The Shake: July 25, 2021

A weekly recap on the Handshake protocol and ecosystem

Community / Tech / Stats

DANE HNS community member breaks down the shortcomings of Certificate Authorities, DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) as an alternative for your computer to establish and trust a TLS connection, and its relation to Handshake.

DANE allows us to create secure connections with websites and allows us to dodge the overreach of CAs. The issue is that it doesn’t have any browser support right now. This is mostly for the fact that it adds latency which big Internet aggregators like Google (who also have the most adopted browser) aren’t too fond of and people say that the whole CA system works good enough as it is. DANE also doesn’t tackle the root of the problem with ICANN’s power over domains. 

HNS Security Matthew Zipkin, in a talk to the dWeb incubator, covered security assumptions and optional trade-offs from Bitcoin through Handshake to DANE in the browser.

DAO/ HNS community effort is underway to develop a @nowdaoit plugin for DAOs to manage their own .dao Handshake domain like moloch.dao.

Community / Tech / Stats

Homescreen A new product the Skynet team is building to fully decentralize frontends for EVM applications. Homescreen’s design puts users in control of their apps, which load an exact version of the interface with no interference from the supply chain. This comes as the problem of accessing DeFi applications through centralized frontends is top of mind this week. Go to homescreen.hns.siasky.net to sign up for the Beta.

HMail Now the service automatically rewrites the reply-to header when sending to ICANN email addresses meaning that they can hit the reply button and it will automatically use the @hmail.app proxy address.

For example, if I send from seb@stian to whoever@gmail.com, whoever@gmail.com will be able to reply.

ArGo The DWeb hosting and storage platform makes it simple to interact with the Arweave blockchain, and deploy fully censorship resistant applications. In the new release, now you can deploy Argo apps with a Handshake domain. Add domains and update / verify records directly from the ArGo user interface.

Fleek The DWeb app builder added BunnyCDN for HNS Domains. The Shake’s website (news.theshake) uses Fleek so that our DWeb resources are secured on the DWeb: hosted on IPFS, resolved through HNS, and managed with Bob Wallet.

Community / Tech / Stats

Primary Name Markets
Names opened grew 2% this week, up to 1.6M total names.

Secondary Name Markets
July volume on Namebase Marketplace sits at 1.67M HNS and is on pace for the third month of 2M+ HNS in resales.

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For more resources, visit our website @ theshake.xyz or news.theshake on HNS.