Two high profile DeFi domains suffered take downs this week, one permanently by sanction and one temporarily by hackers.
First, the tornado.cash domain was taken down by its registrar, Google, after the Tornado Cash protocol was sanctioned by the US Treasury Dept. Then, the curve.fi domain was hijacked in a cache poisoning attack after its registrar, iwantmyname, was compromised and DNS records were pointed to a cloned web server.
Domain registrars big and small remain a centralized chokepoint for accessing decentralized finance. The best assurance DeFi protocols can have is to self-custody their own Handshake top-level domains. Currently, some protocols have IPFS-hosted front-ends accessible on .eth domains, which is better than nothing but still reliant on DNS gateways like Cloudflare and RPCs like Infura.
While we await the DeFi’s full embrace of Handshake domains, The Shake has acquired the top-level domain .front-end and is using it to self-host DeFi front-ends stored on IPFS. This week, we added curve.front-end and saddle.front-end, and plan to continue adding more. You can find the full list here.
This Week in Handshake
¹ Bob Wallet reached a V1.0.0 release. The new version of the non-custodial Handshake wallet uses 15GB less storage thanks to tree compaction. Bob now also supports address aliasing for sending HNS to names instead of long string bech32 addresses.
² Keybase claimed their name on Handshake along with 3.4M HNS (~$200k). This is the second largest airdrop claim to date, equal to Brave and behind only Namecoin. How Keybase intends to use Handshake is unclear for now, but what they could do is operate their own .keybase namespace for users with an embedded SPV resolver for censorship resistance.
³ Tree Updates are now tracked on The Shake. The Urkel Tree is updated once every 36 blocks, or roughly four times per day, and now you can find time-until-next-update conveniently on the home page of our website.
⁴ Impervious registry saw several new TLD launches this week, including .f, .doh, and .hello domains. F is a rare single-letter domain extension and it has been permanently locked for trust-minimized SLDs. Locked TLDs make up over half of all subdomain registrations on Impervious registry currently.
By the numbers
HNS nodes around the globe
Around the DWeb
Github accounts of Tornado Cash devs were also taken down this week. Radicle is an early P2P alternative.
“Privacy is normal. Privacy is for goody guys. It’s for mom and bike messengers and foodies...” A post from ZCash worth re-reading today.
Skynet Labs is shutting down. Skynet will remain online.
Events
Aug 24 DWeb Camp
Sep 2 HNS @NamesCon
Not your keys, not your name
Each week gets more interesting with Handshake. Appreciate you keeping us informed.