The Shake: Jul 24 2022
A publication on Handshake and the DWeb. Towards a New Internet.
By the numbers
Namebase Marketplace monthly resale volume crosses previously all time high of 2.6M HNS with a week of trading left in July.
This Week in Handshake
¹ Impervious Registry The makers of Forever Domains, Ethereum subdomains beneath the .forever TLD anchored on Handshake, have generalized their system. Any Handshake TLD can now stake their name and sell subdomains on Ethereum. There’s a $250 staking fee and a 80/20 split of SLD sales between TLD owner and the registry. Optionally, you can permanently lock your TLD by sending it to a renew-only address for maximum trustlessness of its subdomains.
Some early staked TLDs include: .contract, .www, and .omen.
² Escher A proposed Layer 2 Handshake protocol design for issuing decentralized subdomains in an unrevocable manner. Escher uses UPDATE covenants to deploy a new Urkel Tree for each TLD, or "Escher Trees". The protocol does not require any significant changes to Handshake but a modest soft fork can enhance “performance, security, and accessibility.”
Escher tries to accomplish a number of features we’ve yet to figure out for Handshake SLDs including decentralization, unrevocability, scalability of DNS updates, an economy centered around $HNS, light client self-verification, and reliance on no outside consensus system or blockchain. Read the full proposal here.
³ The Shake You don’t have to wait for our newsletters to hit your inbox each Sunday to keep up with Handshake. Our website https://theshake/ (theshake.xyz) now has a refreshed homepage with top headlines and a stats page with on-chain metrics.
⁴ .Wallet Unstoppable Domains (UD) files lawsuit against Gateway, the Handshake registrar that recently began selling .wallet domains. The filing argues that UD was first to sell .wallet domains commercially and so should have the exclusive right to do so. “The Defendants are engaged in a campaign of chaos” opens the lawsuit from UD. Optimizing Handshake’s name distribution through reserved names and Vickery auctions is a weird definition of chaos.
DomainNameWire weighed in on the matter with an article, “Reminder: you can’t trademark a top level domain in the U.S.” that should put the fears of many names investors to rest. Handshake is a free Wild West legally given that all its names are TLDs rooted in an experimental alternative root zone.
HNS nodes around the globe
Around the DWeb
Recipes for an off-grid internet How to make an off-grid micro 'internet' that can run off solar power (or any power) for emergencies, camping, protests, or building community autonomy and dual power.
