The Shake: Jul. 3, 2022
A publication on Handshake and the DWeb. Towards a New Internet.
Handshake, by the numbers
On Thumb Wrestle
Thumb Wrestle is a Handshake hard fork proposal to extend the name claim period from four years to eight years for a subset of reserved names. It comes after years of community discussion on the construction of reserved name claims and a year and a half before reserved names are set to expire in February 2024.
Included in the extension would be ICANN TLDs (.com), Alexa Top 100 SLDs, (.google), and select organizations (.cloudflare) while all other Alexa Top 100,000 names would remain set to expire after four years. The “important” names identified to be extended are those that could become problematic if auctioned to the public whereas the remaining Alexa Top 100,000 is a far less concerning cohort — and perhaps even too wide of a net cast to begin with.
ICANN TLDs are reserved on Handshake to first avoid name collision, but also enable these TLDs to upgrade their namespaces to a sovereign root outside of ICANN’s control. And once TLDs upgrade, subdomains can themselves upgrade their security by enabling DANE for zero trust HTTPS. Four ICANN TLDs have upgraded to Handshake thus far — .gay, .wiki, .ink, and .pw.
If we want to ensure .com and the rest of the important reserved names are given more time to claim on Handshake, the current four year reservation period is insufficient. Another four years bides Handshake more time, as the network is just now finding a new wave of adoption from registrars and browsers. If we want to ensure .com can NEVER be opened for auction to the public, we can do so through a future soft fork and so it is suggested to be left out of the current proposal. Thumb Wrestle is intended to be narrow in its defined changes to the network to reduce complexity and garner full support, as hard forks require unanimous consensus and 100% upgrades from all miners, exchanges, nodes, and wallets.
It is suggested that protocol changes and activation are implemented in the next version of HSD later this year.
Read the full proposal here.
This Week in Handshake
¹ SLDs A pattern for trust-minimized Handshake second-level domains on Ethereum, by @evbots. Evan’s implementation explores optionality for deploying SLDs across Ethereum L1 and L2s, where Ethereum L1 SLDs are afforded higher composability and query efficiency while Ethereum L2 SLDs benefit from cheap fees and record updates.
² More DNS attacks… Crypto projects remain an active target of DNS attacks, this time affected is the main RPC for Polygon and Fantom networks. It’s clear that every crypto project needs a plan for protecting their domains and ultimately only cryptographically proven DNS records can be trusted.
³ HSD Run a Handshake full node with Umbrel, a personal server OS
⁴ Pencil The Handshake domain registrar spoke at the Solana Hacker House event, unveiling new details about their integrations with Solana.
⁵.tx The .tx TLD crossed 1,000 domain registrations this week
Tweet Check
As a highly active research area in Handshake, perhaps we need a name for the upcoming EVM-based registries / registrars / domains rooted in Handshake.
Handshake nodes around the globe
Around the DWeb
What’s at Stake A new show about decentralized governance and the Cosmos Hub from Hypha Co-op.
Crossfader Cross-chain Tornado-style transaction anonymizer with Connext
Zora Redeemable NFTs, tokens redeemable for physical goods that have resale royalties for the creator and the ability to resell without shipping.
ArNS Arweave permastorage protocol pilot tests its own naming system. Every chain having its own orphaned, bespoke namespace is a great articulation of the need for Handshake as a universal root anchor.
DWeb Events
July 13 DOTS Monthly Assembly
Aug 24 DWeb Camp
Full Calendar curated by GetDWeb + Friends. There’s an email address for submissions if Handshake community members would like to suggest an event to be listed.