there will be a blockchain-based tool that does this.

However, there is a significant amount of DNS infrastructure that's already built out that the world relies on. And it is infeasible to just completely replace all of that. So that is why Handshake is just replacing the root zone, which is where most of the problems are. So you get 90% of the benefit by just replacing that with a blockchain. and all the second level TLD domains and that normal issuance and governance process, that can happen as normal. That just plugs into Handshake.

So what I expect is that Handshake is going to eat that, but then everything else, all this existing infrastructure, because we have path dependency, it's going to keep on being there, right? It's like why the New York subway is still not super fast, even though Tokyo and China have a lot faster subway systems.

So that existing infrastructure is going to stay there, but Handshake is going to replace the top level root zone. Got it. And then what's the user experience like if I want to go to one of these websites, right? So somebody's bought a top level domain, they've actually set it up, etc. Can I just go to my Google Chrome and type in something to navigate there? Or do I need to have some kind of special browser? Like what's that user experience look like? Yeah, so there are multiple different ways to use handshake. But effectively, there's and it's also dependent on your trust profile, right? Whether you want to use a third-party tool or just run your own,

right? Kind of like running a full node. So effectively what you can do is there are third-party resolvers and we're partnering with a few companies to make this really easy that you can just use. And it's effectively similar to using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 or Google's 8.8.8.8. Whoa, what are those? Yeah. Cloudflare 1.1.1? 1.1.1.1. So four ones? Four ones. Four ones. All right. What is that? And four eights. So basically these are DNS resolvers that Cloudflare and Google respectively run. And what they do is basically they just make your DNS resolution a little bit faster and more private. And also it's a little bit more censorship resistant because they unlock access to certain domains that are blocked in certain

countries. So these two resolvers already have hundreds of millions of users. And so this is existing behavior that people have which is you just point your dns to a new resolver it takes like five seconds in your computer or you can do it in your router uh and then you're done and then you're using that so handshake is the same way handshake you just point your dns to a handshake resolver and then you're able to resolve these handshake names and any computer that you use any browser any computer etc as long as i've pointed what you said my my router or or your computer or my computer yeah to the handshake resolver can i have multiple resolvers that my computer's pointed to uh yeah yeah you can like can i can i use the regular internet and also

go through this resolver at the same time and like yeah multiple tabs open and go back and forth that's a great question so handshake is actually completely compatible with the existing internet so that's that's one of the things that gave us conviction is because you know if you're trying to go and replace the entire internet with this blockchain based system and it's like a whole new system. That's basically going to... I have very little conviction that such a system like that would be able to succeed. What Handshake did is they're compatible with the existing system. So all the normal domains that you would access, school.com, facebook.com, segment.io, all those things, they will work as normal. The existing TLDs are all functional on Handshake. It's just

that the new TLDs that are registered through Handshake are going to be resolved through Handshake. So when you're using a Handshake compatible resolver, your internet experience is basically only improved because everything else works as normal and you just get access to this new namespace effectively. Got it. What do you think is the reason why this couldn't work? Obviously, you're bullish, I'm bullish. What are the reasons or the biggest threats to it not working? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think the easiest way to identify these issues is to look at what issues have played previous attempts. So first of all, you can't have any component of the system be centralized. It's kind of similar to

the Bitcoin predecessors, right? How they always had a central entity that effectively was shut down by the government. And so they never took off. And then Bitcoin basically decentralized everything. And then it is eating up the world. Same thing with handshakes. So there have been alternative root zone attempts in the past. And their only value add is that they're just like adding a new namespace. And that is not sufficient to basically unseat the network effects of the existing system. So that is the first component. It needs to be fully decentralized. The other thing is that the issuance of the names is incredibly important to get right. You don't want a system where the early adopters and whales are able to buy up all the good names. Because

what you end up getting is if when that happens, and that has happened in previous naming attempts, is that someone comes in, you know, eight months from now, they are interested in the system. They see none of the good names are available, but also that system has not, you know, basically taken the world by stride yet. And so why would you ever invest in that system and buy into it if you don't get access to the good names and it's not even that valuable yet. So you really want to prevent these early whales from being able to squat all the good names. You want to allow people who come in a little bit later to still adopt it and get benefit from it. It's like digital real estate, right? You want some of the good real estate to be reserved. So what Handshake

did is they created many mechanisms that effectively helped prevent early adopters in Wales from getting all the good names. You still get an advantage that's inherent in like a naming system, but it's not such an advantage that it's going to kill the system. So that's basically what we're, those are the mechanisms that Handshake has created to help mitigate failure. But we still haven't seen it work out yet, right? It's a handshake. The name registrations haven't even launched yet. So there is a world, if anything were to happen, I would see that mechanism not being as effective

as we thought it would. That could be a potential cause for failure. Got it. And so as you think through this, who are the people who are coming in first and interested? Is it the people who are traditionally squatting on domains and used to kind of benefiting from understanding the system? Yeah. The shocking thing for me is how diverse the initial set of community members is. So some of our earliest adopters, people who have been in our private beta for a while, because we were built on the Handshake testnet before, they're just crypto enthusiasts who are basically true believers. They kind of see what's wrong with the internet. They want to improve it and they're just super interested in it. And so it's interesting there because they're not only motivated financially, right?

They're going to speculate on the coins and the names and all that, but they also believe in the potential. And I think that's like the true power of crypto, right? You have this effectively a political or philosophical cause, and you can pair it with an economic opportunity. And the combination of that is incredibly powerful. So we have those people. We also have just normal speculators.

We have miners, but we also have actual normal domainers as well. So there is, for example, one of our community members, Park.io, they're a very popular domain registration site. They basically let you just order.io domains ahead of time. And they're also in our community. So we have existing domain brokers, domainers, developers as well. And there's a few partnerships that we're doing with people who are pretty big in the developer community that we're going to be launching live pretty soon. So it's very varied, but pretty much everyone in the ecosystem who can be interested is already interested, which is super cool to see from my end. For sure. Who's the team behind Handshake? Because it's a pretty impressive team,

if I remember correctly, right? They previously did something with the internet. Wait, hold on. That sounds really ridiculous. They did something with the internet, but they worked on core infrastructure components of the internet, right? Yeah, they're pretty involved with Bitcoin early on. So Handshake in general, at this point, is a very decentralized community. So there originally was a Handshake foundation that was put up. And they actually raised $10.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greylock, pretty much every investor in Silicon Valley. And they ended up donating all that money away to nonprofits and open source developers. That's the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever

heard. They raised money for their foundation, but people didn't get equity in anything. And And then they turned around and gave the money and donated it all. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah, those investors got tokens in the pre-sale. But then they literally didn't even use the money to develop it. And then the people behind that, some of the people involved were like Per Sadeo, Joseph Poon, who made Lightning Network. And there's another, Andrew Lee, who made Private Internet Access.

But they were basically only involved in the inception of it. They kind of kicked things off. And then now there's pretty much multiple ecosystem participants that are all involved in Handshake. There's us, there's another team called Urkel, and there's multiple developers. There's a developer community as well that's basically not them. And what basically we've seen is that the Handshake Foundation at this point is completely stepping aside. They basically just launched it and they're letting it out into the world. If you go onto the Handshake.org website, you'll see they even say everyone is a director of Handshake.

Like literally you can be a director of Handshake. You just have to say you're a director of Handshake. It's not owned by anyone. There's no creator of Handshake. So if anyone says they're a creator, you know they're just lying. It's bullshit. And pretty much it's a very decentralized community that is community-driven at this point. Got it.

And so when you think through this, like what keeps those developers building on Handshake? Because the way I think about this is name-based business is to facilitate the buying and selling of H&S and then the actual top-level domains. and then eventually it'll be the second level domains, et cetera. But you guys are dependent on those developers staying in the community, building this and kind of furthering what's being built. Like, how do you think about what that incentive looks like? Yeah, there's a few different incentives at play here.

One is that there's this really amazing airdrop mechanism that Handshake built in. They basically recognize that for this kind of thing to succeed, you always need the developers. And so what they did was basically there's a fully decentralized airdrop where the top 250,000 developers on GitHub are effectively eligible for this airdrop and they can claim around 4,000 H&S.

And so that gives the developers an economic incentive. And honestly, for developers, usually they're pretty well off and they're not that motivated by money. So really, it's an easy way for them to play around with the protocol. And usually the way that new technologies are adopted is you have developers playing around with it on the weekend, and then it becomes their full-time thing and they're super interested and it becomes the thing that everyone uses. Same thing with Bitcoin, right? It's like developers playing around with it on the weekend. Ethereum developers playing around with it on the weekend.

And now it's like everywhere. So there's this decentralized airdrop that gives developers some skin in the game. And then the other reason is that there are a lot of developers who are, if you know about DNS, if you're familiar with how the domain name system works as a developer, you're pretty much going to be not happy with how it works effectively. So we get a lot of people who are just like, oh, this is a way for us. This is like an incredible improvement over the existing system. And it's a way for us to just like unsee ICANN or unseat these bad actors that currently control the internet and effectively plague it. They collect rent on everyone in the world. So there's a lot of interest just from that.

And I think that's probably the main driving reason for developers being interested because typically developers are more philosophically, you know, they're more philosophically driven than anything else, right? It's like the entire open source movement. Like, why would you contribute all your free time on building this, like, you know, writing free software that anyone can use? It's because the developers just believe in it. You know, they have a cause. They want to create something for the world. So that's really the driving motivation for a lot of these people. Why are you working on this?

Yeah, so for me, it's kind of an interesting backstory. You know, I grew up in the U.S. here, so we don't really have too many issues with censorship yet. It's gotten worse over time, but, you know, compared to the rest of the world, it's a significant improvement. so i never really seen too much of this problem firsthand uh however uh when i went to mit that's where i studied after uh starting the company into mit who didn't go to high school who didn't finish high school yeah yeah i got i got pretty lucky yeah how does that work uh just apply maybe i should apply yeah they'll let me in their undergrad program yeah there are like 60 year olds at mit undergrad so yeah did they already get an undergrad degree somewhere else

um sometimes it varies like they're really like one of my uh friends he was this guy from canada who uh he like never finished high school and he was like a car mechanic for like six years and he's like 28 and then he uh went to mit after he like applied and got in so uh i think if you're interested in your like technologically interested as well uh that's probably a good i would be dumb enough to just apply get in and then drop out the first day and say i dropped out of mit yeah you You should do that. I'm sure there's some people who do it. So anyways, when I was there, one of the first things that I did after one of the semesters was I went and traveled to Turkey.

My old roommate was Turkish, so I got to travel with him. And the thing that struck me was not the cultural differences because I was actually kind of used to that with my roommate. It was when I tried to visit a few normal websites like Facebook or Twitter, it was blocked. I couldn't access it. I got this blue screen, seized by the Turkish government or whatever. And it was shocking to me because I had grown up on YouTube and Twitter. I learned how to program on YouTube, so I wouldn't even have gotten a job in the first place if I had never had access to those resources. And I basically realized that none of those people in Turkey have access to this, or it's very, very difficult for them to get access.

You have to jump through a lot of hoops to basically avoid the censorship that they have. That's one of the reasons why Cloudflare and Google's resolvers are popular, actually, in Turkey. So I saw that problem, but I also kind of didn't do anything about it. I was like, I'm an American, like this isn't affecting me. What can I do as an individual? And so I didn't actually take action at that time. I just continued my trip and I went back to school and I didn't really think about it. But over the next, you know, few years, over the last few years, what we've seen is that

the security and sovereignty on the internet is getting worse and worse. Effectively, you know, I grew up on an internet that was very democratic, right? any website in the world you can access, there's no borders effectively. And now what we're seeing is that the internet is starting to create its own borders. And they're physical borders, right? It's like China has their own version of the internet. It's pretty closed off. And they're now exporting that to other countries. Russia is effectively creating their own internet as well. So what we're starting to see is this crazy trend where the internet is becoming more siloed over time. And you're starting to see this insane amount of censorship. In India, they're censoring

a lot of regions right now uh spain they censored dot cat which is the catalonian government's uh tld when they're trying to hold like a referendum for uh independence so it's gotten worse over time and it's gotten more frequent um when i came across handshake i basically saw the potential because i'm a uh engineer um i could you know i was i was familiar with some of the concepts that handshake was trying to improve upon so when i saw that i basically realized like oh shoot like this technology is something that can actually create a set function improvement in how the internet works. And it would create an internet that is global and democratic again. Anyone, anywhere around the world can resolve these names, which is something that is very difficult to do

today. And so I saw the potential for that, and I wanted to make a difference there. And so that's why I wanted to build Namebase. Effectively, it's tooling an infrastructure that makes Handshake easier to use so that the adoption can spread. So one of the things that's really interesting to me, uh, and I don't know how this would work, but let's take right now in China, for example, uh, coronavirus is a huge topic. And, um, there's been numerous examples of people who either one have tried to raise concerns, uh, and, um, you know, there's the doctor who got sick and ended up passing away. Uh, there's, I've recently read a story about a gentleman who he went into a cities in China, uh, and basically was a reporter. He was like a citizen's reporter and he was

sharing videos and all stuff and then all of a sudden uh he's disappeared um and they get people on the ground who are taking videos and stuff and um i i saw a video on twitter uh i think it was yesterday um that again i don't know how uh valid it was or uh but in the video what was depicted is basically they were visiting a woman and saying hey you have to take down the thing you posted on social media right or you're going to get in trouble essentially um and so what that brings to is like, there's this separation right now. I think the coronavirus scare and kind of issue really highlights like people outside of China don't know what's going on there, right? And people inside of China normally don't know what's going on outside the US, right? So it's kind of

like we're now experiencing a little bit of what they experience on a daily basis. But I'm wondering if somebody in China could if they got their hands on a top level domain on the handshake platform could they basically set up a website and use that website to publish information etc and then now people outside the u.s or outside of china and inside of china could all access that website uh and now that quote unquote source of truth of what's going on inside of china would be available for anyone in the world to see or there's still things with like the great firewall etc that could prevent that from happening yeah there's actually a spectrum uh but effectively that is the first step that you would have to having a website that can't be shut down by the

Great Firewall. And actually what would probably end up happening is basically there's this arbitrage period always because governments are kind of late to adopt technology where just using Handshake alone with the normal internet is sufficient. But Handshake is solving a very specific layer of the existing internet infrastructure. There's also the storage layer and resolving. So the Great Firewall, they do IP-based filtering. They even do packet filtering so like they're they're censoring you based on like that literally the data that's that you're sending out um so there is potential that they would be able to do something like that but when you pair handshake with as like a primitive with something like saya coin or ipfs or file

coin uh then you have something that's that's very very difficult to censor um so yes handshake would be able to do that now uh and then basically it's always a cat and mouse game so probably what you would see is uh you know a few years from now you wouldn't just use handshake alone you use handshake with like this decentralized storage with the whole sack yeah um and it's really great that you brought that up there's actually a ben thompson article about this recently you might you might you probably like reading i'll send it to you after uh but effectively they uh he talks about this is probably one of the the strongest examples of why censorship matters uh and it's really easy to explain to anyone in the world right now uh normally censorship he wrote an

article specifically about coronavirus yeah oh wow yeah i would love to read that and uh effectively what happened was uh the doctors in china they knew about coronavirus uh early like they uh reported they they basically saw a ton of patients start coming in with sars like symptoms and they're like there's this like new thing going on they're really concerned about it they started talking to other doctors about it and it was this like phenomenon where they saw like this was becoming an issue and this is if i remember correctly in the news they say like as early as like november december yeah last year i mean we're talking you know three four months ago yeah yeah so they knew about it and they started to raise the alarm bells and then the uh local jurisdictions and

the governments were like everything's yes they're like shut up everything's under control there are only like 49 patients that have this and like the doctors they saw there's like literally hundreds there are hundreds of these patients coming in they're like there's only 49 patients and their symptoms are calm uh and then the initial doctors who were spreading this news they were um punished Their punishment was like publicized to like everywhere. It was in the newspapers. It was like these doctors have been reprimanded and they were spreading false news and don't listen to them. And basically what you saw.

Yeah, it's crazy. And what you saw was every other doctor who was aware of this problem now was silenced. Right. They didn't have the conviction. They didn't really have the ability to go and share this because they knew that they would also be silenced. And they would, you know, their families are at risk and all this. And so they didn't speak about it. And the consequence of that censorship is now coronavirus is spreading to the rest of

the world and it's getting worse and worse. And it's only because of the top level down censorship, right? The individual doctors, they want to share this and they were sounding the alarm bells. But the governance layer at the top is what is preventing it. And I think if you tie that back into Handshake, that's really what Handshake is doing is it's trying to create an internet that's not controlled by governments or organizations at the top of the hierarchy. It's letting the internet be controlled and literally owned by individuals, and that's something that we've never had on the internet before.

So I'm looking up right now what the coronavirus death toll has surpassed 1,000 people in mainland China. Yeah, and that's probably a very underreported – that's probably like – It was reported 35 minutes ago is when that was written, and so if that's even remotely accurate, it's a big number. And I think a lot of people are saying it's going to be underreported number, which is pretty damn sad, to be honest. Yeah, so I guess as you look at this, what are the next steps here? So Handshake, we've got the two weeks where we're going to get out kind of with the mining capacity, make sure that that's working. People will begin to come in. The first domains that become available is top-level domains.

Those are going to be the less desirable ones, the more desirable, a mix. It's actually pretty much equally desirable. Basically, without getting too much into the weeds, you take any name that you want to bid on and you hash it to a number and you take the modulus 52 of that and that determines which week it is available. So basically, it's completely random, effectively.

And each week, there's a new set of names that's available and they're all like pretty good each week. And it's not like a specific set. It's like any name that you can think of, you can go and bid on. It's just at some point along those 52 weeks. so even in this first week i think like dot coin is available i'm pretty sure that one's going to be pretty popular um there's a few other ones how many names become available each week uh it's like

a thousand oh no no it's like uh a hundred so there's like 63 characters i think that you can use in a domain name so um and i was like 26 to the 63 like the name space is massive uh basically one, like 2% effectively of any name that you can, any of the names that you can think of are going to be available each week. It's not like a specific- It's not like thousands each week? Yeah, millions, millions. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And so what happens to the ones that nobody buys?

Yeah. So those are just unregistered. So basically what happens is until you start the auction process and you have to submit a specific transaction to start it, that name is just sitting there. And then when you start it, then other people can go and anyone can start the auction. Oh, I got it. So just because it's available, it doesn't mean that it started the actual auction. The first time somebody bids on it, then there's an auction process that starts. And how long does that auction last for? Yeah, the auction lasts for five days. And then there's like a 10 day reveal period. It's kind of like a blinded auction. There's some intricacies to it. We make it easier on the name based side, but basically you have a blind auction. And then

there's a 10 day reveal period where all the participants reveal their true auction bids and the owner, the winner can claim their name after that period. So the entire process runs about two weeks. Got it. Yeah. What name do you want? Yeah, I want, I just want my name Tia Shan. Dot Tia Shan. Yeah, dot Tia Shan. Yeah. And also dot Regeer, my last name. I try to get, yeah, I try to get TiaShan.com on the normal internet and there's like a Chinese company that owns it i'm half chinese um i want that's the name of their company or yeah it's like the name of their company yeah so it's just like a big company i don't think so yeah there's a role in which i can get that eventually yeah yeah just just tell them that uh that you'll uh you'll help

them out with something yeah i think the best um you know a lot of the people who are interested there's this like a new name space and there's already a lot of excitement around it so you can kind of see like it's kind of like the people who kind of got into domain name uh domain names early on right like they bought like you know airplane.com or airport.com and they sold for like millions of dollars a few years later so people are kind of speculating uh component to it yeah there is and people kind of see that potential now right it's like okay the first time i might have missed it but now there's like a new name space and there's like people that are very excited it's like the crypto.com era effectively uh so a lot of people are trying

to get in an early and reserve their personal name uh early right when it's when it's still a little bit easier than it will be even six months from now uh so that's you know for me Now I'll reserve like .rogear and I'll, you know, issue domain names for each of my family members. So that'd be like a really cool thing. Are you going to sell them to them? Are you going to make them pay you? I think I'll just give it to them as a freebie. Maybe some other ones.

But, you know, those are examples where it's like anyone can benefit from that, right? Because like who doesn't want their family name as a TLD? Honestly, for some of like the really popular family names, right? You can imagine like .loo. There's like millions, like even like a million .loos out there. So if you reserve that one and you start selling them, the amazing thing with this is that normal TLDs cost millions of dollars to register. First, there's a $200,000 application fee that you pay to ICANN basically for doing nothing. Yeah, it's absurd.

It sounds like a racket. Yeah. And then there's this auction system. So it costs a lot of money. They keep your $200,000 whether you win or not? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, they've made over $100,000,000 off of just application fees.

It's pretty ridiculous. But if you think about the cost, that basically what that means is it drastically limits the use cases of these TLDs, right? You need to have a business model that can recoup that cost. However, for handshake TLDs, you know, you can be registering a name.

Maybe it'll cost $10,000, maybe it'll cost $5,000. It might even be $10, right? It's like, so it's just determined by the second highest price. And what that means is that if you register something like .lu, you could just be selling all those names for like 50 cents. If you sell it to, you know, 100,000 .lus,

is you just made like $50,000. So it basically just, it's really interesting thinking about all the things that you can do with these CLDs once you've basically had the cost of acquiring them and lowered it by multiple

origins of magnitude. And we'll get to see what people do with it. Joe and I both got brothers. Joe, we're going to buy our last names and then we're going to, we're not giving them to our brothers for free.

We're going to make them fucking pay us. Awesome, man. All right, before we wrap up, I asked rapid fire questions. What is the most important company crypto outside of name base or handshake i think square crypto is pretty interesting why um they are introducing a lot of consumers to crypto uh square cash is like immensely popular uh and i think they're i i have to read the report again but like they're selling a lot of bitcoin actually

through oh yeah 100 plus million dollars a quarter yeah and they they really get i'm pretty sure that's right yeah i think i think so and they get they like understand consumers uh right like if you see their twitter like they're really good at like memes and all that and i think honestly that's like how things spread today um although i mean i'm personally very bullish on handshake i think a year from now most of the people using handshake won't even know that it's powered by a blockchain they'll just realize that their internet experience is uh better effectively and uh more rich and more broad um so i think handshake is probably the most exciting thing but if i wasn't looking at that, I would say Square Crypto is pretty interesting. What's the one regulation or

law you would improve or change if you could? Yeah, I think the money transmitter laws are pretty, and also like the BitLicense, like that entire suite of regulation. There's a reason why it exists and it's good for some sort of that to exist, but it also is drastically limiting because the MTL laws also apply for virtual currency to virtual currency transactions. And that basically just immensely limits what companies can do. It's a huge hurdle. And other countries in the world don't have these laws. And so these other countries and citizens are getting access to this new technology

that's really easy and amazing for them. But in the US, it takes an immense amount of capital to even get started and navigate that. So I think that changing would open up a lot of interesting business models, even like cloud wallets or custodial solutions that would make crypto much more adopted that right now is being limited. What is your most controversial thought in all of crypto? Something you believe that everyone also disagree with you on? I think maybe not so much a controversial thought, but in terms of what I have conviction around, I have conviction around Bitcoin and I

have conviction around Handshake. I don't have conviction around anything else in the space. And that's not to say that those things won't succeed. I think, as I mentioned, the history of Silicon Valley is people thinking of new technologies as toys that will never go anywhere, or they laugh at it, and then it ends up eating the world, and everyone ends up using it. So when I don't have conviction in something, it's not to say, oh, I think it will not succeed. It's just that I don't have conviction that it will succeed, and I don't have my belief in that. So I think that is pretty non-standard of just having only conviction in those two things. What's the most important book you've ever read?

Oh, there are many. I don't think there's a single book that I could say is the most important. All right, what are some of the top ones? What are the few? Let's see. I love reading stories about how companies got started. So founding story of eBay, The Perfect Store, founding story of Amazon, The Everything Store, founding story of Walmart, Sam Wallen, Made in America. Those are all really good books.

Nike founders, Shoe Dog. Those are really good. And I think the reason why those books are important to me is because as an entrepreneur, it's really hard sometimes because you have all these bad things happening all the time. You have to deal with it. And it's really hard to see the light forward. And then so reading those stories, you also get to see, oh, those people went through situations like far worse than I'm experiencing. And they were able to persevere and come out on top. That has been that basically just helping to build my own conviction is phenomenal. The other book that's really good is the courage to be disliked. It's, it's kind of like a philosophical book. I like reading like philosophy. And I read it. Yeah, it was very, very good. Yeah,

that would be a good book to recommend as well. Aliens, believer, non believer. uh yeah believer why um i think in some form right i don't think it's like humans like us or like you know sentient beating that would be wild if there was other fucking humans out there and we didn't know about it yeah yeah like i've asked that question over 200 people no one's said that yet oh really like what if there was other humans yeah i mean have you read the um how was that fucking crazy have you read uh the three body problem uh that sounds familiar what was it about It was this sci-fi book by C.C. Liu. It was like a Chinese sci-fi book, but it was spread.

No, somebody told me. I haven't read it yet. I forget who it was, but somebody, I think, told me to read this book. That's why it sounds familiar. It's a very good book, and it really explores the implications of if there are other sentient beings, what would happen. Not really good outcomes, actually. But that's a pretty good book. But, yeah, I don't know.

I haven't really researched too much about aliens and all that, so I wouldn't be able to say. but i think there's probably like at least some sort of life form floating around somewhere so like that's definitely my feeling is like if there's going to be contact made we want to be on offense not defense yeah yeah yeah like for sure that's a pretty scary uh idea of like us being the ones that are uh what is it independence day where the aliens like yeah they're just like coming out of the sky like what are we gonna do yeah we're gonna run inside and hide um all right what uh what one question you have for me to uh to finish this up yeah what uh what domains are you going to be bidding on i don't know if i want to tell people i feel like that kind of

fucks it up yeah you might want to keep it quiet actually um no i mean like there's uh i would say that there's probably uh really obvious ones like it'd be awesome to own you know dot bitcoin right dot crypto those types of things um i'm assuming that there's not the like dot google's dot facebook's uh domains but uh if there were like i'm sure people will definitely want to grab those to basically screw around with the uh the internet giants yeah actually the top 100 000 uh alexa domains are already pre-reserved for those companies and actually that's another conviction point which is that like if you make it difficult for those companies to adopt uh when they already own those trademarks then yeah it's just not very gonna go anywhere but every other name you can

so yeah so doc crypto is actually one of them that you can get got it okay um and then uh there's always like the personalized ones that i think people would want and then actually i think that there's um there's a pretty interesting thing around uh if people look at this as like a revenue opportunity right you know where's the world going and kind of what domains fit into that well one of the best stories that i've heard recently about a domain name um so a friend of Brent Beshore. He was having a conversation with a friend of his, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and they used the term permanent equity a few times. And Patrick went home and he bought the domain. Well, Brent just changed the name of his firm from Adventures to Permanent Equity.

He now has PermanentEquity.com because Patrick had the foresight to go and buy it, right? And he just gave it to Brent. And so it's, uh, it's pretty interesting how, like, even in the kind of centralized traditional world, how important URLs are in these domains. Um, and so when you think about that from a top level domain or a second level domain standpoint, uh, if there is this new name space, um, you know, it's a pretty important thing for people to, uh, to kind of take seriously and pay attention to. Yeah. I mean, the existing domain name industry is worth tens of billions of dollars um and this people don't realize how much money like i think like godaddy makes like two or four billion dollars a year yeah it's like a stupid amount of money that they make

like your 10.99 purchase of you know whatever stupid.com or dot org or whatever they made four billion dollars last year something like that yeah yeah so i mean it's an interesting thing and i think what's cool is like handshake democratizing that economy and allowing anyone to participate uh and basically start their own business and do all that uh it doesn't need to be this obscure thing that a few participants are benefiting from. Right now, everyone can go and do it. So that's really personally very exciting. Awesome, man. Well, listen, where can people find you and find Namebase? Yeah, we're on Twitter at Namebase HQ. I'm on Twitter at Tia Shan R. Namebase.io is the place to go if you want to buy H&S or buy Handshake domain names. Pretty much

anything having to do with the Handshake ecosystem and economy, we're going to try to build that infrastructure for. So that's a good place to go. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming to do this we'll have to do it again in a few weeks maybe yeah totally hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next

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