IPFS Browsers 3000, 13 Jul 2021

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From YouTube: Browsers 3000: Decentralizing the Internet's root with (HNS) Handshake - Tieshun Roquerre

Description

Browsers 3000 is a six-week virtual event to explore and accelerate the development of web3 in the browser through experimentation and challenge prizes of up to $20,000 worth of Filecoin (FIL). Learn more at https://events.protocol.ai/2021/browsers3000.

Like all IPFS Community events, Browsers 3000 expects all speakers and participants to follow the IPFS Community Code of Conduct (https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/code-of-conduct.md).

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Today, I'm gonna talk about handshake uh I'll share what it is, and you know why you might care about it. uh What you can do with it and uh show off a demo or two on you know what's possible um and for those who aren't familiar handshake is a decentralized naming protocol.

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uh It's actually specifically meant for decentralized dns, uh so you know similar to a lot of other naming protocols that have been discussed today. um But one thing that's pretty interesting about handshake.

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Is it's really focused on dns and specifically root naming uh so, for example, if you take a website like google.com the roots tld of that domain name, dot com is the uh basically the parent of every domain name under dot com and the way that dns currently works today is that there is an organization called idcan which basically governs who gets what tld and then each tld individually is owned by a different entity. So, for example, verisign owns.com they're, you know for-profit public company worth billions of dollars and they make a lot of money.

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Selling.Com domains, dot org is owned by another organization, um and then you know you have some tlds like ai, which is owned by um the uh a government. Basically, um and not a single you know, company or a non-profit organization and the way that new tlds get registered today is well right. Now it's not actually possible to register utilities, but when I can allows new tlds to get registered, there's an application process, it costs 200, 000 minimum and again it's all organized under this existing kind of centralized system.

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That was the only architecture available at the time that dns was created, but now with blockchain technologies, we have a new architecture available and handshake capitalizes on that and has created a decentralization protocol that basically allows anyone to register their own tld. And the interesting thing about it is.

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The adoption is, of course, still very early, but it's already gotten integrations with a number of traditional domain registrars that you probably have heard of like 101.domain.com and circa dot com and epic.com and uh already actually namecheap has been recently getting into handshake and they uh purchased a handshake name for uh 250 000, so they're kind of investing um heavily into it.

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uh So that's what handshake is at a nutshell, and I'm just gonna show off real quick what you can do with it, because it's it's interesting, if you think about it, just at the service level. It's just for you know decentralized, tlds, but really what handshake does is it basically just puts a root name on the blockchain and allows you to associate arbitrary data with it? That's cryptographically secure. um You know through a mechanism that works very similarly to how bitcoin works, and you can use that for a number of different use cases.

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You can use that you know even outside of like a tld. Normally you can use it for a personal website. uh You can you even use it as a decentralized username, so this is namebase, which is uh the company that I run. I'm the ceo of namebase and it's basically an easy way to use handshake if you've never used it before and you'll notice in the bottom left here it says connected to handshake dns, so we run a dns resolver for handshake.

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That makes it easy to connect to it and use handshake as your root dns. So what I mean by that is, if I go to nickcarter, slash it'll, resolve to nick carter's personal uh website, which is we call this a d-link. It's basically like a little link tree alternative using handshake names, um and some of you might be familiar with nick carter he's a pretty popular.

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You know, crypto twitter personality, and so he has set up his own website at his uh nick carter, tld uh right there and the uh interesting thing about that is that you can actually just type in nick carter, slash in your browser uh when you're connected to handshake dns, like I mentioned and it'll, adjust resolve and, of course you can also use a name, a tld like a normal tld where you have a sub domain at it. So right here, I'm going to welcome dot.

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Nb nb is a tld that we own on handshake, and then we set up this sub domain to resolve to this little.

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uh You know static website right here and then, if you're not connected to handshake, uh which, by the way, is very easy to do in order to connect all you just got to do is go to your network settings um and then you just go and change your dns resolvers to add these two numbers right here and then you'll be connected, uh but that makes it difficult to share your name on the internet because if other people aren't connected to it by default, they're not gonna, be able to type in nick carter, slash and just go and visit it, and so what you can uh share instead is we have a gateway at hns.to.

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So if I go to tiashon.hns.to, this will resolve to my personal d-link, um which you can see right here and it's fairly straightforward and I mentioned before that the names can be used in a broader context than just you know, traditional dns and tlds, and what I mean by that is that you can use it, for um you know: decentralized, usernames, for decentralized authentication and so what we've done at uh news.nbc.

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Basically like a normal, you know, web 2.0 forum, except the cool thing, is that it allows you to use your handshake name to log in to websites, and so I'm just going to go in here, you'll notice that the website url went from news on nbc to oidc that navy, serio um and actually it's let me see if I can get this to go slower because I already logged in and so just did it quickly.

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For me, it might just already be cached. um Oh yeah, but you'll see here so now, I'm at oidc, dot, name based o and which is completely separate from news. Dot name base celio, uh and this is where my uh basically my credentials for tiashon.namebase are stored and I'm using it to go and authenticate to news.nbc.

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Basically uh at a high level what's happening is news on nbc is issuing a challenge request for me to sign and when I go to oidc dot name studio, I am going to sign that message and then it will redirect me back to the forum so that I can go and uh basically verify that I'm actually the owner of teshon.namebase and this site will then go and query handshake behind the scenes and make sure that the signature is a valid signature.

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um So this is how you can actually even use handshake names for decentralized names and uh for a developer. This is actually pretty interesting. It's it's kind of similar to how you would use you know an ens name or a software. Domain's name uh to uh you know, use as decentralized usernames, but something that's very cool is the tlds on handshake are all managed on chain the slds as we call them so the second level names the sub domains.

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These are all managed off chain, and so what's possible is, if you want to have you know, maximum security, maximum decentralization? You can have your uh decentralized username information all stored on chain uh and manage it. That way. However, if you're a developer and you're trying to onboard users- and you want to give them all their own decentralized usernames- that can be very costly. uh Although on handshake names, uh you know are much cheaper to register than on.

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You know a chain like ethereum, because handshake is built specifically for naming, and so all the transactions are all for uh basically registering names on chain, and so you can register names for as little as you know, one to ten cents uh right now, but if you're trying to onboard millions of users that that can still add up uh quite quickly, and so what you can do is in this case, what we've done is: we've appointed name base to a which is a tld that we own on handshake to a name server, and then we store the records of uh the second level names on that name server and you can imagine as a developer, then what you can do is you can create a uh application that uses decentralized usernames and for the majority of users you can just give them a free username right like let's say you own, you know app name, you can just give them username.app name and they can use that by default and then, if they want to go and maximize your portability and decentralization, they can go and get their own.

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You know, root level, name and use that themselves and the application will still just work as normal, um and the analogy is it's kind of similar to getting an email address right. You can go and get a gmail address for free and then it's going to be gmail.com or you can register your own domain name, uh which costs a little bit more and then go, but it's also more customizable and then you can go and use that as your email address.

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Instead, and so this is something that's possible using handshake names today um which you're seeing in this live demo and then, if you're interested in actually implementing it, we have docs at dachshund based io, which basically shows off how to uh one create like a simple decentralized website like I showed off here um and then two how to use handshake names for the decentralized authentication um which can be used. um You know for for basically any application.

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That's trying to leverage decentralized, usernames and I'll say one other uh point about handshake for in case there's any non-developers here or just people who are kind of uh just interested in the decentralized username space in general and collecting um something. That's been very interesting. Emergently is just the fact that um a lot of people have been collecting handshake names, which is kind of a weird thing, because you think oh, these are just like tlds like. Why would we collect?

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Why would they be collecting them, um but a lot of uh not just like crypto enthusiasts, but traditional domain industry enthusiasts have gone into uh collecting handshake names, and so what we've been seeing um at name base is we have a basically a secondary marketplace for the names and uh basically, it's been growing exponentially for the past. 12 months um june was the second highest month of volume. Ever uh basically, the volume has been growing at 32 month over month for 12 months straight and there's a really interesting market arising from these names.

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um That was kind of surprising, like we didn't really expect this to happen at all, but a lot of people are selling names. um You know the person who sold p uh for namecheap, they bought it for like five thousand dollars and then sold it for 250 thousand dollars. uh Six months later um and a lot of people are actually having like 100 x sales or a thousand excels um and you'll see even in the the marketplace today, I'll just scroll down uh to a name. I was looking at earlier.

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um You'll see this double emoji name, which is using the browser's puny code, rendering which is basically turning an alphanumeric numeric string into an emoji. uh This name was originally bought in december of 2020 for uh basically zero hns.

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um You know the the first person the top bidder was to ten hns and then the second bidder was uh zero hns right here, and so they actually pay the second highest bid, which is zero hns and then they later sold it. um You know less than a month later for 12 h s and then the person who bought it then sold it a few months later for 400 hms so there's this really interesting market.

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So, if you're a non-developer, um I would check that out, because a lot of people are kind of getting into it and just using it as a game, basically where they can make money from it. uh But then, as a developer. Something that's really cool. Is now that there's a lot of people who are actually registering these names and collecting them? You can build uh dap experiences around them, leveraging the uh decentralized uh authentication like I mentioned, or just you know, creating experiences around creating decentralized.

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