The Shake: Apr. 3, 2022
A publication on Handshake and the Decentralized Web. Towards a New Internet.
The App - Infrastructure Cycle of Handshake
As Handshake matures and its first series of applications emerge, so too does the need for new and improved infrastructure to support those apps. The 2018 Union Square Ventures blog post ‘The Myth of The Infrastructure Phase’ highlights this dynamic between application and infrastructure building around new technologies.
“There is a narrative in the crypto space that first we need to build great tools, and once we have the tools, then we can build apps. But what we hope to have shown is that in other platform shifts, we are able to build the first few apps before there are great tools (though it is more cash and time intensive), and then those early apps inspire us to build tools. And the cycle repeats.” — Dani Grant and Nick Grossman, USV
We saw this with HNS Chat. TXT record-based verification to the messaging app called for better name hosting options. And so we got the development of HS Hub, a public Handshake nameserver.
Now, we’re seeing this with HNS Search. A search engine indexing Handshake websites calls for, well, more Handshake websites. So from the makers of HNS Search comes Sky Factory, an upcoming Handshake-native website builder.
What we know about Sky Factory so far: There will be templates and from-scratch options to create static sites, host them on Skynet, and deploy them to Handshake. V1 will be released at the end of April. Iteration will happen from there, based on community feedback.
While plenty of site building infrastructure exists today, these tools do not natively support Handshake domain configuration. Sky Factory is a missing piece for non-technical name owners wanting to quickly and easily get content up on their Handshake names — which, by the way, there are now 4 MILLION of. It’s time to put those names to use.
These cycles of app-infrastructure building are happening all across the ecosystem in larger and smaller loops. For example, as security becomes an increasing priority, we see infra around self-signed certs from Rithvik’s SiteCheck to buffrr’s x509-DANE script to Namebase’s planned nameserver support for TLSA records. This is a good thing, the Handshake flywheel is spinning.
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This Week in Handshake
↳ Bob Wallet Multi-sig support is under development
↳ Sky Factory Info on the upcoming Handshake site building tool
↳ Niami Sign in with Bob Desktop as a fallback to the Bob Extension
↳ HS Hub The free, public nameserver is now open sourced
↳ HNS Chat A browser extension, chat reactions, and ENS support.
Several Handshake apps support .eth names: the Fingertip desktop resolver, Beacon mobile browser, and now HNS Chat. Why? We’re namespace nerds, DWeb dweebs — this is what we do. Having already claimed the .eth TLD on Handshake, ENS would simply need to flip a switch to anchor .eth domains into the Handshake root. Doing so would unlock the full benefits of Handshake from the sovereignty of self-verifying light clients to the security of self-signed certificates.
Stats
Name growth continues to accelerate — half a million new names opened in March pushes Handshake to 4 million total names. It took fourteen months to get the first million names, but just two months to get the last million. This is where we enter the steep part of the S curve.
TLD secondary markets closed March as the highest month on record with 6.65M HNS in resale volume, and still March would rank as the third highest volume month not counting Namecheap’s purchase of .s for 4.7M HNS.
HNS Chat hit 10k messages 🥳
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