The Shake: Apr. 11, 2021
The Shake is your weekly recap of the Handshake ecosystem and protocol.
Community / Tech / Stats / CWebNamecheap. The domain name registrar, Namecheap, has claimed their reserved name and tokens, and has expressed an interest in supporting the protocol.
.C Case Study. Last week TLD .c broke a record and had 100+ registrations in a single day. Monday saw over 250 registrations. Clay Collins spoke to Namebase about the process of selling .c subdomains.
HNS Fund. The first round of grants, including 20 ETH + 10,000 HNS, has been distributed to nine teams / individuals working around the Handshake ecosystem.
SkyDroid. A domain-based decentralized App Store for Android with full support for Handshake domains and Sia Skynet.
dWebsites. Guide to quickly deploying dWebsites with Handshake & Fleek
Trading Names. Guide to trading Handshake names with Bob Wallet & Shakedex
Alexa.ndria Project. Archival project to ensure that knowledge and literature have an immutable digital archive, open to everyone with an internet connection.
Community / Tech / Stats / CWebBrave Browser. Brendan Eich of Brave pointed to the April roadmap when asked about HNS this week.
“Working on adding support for crypto DNS services within Brave. We will share an update on a couple of integrations by the end of this month.
ShakeDex. The new release adds fee support to the ShakeDex protocol. Anyone can run an instance and set whatever fee rate or receiving address they want. Shakedex.com, however, will send all fees to a community burn address. The fee burn experiment (1) creates added deflationary pressures on HNS supply and (2) positions the protocol as credibly neutral.
Login with Handshake. If you have a name configured to use Sinpapeles you can use this name to login on compatible sites, like news.namebase.io or handy.wiki. No extra configuration needed.
Wireguard. Sentinel’s new Wireguard based dVPN node includes a HNS resolver. All hardware routers which run Sentinel nodes will also run HNS resolvers.
Ledger. Wallet integration in progress.
Community / Tech / Stats / CWebName Metrics
As subdomain markets like Namebase Registry become available, we will be keen to track data. Income report for .c subdomains projects an annual run rate of $90k.
$HNS Metrics
Total HNS Burned has eclipsed 20M, roughly 5% of circulating supply and 1% of total supply. The burn occurs in name auctions with the winning bid amounts removed from supply. This week’s ShakeDex fee burn announcement stands to amplify the deflationary pressure on HNS supply.
Community / Tech / Stats / CWebEthos Capital. The private equity firm Ethos Capital is buying a controlling stake in Donuts, a large operator of over 240 top-level domains. Ethos Capital was denied an acquisition of the nonprofit that runs the .ORG domain in 2019. Since then, Donuts, through its own December 2020 acquisition, now runs the technical operations of the .ORG domain.
Donuts already has questionable practices when it comes to safeguarding its users’ speech rights. Its contracts with ICANN contain unusual provisions that give Donuts an unreviewable and effectively unlimited right to suspend domain names—causing websites and other internet services to disappear.
These practices could accelerate and expand with Ethos Capital at the helm. As we learned last year during the fight for .ORG, Ethos expects to deliver high returns to its investors while preserving its ability to change the rules for domain name registrants, potentially in harmful ways.
EFF is asking ICANN to demand changes to Donuts’ registry contracts to protect its users’ speech rights.
Ultimately, these are systemic issues that requires systemic changes.
“Change the tools. Change the rules. Change the culture. Change society.”
Resources: Learn HNS | HandyBrowser | HDNS | NextDNS | HNS↗TO | Puma Browser | HNS on Sia Skynet