The Shake: Mar. 6, 2022
A publication on Handshake and the Decentralized Web.
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Internet censorship is in full view this week.
The fight for narrative control means physical wars are increasingly fought on digital fronts too. As an array of global institutions from financial services to internet providers halt services to Russia amidst its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is seemingly building its own firewall to silo its citizens from the outside world — banning Facebook, Twitter, and other sections of the internet. Reports of increased online surveillance within Russia highlight a crackdown of free speech on its own people. Today, nearly all of the top Russian App Store downloads are VPNs.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has experienced its own disruption to internet services. Starlink’s satellite-based internet terminals have been sent to Ukraine, with additional terminals promised, as reportedly the only non-Russian communications system still working in parts of the country. Those Starlink terminals are now the target of signal jamming or worse. At the same time, Ukraine has tried to punch back by, unsuccessfully, lobbying ICANN to censor Russian root DNS servers.
Beyond Europe, this week, Ethereum network access was (mistakenly?) blocked in certain jurisdictions including Venezuela by leading wallet and RPC provider, Metamask and Infura. This sparked discussions within crypto on the reliance of trusted third parties to access and verify public blockchains. Even with alternatives, cryptonetworks have the potential to converge around centralized infrastructure without the means for individuals to self-verify.
Decentralization tends to be taken for granted in periods of excess. As the tides of a crypto bull market subsides, as speculative mania and half-baked ponzis and cringe corporate co-opting are overshadowed by real world macroeconomic and geopolitical crises, we are reminded of the origins of the grand crypto experiment. Cryptographic security, trust minimization, and censorship resistance don’t matter until they do.
We need an open internet now more than ever. An open internet requires full stack decentralization, including a trustless root zone to build atop. A trustless root zone requires self-verification. Self-verification requires simple and fast light clients that can run on any laptop or phone. And those light clients call for compact proofs.
These concepts are in focus with Handshake. There’s still much work to do, and that work has never been more important.
This Week in Handshake
↳ HS Hub From the developer of HNS Chat, HS Hub is a free nameserver to manage your name records.
The Handshake tree only holds a small set of standard name records including NS, DS, and TXT records. An off-chain nameserver is required for the rest of your name records. Many users not equipped to run their own nameserver, so the community relies on public services to do so. Across Handshake, there are now three public nameservers: Namebase, Sinpapeles, and HS Hub. The latter two, Sinpapeles and HS Hub, serve names outside of Namebase. Free DNS services like HS Hub are key infrastructure for enabling self-custodied names.
↳ HNS Chat A general public chat was rolled for the Handshake messaging platform. Additionally, an open API endpoint means the chat functionality can be integrated into other applications like, perhaps, Niami.
↳ Hackathon HNS Fund announced a Handshake website race in partnership with Akash and Skynet. Sites built using various combinations of Handshake, Akash, and Skynet are eligible for prizes. The hackathon will take place March 16 - 23rd, coinciding with the upcoming HandyCon.
↳ HandyCon We are ten days away from the start of the second annual Handshake Conference. Sign up for free if you haven’t yet!
Stats
↳ Daily Bids Big spike this week, reaching 200k on-chain bids on Monday.
Around the DWeb
↳ Superfluid staking launched on Osmosis
↳ Skynet went down, seemingly from a phishing attack
↳ An update from Bluesky, the decentralized social project