The Shake: June 19, 2022
A publication on Handshake and the DWeb. Towards a New Internet.
Handshake, by the numbers
On decentralized SLDs
This week, Namecheap outlined their intent to support decentralized SLDs, second level domains that retain self custody and trustlessness like their parent TLDs.
Whatever L2 we choose should have the ability to scale to billions of registrations and any associated gas fees should always be <$1.
For Namecheap to seek non-custodial alternatives for domain registration and management that would disrupt their core custodial business today is noteworthy. It speaks to the disillusionment that even the largest players in DNS have of the current model.
Namecheap is not alone in their pursuit of dSLDs, as other projects around Handshake are actively exploring this space from Forever Domains by Impervious to the more generalized xnHNS protocol.
One open design choice is which network to build a dSLD system on. Ethereum itself doesn’t fit the necessary high throughput and low fees. Ethereum L2s are better suited in their technical requirements albeit nascent in their evolution. Do privacy-centric networks like ZK-Rollups need to be considered? Or, with a bridging protocol like Connext, does the system need to be confined to one chain?
Beyond that, much of today’s active research from the Handshake community is focused on how to minimize trust for buyers of SLDs. If a TLD owner can easily exit a registry and break the SLD namespace, we’ve a system of DNS that is worse not better. Locking a top level domain to be uneditable minimizes trust but prevents technical upgrades. To enable registries to evolve over time, economic incentives can be used to hold TLD owners accountable, though this comes at the cost of more complex governance systems.
As these low level tradeoffs get worked through, I expect a next area of focus to be programmability. There’s wide open design space for how to price and distribute domains. Where ENS has one TLD that requires a conservative and straightforward approach to its registry, HNS has millions of TLDs and the opportunity for more progressive and experimental registry formats.
This Week in Handshake
¹ HNS Chat The P2P Handshake messaging tool is now open source.
² Palmreader As the HSD plugin with multisig gets closer to its beta release, a community member configures it for mobile.
³ Single Letter TLDs This week Namecheap acquired i/, their fifth single-letter TLDs thus far along with j/, n/, p/, and s/.
⁴ SLD Voting A proposed alternative to the ‘snitching’ model used by XNHNS to hold top level domains accountable in cross-chain registries.
DWeb Events
June 30 Ethics of the DWeb
July 13 DOTS Monthly Assembly
Aug 24 DWeb Camp
Full Calendar curated by GetDWeb + Friends. There’s an email address for submissions if Handshake community members would like to suggest an event to be listed.
Handshake nodes around the globe
HandyGrants
The latest micro grants from HandyOSS
1,000,000 DVPN to 0xStefan, founder of Niami