The Shake: Dec. 12, 2021
A weekly recap on Handshake and the Decentralized Web
DeFi, meet the DWeb
This week, an AWS outage temporarily took down huge portions of the internet. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols were not spared from the outages, prompting Vice to ask how decentralized is decentralized finance. Many DeFi protocols host alternative redundant interfaces on IPFS and those links tend to get re-circulated around Twitter on weeks like this. This cycle of hosting decentralized protocols on centralized web stacks, having those web stacks fail time and again, and responding reactively with a slew of alternative entry points is a suboptimal state of affairs.
Aggregating IPFS hosted DeFi interfaces into a public repository can serve as a community reference point in the case of server outages like the one this week. Putting those DeFi interfaces on Handshake domains provides further security and redundancy. So this is exactly the project that we’ve started at The Shake — curating a set of always-on, decentralized DeFi frontends on Handshake.
Decentralized finance isn’t truly decentralized until the whole stack is. It isn’t enough to build a decentralized web stack and hope the DeFi community adopts it. We must build bridges. Homescreen from Skynet is one such bridge, and we can be one too.
Ok, now to the rest of our weekly recap.
This Week in Handshake
HTools CA Handshake is an experiment in disintermediating not just ICANN as the gatekeeper of the internet’s root zone, but Certificate Authorities — the trusted intermediaries needed to securely connect to the internet. This proof of concept from Rithvik Vibhu is an ACME server for creating self-signed certificates for use with DANE on Handshake websites. Set up HTTPS like you would with LetsEncrypt. Use the programs you’re already comfortable with to secure Handshake websites.
Federalist Decentralized, uncensorable swarm websites using Handshake and webtorrent.
PR Review HSD maintainers Nodech and Matt Zipkin will be discussing and reviewing open PRs on Monday, December 13 @ 12pm EST / 9pm PST. If you've been looking to get into the weeds of HSD and review some code, get involved here.
Agaamin Registry The TLD .भ is now officially in the sunrise period. All legitimate holders of copyright and trademarked names can reach out to claim their names.
Stats
Network Hashrate: 13.95 PH/s
Handshake continues to make hashrate all-time highs up 10.4% this week
Names Opened: 2.34M (+1.7% 7d)
Around the DWeb
Akash The network hit 40,000 total deployments this week
Aztec The privacy centric DeFi network is live on Ethereum testnet. Zero-knowledge privacy also affords better scaling with up to 100x gas savings.
Mirror The decentralized publishing platform with crypto-native economic and governance tools is now open to everyone, with a new and improved dashboard.
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