September 2021 Highlights

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Namebase

The easiest way to get started on Handshake

• Last year Tieshun/ and Mike/ alone represented Handshake on a Blockchain Domains panel at #NamesConOnline. This year, Handshake had its own 2 day track at NamesCon!

• Digital Trends reported on Handshake in their article: The Internet's Phonebook Desperately Needs an Upgrade

• The Handshake coin was included on CoinMarketCap's NFT list

• IPFS posted an article on Handshake!

• Our merch shop just dropped some Handshake beanie merch

  • Reminder all merch is priced at cost, which means affordable prices for you and zero profit for us!

• We fixed some papercut bugs including:

  • Emojis now render in emails

  • Clarified name gifts count as referrals

  • Fixed bug where sellers couldn't see their own listings in marketplace

  • Fixed "-637000mins" text for auctions that haven't begun

  • Blog post format fixed

• Our community manager pitched Handshake dozens of times at Messari Mainnet, this was the pitch that worked best for him.

• 9 of the 10 top sales from last month were emojis!

  

• We've updated our domain share pages! Check out this clever domain's preview image below:

Opportunities to help:

• 1,000 HNS bounty: Create a Namer News clone where only subdomain owners of a specific TLD can login. This should take advantage of both subdomain gifting and Handshake login (which supports logging in with subdomain gifts).

• 500 HNS bounty: We use this library to render emojis on Namebase. In order for zero-width joiner emojis to be rendered properly on Namebase, this library needs to get updated.

• Open role: "Events Promoter". Our community needs a Namer or 2 who can be responsible for keeping tabs on what blockchain or relevant events are happening around the world so we can begin sending Directors out to represent Handshake.

• Ping johnnywu/ in the Namer Community Discord if you're interested in taking on any of these bounties.

Agaamin

India's Internet

• Figured out how to make a MVP domain registry system for

  • Handshake TLDs under 2500 USD.

  • Initial Capital Expenditure less than 2500 USD.

  • Recurring Costs Monthly - 600 USD.

• This will help a lot of the folks set up their little mom and pop niche domain registries. Like little decentralised coffee shops :)

• We are working towards a working prototype.

• Lesson Learnt - Its often important to step back and look the larger objective than get stuck in the micro details.

Opportunities to help:

• We can put out bounties ranging from 500 HNS to 4000 HNS for various tasks. The kind of stuff we are looking at are :

  • Web Design Skills.

  • Dev Ops With experience in Web Hosting Solutions like WHMCS and DNS.

  • Developers who can create plugs-in that can connect hosting solutions like WHMCS to DNS Servers on Clouflare/NS1/ClouDNS via APIs.

Alexa100k

A Handshake Initiative based in London, England focused primarily in assisting Alexa ranked site owners claim their Alexa Handshake Top Level Domains absolutely free.

• Alexa100k presentation an informative and insightful talk on Namescons Online Handshake Track.

• Networking with domain industry professionals to get them to understand the benefits of adopting Handshake and claim their Alexa Handshake Name.

Opportunities to help:

• If you know an Alexa ranked site owner refer them to Alexa100k and receive 5% from the free hns allocation (no cost to the Alexa site owner).

dWeb Foundation

A Foundation for the Third Internet Era

• Setting up an online privacy & censorship-resistant Handshake conference coming up mid-November!

Flamingo Handshake

Premium Live Auctions for Handshake Names

• Record breaking auction at NamesCon auction, 361,000 HNS, results posting soon on flamingohandshake.com

• Next auction for Wednesday Oct 20, 2021 at 4pm PST (SF time)

Opportunities to help:

• Submit your names for next month auction at: flamingohandshake.com/submit: flamingohandshake.com/submit.

Foci

Email & DNS hosting service with support for Handshake domains

• Development on Foci's first public service (DNS hosting for Handshake names) is nearly complete and will be ready for closed beta testing in the near future!

• The intent for Foci was originally to mainly focus on creating a "domain-agnostic" email service, though building out a domain hosting platform was given first priority (rather than a secondary feature) because there's a greater need for one with the Handshake community.

• Other details of this project have mostly been kept under wraps until recently, so work to fill out the website's placeholder landing page with some basic info is underway.

• A new Twitter profile also emerged a couple weeks ago, give it a follow!

• Oh and the above logo was finalized this month (though "finalized" is a relative term 🙂).

Opportunities to help:

• I'll be looking for Handshake community members that would like to participate in testing the domain hosting service with one or two Handshake domains in the near future. At first this will be an invite-only closed beta test.

• If you are interested, please contact Neel Yadav via Twitter, through Discord, or by email!

Gateway.io

Buy domains on the new Internet

• We had a great time presenting at NamesCon Online in September!

• In case you missed our panel about Handshake SLDs, here's a quick summary:

  • All Namebase Registry registrations are tweeted @HandshakeSLDs.

  • There are 4,272 active SLD registrations, and ~70% of them are .c registrations.

    • Cumulatively, that is #337 on the new gTLD rankings (.c is #389 by itself).

  • 94 TLDs have at least 1 SLD registration. Here are the top 11 TLDs, in terms of SLD registrations:

  

  As you can see, .c is currently the runaway winner. To learn how to duplicate this success, contact clay.c/ (he owns .c, .1, and .zen).

  • Here are the top 15 SLDs, in terms of registrations across multiple TLDs:

Not surprisingly, the most popular SLDs are crypto-related (e.g., "bitcoin", "crypto", "nft", "defi"). DeFi is particularly popular because it appears as a top TLD and a top SLD.

HNSfans

HNS Chinese community

• Due to China's regulation on mining pools, we've shut down our WeChat group and have moved onto Telegram: https://t.me/hnsfans

HNSSearch

Your window into the dweb; indexing the New Internet one name at a time

• The public beta of HNSSearch is now live and will last until the 22nd of October with the launch planned for the 25th of October. You can reach the site with the url http://hnssearch/ or http://hnssearch./

• If you are not using any resolver, please do not use hns.to but rather our mirror https://handshakesearch.hns.siasky.net/ as hns.to messes with the page and the performance. It would still work but it loads very slow.

• The beta is a complete overhaul of the old site and code-wise has nothing to do with it.

• The tech stack has been completely changed to not only improve the user experience but to make the site more scalable and more adaptable in the future.

Kyokan

We make decentralized stuff

• Bob Wallet is getting SPV mode in the next version! Without having the download the complete blockchain, the desktop app syncs much faster (~30-45 mins instead of 7-8 hours) and takes up less space on disk.

• A major code refactor of wallet code by Matthew Zipkin makes connections to remote nodes (and switching between local and remote) more reliable.

• Bob Extension has been updated to use a new backend by Kurumi Imari that is simpler and more stable. The update also adds a new API method (getNames) that websites integrating with the extension can use.

Opportunities to help:

• Try out the extension! We'd love get your feedback on design, features, or anything else.

• If you face any problems (or find any bugs) with Bob Desktop or Extension, feel free to join the Telegram group / Discord or create an issue on GitHub.

• If you're a developer, maybe even contribute fixes or new features!

Niami

A fun way to discover Handshake

• Open, Bid, Reveal names via Bob Wallet Browser Extension

• HNS Block Explorer Integration

• Much faster Namebase Market Sync (<1h)

• 1.8 Million Names rated

• Full Transaction history for names

• Dark ModeOpportunities to help:

RealtyDAO

Daos on Domains - Tokenized Domain Marketplace

• RealtyDAO smart contract and bonding curve contracts on Binance is working good, fast, cheap and what we expected.

• We now have about 18 HNS names onchain, 120 premium .coms and adding about 10 day to the marketplace.

• However the challenge is amount of users that do not have BNB to pay for transactions, getting BNB, etc. as most are just now getting into ETH contracts, let alone DWeb domains.

• We are rolling out NFT based subdomains for our HNS names like .Carbon, .Chain and .Aqua and rolling out a automated page builder and wrapper for the subdomains.

• We learned we are still early and to target market the right audience as most users are just now hearing about crypto, smart contracts and decentralized domains but the tech stack is def disrupting markets and some really good tech and companies pushing the bounties of how businesses are built and run.

• We are looking soon at how to decentralize our storage stack with arweave, ipfs but still not sure to fully trust these systems just yet...

• There is a rampant amount of hacking which is concerning and spammers are getting more aggressive on there access and approach to getting you to click.. Be careful and we look forward to the day when HNS names remove this ssl approach to "false security connection" .

• RealtyDAO added some really big media partners who now "get it" and engaged on some premium names we added to our Tokenized Domain Marketplace.

Opportunities to help:

• We need any technical, marketing and storyboarding-education content help. Giving nice referral bounties using our Referrals.com asset along with HNS bounties. We have various bounties and have a cool lottery system to test.

Shakestats

• Hello all! This month we have been actively getting everything in place for Auction #2.

  We aim to make each auction bigger, better and more impactful for the ecosystem.

• In addition to this, another major focus has been altering our database to fetch in depth data with more ease. Expect new stats on the website in our next update.

• Last but not least, we are working on a presenting burned data per block with various forms of graphs to all to visualise the real time burn which is occurring on the blockchain.

• Thank you all for the continuous support! Happy naming :)

SkyInclude

Education & Services For Building Websites on Handshake

• Working on a HNS payment plugin for Wordpress via WooCommerce

• Recap meeting with NamesCon to discuss future events and collaboration.

Opportunities to help:

• HIP002, wellknown wallet, we have still HNS put up for that along with a bunch of others

Thank yous

Thank you to Agaamin, Alexa100k, dWeb Foundation, Flamingo Handshake, Foci, Gateway, HNSfans, HNSSearch, Kyokan, Niami, RealtyDAO, Shakestats, and SkyInclude for sharing your highlights!

If you wanted to hear from an org that we missed, ping johnnywu/ in the Namer Community Discord to see them in the next update!

Additional community highlights

• Argoapp.live had its GoDaddy account suspended and are now back live on their uncensorable Handshake at argoapplive/

  • Connect your Handshake name to your dApp on Argo to receive a free Handshake name!

• Coming soon: Top Level Bears NFTLDs drop

• DeFi needs decentralized frontends, and everyone needs end-to-end decentralization. This was just made possible with Homescreen!

Namer Norms

• Namers are Directors of Handshake. Handshake is controlled by no one and can be enhanced by anyone.

• Namers believe in freedom, transparency, security, and equitable ownership of the internet. Handshake domains can be practically anything, are won through open auctions, are censorship-resistant and private, and can be fully owned by anyone.