The Shake: Jan. 17, 2021
The Shake is a weekly recap of the Handshake ecosystem and protocol.
Community / Tech / StatsSci-Hub: The website, which provides free access to millions of research papers and books, has had various domain names revoked over the years and is now suspended from Twitter. Sci-Hub created a Handshake gateway to keep the site accessible even as the legacy domain name system applies pressure. To own your own top-level domain is a new concept and further education is needed as Elbakyan of Sci-Hub, ultimately, wasn’t interested in managing DNS records for the project, only in controlling her own subdomain. As is the case across all of crypto — with decentralized power, comes decentralized responsibility.
CNBC: Kanyi Maqubela of Kindred Ventures spoke on CNBC about the thorny issues around our social media landscape, the consolidation of power in web infrastructure, and the case for decentralized protocols like Handshake. Kanyi presents a reasoned description of where we are with the web’s current oligopolies and where we’re going. The case for Handshake is going mainstream.
CoinDesk: Valerian Bennett explains in CoinDesk that now is the time to advance the decentralized web. Bennett writes, “the incident is a scathing indictment of a centralized system that allows a handful of social media oligarchs to manufacture and monetize madness at scale… And, despite the best intentions of government regulators, passing laws to curb these companies’ predatory behavior is akin to politely asking a great white shark to stop eating in the midst of a feeding frenzy.”
Community Forum: Mercenary Handshake Forum is a new community site from Michael Michelini to learn, discuss, market, and trade Handshake names.
Open Social Protocols: Naval spoke to the evolution of public blockchains from Bitcoin to Ethereum to identity and social graphs. Namespace is a large component of that, which Handshake’s layer two social application Nomad highlights. Your social graph on Nomad is truly yours, tied to your HNS name, and can be ported to further Handshake applications.
AllHNS: This Handshake ecosystem graph has been updated to reflect the growing web of mining pools, exchanges, social channels, and use cases.
Securing Internet Infrastructure: Handshake technical resources from Mark Tyneway and Handshake explainer deck from Matthew Zipkin.
Community / Tech / Stats Puma Browser: The data-privacy focused mobile browser integrating Handshake has announced that top-level domains and emoji support are in TestFlight and rolling out soon. Between this week’s news from Puma and last week’s from Brave, mobile integrations will make Handshake names more easily accessible than ever.
SkyDocs: As more decentralized web apps are built on Sia Skynet, the symbiotic relationship with file storage and namespace protocols becomes ever clearer. A decentralized version of Google Docs, built on Sia, is now hosted on Handshake and accessible at skydocs.hns.siasky.net.
Poolin: Handshake mining is now available with Poolin, one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools. This is the second pool in as many weeks to add Handshake support, after the Huobi addition last week.
Community / Tech / StatsShake Stats is a new Handshake website for on-chain data.
Name Stats
Total Names Registered: 462k TLDs, 1 week change: +7.19%
Top Name Auction This Week: http://z/ for 130,000 HNS ($18,814)
Top Name Resale This Week: http://xx/ for 190,000 HNS ($27,497)
$HNS Stats
Total $HNS Burned: 15.7M HNS, 1 week change: +3.29%
Total $HNS Locked: 46.3M HNS, 1 week change: +4.99%
Circulating $HNS Supply: 17.05%, 1 week change: +0.29%