The Shake: Apr. 17, 2022

Apr 17

Find our publication on Handshake at https://theshake/. Towards a New Internet.

Duct-taping the old internet

It was another week of duct-taping the moral and structural cracks in the old internet as we ready the New Internet for mass adoption.

Morally, as Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter reaches Broadway-level theatrics, we return to the question of who should govern the public square. Is this billionaire better or worse than what we have today? Is Twitter even a public square? Or, as VGR puts it, is it a football stadium with no field and the spectator sport is watching the stands across from you? Is this the thing we necessarily want to build a top down decentralized replacement of?

Structurally, DeFi governance protocol Snapshot faced a DNS takedown prompting its founder’s remark: “we desperately need web3”. DWeb advocates are no stranger to DNS as a centralized choke point. A spectrum of solutions are zeroing in on the accessibility of decentralized front-ends, from Homescreen for local storage to Handshake domains for self sovereign naming.

This week, The Shake acquired the .front-end TLD and will be using the namespace to curate DeFi front-ends hosted on IPFS and Handshake (i.e. uniswap.front-end). Decentralized front-ends for DeFi primitives should be legible and easily accessible in a global repository, not a scramble to find an IPFS link on Twitter each time a problem arises. View the full list at theshake/defi or theshake.xyz/defi and reach out if you’d like to get your protocol added.

This Week in Handshake

↳ Namecheap In the midst of a potential rebrand and larger product overhaul, Richard Kirkendall writes that “we've built and re-imagined everything from the ground up” as he teases a new brand, Spaceship. Plus, deeper search integration for Handshake domains.

↳ Goldshell New Handshake and Sia miners with increased hashrates

↳ Beacon Browser Coming to desktop, a new Chromium-based browser with native Handshake resolution and DANE support.

impervious/ @impervious

Beacon browser for desktop will be available next week for beta testing. It is awesome and is going to change the internet. Well done, buffrr! Check it out:

↳ HNS Chat The command !theshake retrieves our latest newsletter edition. Stay tuned for custom context menus when right clicking on users.

↳ Snipd A screenshot API for Handshake and ENS names

↳ Pencil Domains A new Handshake registrar for Andorran, Spanish, European, and other international domains

Stats

Messari released a report on the DWeb projects that make up the Web3 Index, and their protocol revenue in relation to market cap valuations. Using burned $HNS as a relative protocol revenue metric, Handshake would be third and fourth in the Web3 Index for the year and quarter, respectively. Yet, it’s the lowest relative market cap project.

Handshake burned 10M HNS (~$2.6M) in 2021 and 1M HNS (~$222k) in Q1 ‘22. USD measurements calculated using $HNS market price at the time of burn.

Upcoming DWeb Events

DWeb Meetup April 28 | San Francisco, CA
The dWeb meetup series focuses on bridging DNS, storage, compute and bandwidth experts underneath a singular umbrella to educate and enlighten each other on the interoperability of complementary networked protocols.

DWeb Camp August 24 - 28 | Navarro, CA
DWeb Camp is a five day retreat in the redwoods to connect, learn, and share about building a better decentralized web.