Transcript
(00:01) [Music] hey hey hey because you see the potential that handshake can grow into you that not very manipulate which means you have adopted the kind of visionary outlook on this technology that the internet pioneers in the 90s have adopted very exciting except where we’re headed from the vantage point of present day is that we’re entering the third era of the internet which is which was some someone call it the web 3.
(00:43) so we’re going to talk to some of the early internet pioneers of the decentralized web today on this conference so on this talk right now we have tayshan matthew zipkin kiva handshake jesus and jihanchu welcome everyone uh what are you in a handshake let’s just do left to right top to bottom you should call you should call on us i’m not sure what order we’re in when everyone’s going uh yeah well taishan you’re already here to give your uh intro in the previous talk so maybe we’ll just go to matthews of kin
(01:16) okay uh i discovered handshake um because i was working on b coin in in 2018 um when i had my job interview for that jj and andrew lee were like we’re also doing this like dns blockchain thing and i’m like oh you guys are starting an altcoin um and here i am i love it i’m super involved and and i think it’s it’s totally awesome but yeah i came came from the b coin world uh do you want to give some context about what bitcoin is because oh right of course all right all right they’re right we’re talking to the most
(01:45) general audience possible here so b b coin is a uh bitcoin full node written in javascript by uh mostly almost entirely by jj and it was used by purse.io for which is a company that can buy uh anything you want on amazon using bitcoin and um it’s like a platform where somebody buys the amazon thing and you give them your bitcoin and so they don’t run bitcoin core they run this this homemade bitcoin core uh bitcoin full node written in javascript called b coin um and a lot of people use it um i’m still very active in the b coin
(02:14) community and support um users on slack and developers all over the world uh there’s a lot of um bitcoin based companies in africa for some reason in nigeria in particular um that run b coin full nodes and i’m happy to can you continue to support them um yeah and so uh handshake hsd the the handshake full node that everyone uses is based on b coin so it’s also written in node.
(02:38) js it’s not a fork of bitcoin core like uh other alt coins you might be familiar with like litecoin or or dash um that kind of thing um and and because jj had written them you know basically all of bitcoin and had this idea for handshake it made sense that the handshake full node would be a code fork of b coin and so all the engineers that were familiar with b coin like myself mark tyneway boyman nodar javed um by identity are also very familiar with the handshake code base and so that made it very easy to transition over and start helping
(03:12) people get handshake installed in their systems and in their projects um and uh yeah it just it just kind of took over um you know the last thing i’ll say about it is bitcoin only has like 50 nodes on the bitcoin network you know bitcoin has got something like 10 000 nodes and like a handful of them are bitcoin and so we had a couple of users handshake 100 of the nodes are hsd and um so we’re discovering a lot of things that like bitcoin uh didn’t have to worry about because it wasn’t the majority of the network and
(03:43) hsd is like the entire network um and so it’s just very exciting to have all these users um yeah right and the uh the implementer of b coin and implementer of hsd is going to be in q a closing ceremony tomorrow so you have questions for him that’s great i have some questions for him actually yeah yeah rare appearance okay uh we’ll go on to kiva full stack developer and h s fun tell us about yourself oh hello everyone um nice to be here um about me uh i’m just a developer yeah just like learned how to
(04:23) code uh got into crypto like a couple of months after that and kind of ran with it for the rest of my life i guess um seems to be the plan and i got into handshake almost a year ago exactly like right before right after actually like a couple of weeks before i made it launched and my friend asked me to do a freelance job for them and they’re like oh can i pay you a handshake and i was like what’s that and they’re just like oh this is blockchain that’s about to launch and it’s like it’s you can’t even pay me
(04:50) with them yet or like they’re i don’t know but i accepted and here i am um and yeah i think the idea and the concept of handshake of like owning your name um and everything that comes with that like the security and uh interoperability and everything um program programmatic domains is really powerful concept and you’re only scratching the surface so i’m really excited to see what people are building on top of it especially open source things where they can be integrated with other blockchains or
(05:19) with other services that aren’t possible with normal web 2 domains yeah and if this concept if you could take away anything from this conference it’s just ideas about what you can do with this yeah and actually meeting people because i don’t i don’t really talk to anyone i’m mostly just do my own thing so i’m really happy to just make friends too yeah all right handshake jesus welcome welcome thank you for that i uh found out about handshake this summer i had a previous acquaintance with one of the founders
(05:53) the second of the two andrew lees or the first maybe um the pia founder he and i um had gotten together a few years ago to discuss some humanitarian business we were gonna we were talking about doing a technical and financial literacy program for kids in in schools and we happened to stay in touch and as a matter of fact the last time i saw him we had discussed his running for president and i reached out to him this summer and i said hey are you so where are you with that and what are you working on and he said i’m working on handshake
(06:30) and um i took a look at it and was blown away i i loved its simplicity and its basic bitcoin proof of work framework but just focused on dns uh when i saw bitcoin i actually found out about it from andreas antonopoulos and about 213 214 and i just freaked out i read everything i could but you know interestingly i saw the revolution there the the decentralized trust network the the deliverable of trust minimization and i felt similarly when i saw a handshake i had thought i retired and the bankers were pumping our bags
(07:16) and and we won and the wealth transfer had occurred uh but when i saw a handshake it was clear that there was a lot more to do and that there’s something really special about a self-sovereign identity i’m a psychologist by training but i’ve been an investor for a long time but mostly it’s about finding freedom and empowering others these days and handshake looks like the perfect vehicle for that i talked about um bitcoin being a revolution and i really believe that handshake we won the revolution
(07:58) and um the money is flowing into the decentralized ecosystem and now i see handshake as an evolution and the um the decentralization of the internet so i’m all in all right juhan tell us a little bit about yourself awesome thanks again um so yeah jay hinchey i’m the founder of kinetic we’re a investment blockchain investment firm i’m also uh the founder of the ethereum meetup in hong kong back in 2014 so that’s actually how i got to know vitalik and through metallic joseph poon they’re just putting
(08:36) handshake how i got in um and i think fast forward to today like the way that i look at handshake and the way that i kind of sell it to other people and get them try to get them interested in is you know you have like the the web that we know we have the dark web and then to me handshake is the doorway to the light web it is the decentralized internet that we really want and that we really deserve and you know to have a censorship resistant internet where you know content and ideas and applications can roam freely
(09:09) and people can interact with each other in a way that’s not kind of mediated um by utilized authorities that’s really what handshake enables we have incredible functionality uh deeper in the stack from storage uh to infrastructure but you know it all begins with how uh we interact with the web and that’s browser and that’s domain and that’s handshake so without handshake i feel like you know we’re missing you know the faceplate on like the world’s most advanced kind of you know android
(09:40) functionality and so we really need this i think um handshake in addition i always think of it as you know the the identity layer for people places things and ephemera um and you know i think increasingly what we’re going to see with handshake in addition to just domain names is even and we’re starting to see even other protocols um using handshake as a layer a reference layer and a registry layer you know the example that i always like to give is imagine you know a honeywell a dot honeywell domain and
(10:13) imagine you take that namespace all the way back so that you have transaction six dot you know machine five dot jurisdiction eight dot honeywell and you can actually capture the entire namespace uh in a unique persistent uh and censorship resistant way uh for even transactions um in a way that’s you know kind of universally referenceable like that’s the power of handshake um i think that nfts are an incredible opportunity for handshake as well the ability to kind of which is why i bought the nft domain to be able to kind of not
(10:46) only capture and amber uh you know digital amber all these different ideas uh and content but to be able to name them and find them and reference them that’s really the power of handshake so when i get psyched about handshake these are the things that i like to talk about yeah and to add to that handshake really makes it so that domains can become the digital tomorrow and land is important digital land is also valuable because it scares cool well thank you everyone for giving your intros i’ll do a really quick intro
(11:18) and then we’ll go on to the ground questions uh i got into bitcoin really early on in 2014 i was ideologically aligned with it and then saw the potential of bitcoin and now we’re kind of seeing the fruits of that manifest and then um afterwards i joined droid cosmos and now i’m kind of doing this d-web foundation with johannetian and yeah we’re really really big believers of handshake as you can tell um yeah well we kind of touched on what got people into handshake but what’s really cool right
(11:53) now is let’s let’s talk to the builders right everyone everyone here is a builder um tell us about what you’re building and why you think it’s cool yeah go ahead all right can you read that one more time it kind of cut out for a second uh what are you building and why do you think it’s cool and i don’t know yeah name base but you’re doing a bunch of votes too yeah totally so something that we care a lot about is just infrastructure for the handshake community um so that’s why we
(12:23) built the name-based marketplace uh so that not only people trade the nays but it’s really in terms of enabling liquidity in the marketplace right if someone comes in and already has a name that you want and you want to go and use it you need a way to be able to get that so we built the marketplace for that uh and then on top of that we’re also trying to build infrastructure that makes your names more valuable and so this is why we’re releasing the name based registry uh which is what you know clay collins
(12:52) is using for c um and we’re integrating with registrars on that so people can actually go and sell uh subdomains off of their tlds and so that is just increasing the utility of the names um and then we’re investing more in uh alternative use cases of handshake names that are uh kind of unintuitive just because you wouldn’t think of using domain names for this typically but one of the really cool things is with handshake it solves the certificate authority problem basically instead of having to rely on a
(13:22) third party for trust you can rely on the handshake blockchain and once you can do that you can actually start using handshake names for more use cases than just for domain names you can use it for actually decentralized identity which is why we worked on the handshake login spec and namer news as an example for how to use handshake login in a normal website and so now you can actually use your name for decentralized identity you can use it for as a decent registry you can use it as a normal website and then there’s another use case which
(13:57) is even cooler which is a little bit too uh broad to go into now but you can actually use handshake for uh decentralized social applications like you can actually build like decentralized reddit and decentralize twitter using your handshake names and it’s really really cool because one is it’s only possible today by combining handshake with new decentralized technologies like uh skynet and akash um but then also you know a lot of people haven’t realized the potential of this just because right now the current model for
(14:29) decentralized social applications is like federated applications which just have a lot of really bad user experience issues and with handshake you can actually solve them and it’s fairly nuanced how it solves them but basically we’re working on uh you know developing this infrastructure building example apps that the community members can see what’s possible with handshake um and then go and take it and run with it totally what are you building matt um i’m trying to focus on the uh the core applications that support handshake
(15:00) which is hsd and hsd i also have a few ideas for things to help developers launch their websites i have a project called handout which is a really easy way for user with a handshake name to launch a name server and a web server and just like get some content on a handshake domain right away that’s the kind of thing i’d like to do is build simple tools for developers to access handshake quickly and even if they’re just proof of concepts that other people can expand on and then i gotta get back to fixing wallet bugs on hsd
(15:31) and there’s a lot of dns sect features that we’re missing or things are like not um quite interoperable with legacy dns tools so i’m working with james stevens on that and buffer not actually sure what his real name is but it’s great to have some um uh dns experts around to help us get the you know to get to help to get those applications working so you know the the core stuff is what i love i love writing the software that an individual person runs on their individual computer to leverage the power of cryptography and
(16:03) proof of work against or not against but just independent of state level powers or or corporate level powers just you know so that’s the stuff that um i’m really into um you know recently was this project i think we’re going to talk about tomorrow with mike carson and kiba which is an ethereum bridge um i decided that was an important priority to take on because it shows to the community um cryptocurrency in general handshake and ethereum and ens communities that this is not a competition people don’t
(16:32) need to say like oh why do i need handshake if the ens is around or vice versa like we are interoperable we have different use cases um a particular handshake is a root zone and an ethereum operates subdomain so like that’s an obvious thing that we can fit together um and the ability to deploy other contracts on ethereum that work like ens but with individual properties based on preferences mike carson’s preference was to um have an owner-less registry you know um so so i decided that was a really interesting and important thing to work
(17:01) on to show the world how we can do this interoperability and stuff like that um but back in in hsd and hmsd land um there’s a lot of little features i want to add a lot of uh dns features and um over the past couple years i’ve been working on on bitcoin development and following bitcoin core development which is um just something i like to do like to review uh pull requests for bitcoin core and interact with those developers and obviously they are so far ahead of where we are in terms of things like network security eclipse attacks um
(17:34) all kinds of optimizations and stuff like that blocks how blocks get transferred around the network and i’m really excited about bringing those technologies that strengthen the network fundamentally into hsd and hnsd yeah in hsd land when do you expect it to be mature enough and for the infra around it to be mature enough for mass integration with all the existing um like browsers for example oh can we start seeing handshake names result oh i mean i’m doing it right now i run i run hsd on on uh raspberry pi at home and in the cloud
(18:10) and i mean i i think i understand what you’re getting at like like the the question is like when can someone who’s brand new to the ecosystem download one thing double click it and go to a handshake name securely and that’s still a hard thing to do as you know we’ve discussed with engineers that that represent major browsers and and there’s a lot of technical hurdles to overcome and you know different levels of reluctance and excitement over those technologies that need to be added one thing we talk a lot about in
(18:38) this community is dane which is a way to secure the web server client communication without using certificate authorities so that’s the https the green lock in the browser otherwise known as ssl or tls this is your browser telling you go ahead and trust the content on this site i guarantee you it’s real you can put in your credit card number if you read a bitcoin address off a website you can trust that that’s real hasn’t been man in the middle hasn’t been interrupted in a way and um it’s a hard thing to do and it’s
(19:12) a project is because it’s like the dns part of handshake is easy um you get a name you point out a web server or you forward it back to your icann domain and so you can have a handshake name and like have something there but if it’s not secure it’s just not um i don’t want to discourage anybody but for me like the the thing is to get that security that’s when we know it’s real you know like the thing like oh i just want my grandma to be able to use it well if you want grandma to use it or you know let’s use
(19:41) something not gendered or ages or whatever if you want a non-technical person to just double click something and use something securely like um it takes a lot more work than this http colon slash emoji stuff and we gotta get there but it’s hard like you said so your question was when do i think it’s gonna happen um and uh i have no idea i think honestly it’s gonna take somebody from inside the handshake community forking firefox or chromium and writing it i don’t think we can really expect um brave to do it for us
(20:15) uh or or chrome or safari um i’ve taken a look at the firefox source code it’s 20 gigabytes i got it to compile it took like 30 minutes um but you know so i’m like oh i i compiled this browser from source that’s cool i can start like picking at it but like man it’s complicated and because we’re talking about security like um we need like a team and we need some experts in there and i might be able to get something to work personally but it’s going to take me all year of just focusing on that you know
(20:42) um so it’s hard and and i would encourage people to really push for security and do what they can now launch those sites um with dain and you know look into into the let’s dane proxy uh it’s the best thing we have um there’s an attack surface there that we can talk about um but it’ll work you can get that https in your browser um and i think we need to be patient and um maybe as handshake gets more exciting and we get more funding from different groups um maybe we can afford a group of developers to to add that
(21:14) feature to a fork of a browser or you know something else we’ve spoken about in the developer channels there’s other browsers like not just chrome opera safari brave but like puma has shown some interest that’s very interesting i don’t know if if they want to add dane or um if they have that technology available to them the expertise for example but um one thing that i thought was interesting that somebody mentioned is a tour browser because this tour is like it’s um it’s all you know it’s an alternative system
(21:41) and not everybody in the mainstream loves tour and you know you have to download the special browser to get to tour sites and it’s a fork of firefox and they’re interested in security and they take bitcoin donations so they’re aware of that kind of stuff um so maybe we should go bark up tor tree and see if you know though they could add dane support in a way that would be helpful to handshake and shameless plug you know if anybody in the audience wants to take up the helm this is something that the web foundation would
(22:10) be interested in funding all right handshake jesus what um when i first saw when i first started to engage it was all about just learning there was so much that i didn’t know and actually that’s what i love about this space is it’s constant learning um so one thing that we just created and was a co-sponsor of this event um was the handshake institute um you know when i i love the the fact that it rose up out of the community um and i want to make sure that although it’s a centralized body to some degree
(22:51) it was generated by the community to meet certain needs but um what we are is a u.s based 501 c 3 slated organization that educational organization that’s basically i got a couple focuses you know when i looked at the well to take a step back one thing that i love about handshake is the spirit of gifting and if there’s one thing that i’ve really tried to create is momentum around gifting it feels like an emergency to me to get your friends and family their names on the decentralized web and i’ve you know i’m surrounded by so many
(23:36) amazing superstars i had to find a role and i felt like that was an interesting role to fill um part of it is the concept of creating momentum you know when you have something like handshake at your back you can fearlessly bring the gospel so to speak and so i you know played that scrappy role on twitter to raise awareness and develop momentum and we all know that’s where a lot of early adoption goes on with crypto and so that’s where i focused a lot of my energy was just raising awareness at least subtly and gifting and
(24:15) developing some momentum around gifting it was one of the most beautiful things there’s two things that i loved about um handshake was the simplicity with the b coin base focused on the dns and the distribution model and it’s kind of based on this radical gift and so um that was really kind of where i started but then when i looked into the ecosystem as a whole i saw a couple places i could also um contribute and one of them was that i wanted to raise awareness to developers um claiming and just workers work on that claim
(24:58) function not only with developers that got the airdrop but with the top 100 000 i feel like once we can onboard you know it’s about onboarding and adoption um so the organization is focused on raising awareness and at the same time growing and sustaining open source development one thing that i’ve that i saw early was kiba’s h s fund and i just thought it was a beautiful place to contribute and it’s a it’s a community-based uh non-vc funded um fund that i’ve been working with him on that i
(25:42) that i just think is another place to focus um so we created the um handshake institute the first large donation is going to the h s fund um i’m excited for kiba who’s sitting right here also to talk about that um uh we’re going to get a panvala match and we’re open to um you know funding uh open source development and really growing and sustaining that over time i think the interesting thing about handshake like bitcoin is that there isn’t funding built into the protocol level and so it’s required from
(26:28) the community in a lot of ways whether that’s vc which is great or community-based donations or different projects that that can produce some some revenue so uh some things that i’m focusing on is that 501c3 vehicle so in in concert with the d-web foundation that we we discussed a potential partnership around being a us-based alliance partner so we can work in multiple jurisdictions you know something that you have brought up last night there’s a certain need for a centralized communication at this
(27:08) level where whether it’s with coinbase or icann so the concept of developing a foundation just made sense i i like what the founders did in dissolving the initial one and then having a community rise up and develop multiple ones in concert which is really what this was we had people had different ideas and could see the need and and so and so the the handshake institute um is just a group of us it’s uh mark smith myself uh christian stark uh getting getting it rolling and um our first big focus is on the ats
(27:48) fun great thank you yeah and just for context uh what handshake jesus was referring to with the diva foundation is that it is it’s residing in singapore of the jurisdiction yeah uh we we’ve only got five minutes left so we didn’t even get through the whole round of people so i guess keep it very quickly and then jihad talk about what you’re building why it’s cool uh yeah i can be pretty fast but i’ll also be talking about um what i’m building on the badass domains thing tomorrow but
(28:20) two things that i’m really focused on is a uh handshake domains as an identity um much like tischen i have a slightly different take than him but i won’t go into it um but yeah basically like allowing your domain to be everything about you whether it’s like pointing to your crypto addresses whether it’s like pointing to um we have more time actually so if you’re still hearing me we’ll keep going don’t worry yeah a little bit edm yeah so like using your handshake domain as form of identity so like logging in
(29:13) um pointing into your addresses basically like making it the hub of your entire life um i don’t know about other people within the hinge community but i live my entire life entirely online so for me the ability to bring that identity across multiple platforms and being able to interact with people and like building that reputation that trust um across different platforms using the same identity uh kiba is really important to me so that’s like one thing i’m focusing on uh and i’m doing that in two ways this
(29:40) is one um allowing handshake to port to any other blockchain um so yeah basically like any other blockchain that you might want to use you can move your handshake domain there and use it natively within whatever applications and things are in the ecosystem um and you do that by kind of like signing over your identity on handshake over to this other address on another blockchain and the other thing is integrating handshake into the communities that i’m already in so i worked at consensus which used to be one of the biggest blockchain
(30:08) companies i think they kind of collapsed now um but a lot of the developers that came out of consensus are now building other developer tools and so i’m talking to them um about how to use handshake how to integrate to their communities part of that is this pembrolo league that handshake jesus mentioned which is basically a community regeneration fund i guess you could say so all these different communities get donations from their community members and then the pinball league is like this inflationary token
(30:39) where they give donation donation matching every month um to those communities within pinballa and so that was started by one of my friends from consensus and the handshake development fund is within that so every time someone donates to the handshake development fund and these pan tokens um we also get like five times that amount from pen volley as well so it’s this like really cool thing where it goes for circling um and yeah talking to ceramic network like this weekend hopefully um and they just made a proposal to w3c about using nfts
(31:07) like your ethereum erc721 specifically um as an actual form of identity so it would be a full-on web standard um that your nft is a form of identity and so hopefully when importing handshake domains over to these other blockchains specifically ethereum that will be an internet standard form of identity will be your handshake domain um so things like that um something that i’m really looking forward to yeah i’m totally looking forward to that too one day when our tld that we own could become our self-sovereign identity that no one can
(31:41) take away all right jihan we’ve got two minutes left cool well i i kind of got to got a chance to kind of say a little bit in the beginning but um i’m not really building anything in the handshake ecosystem unfortunately i’m kind of happy to be in the background supporting and maybe chango actually maybe i can kick it back to you just to talk uh say a few words about the the foundation um that we are all building oh yeah totally yeah so so i envisioned the foundation to be sort of a an enabler of innovation and so that’s that’s going to
(32:16) be important because you know without a core foundation um at the start it’s really hard to do things in a totally decentralized way and so now we’re able to help coordinate a lot of these different projects and you know hopefully get funding for them to get more people employed and involved and engaged and so um yeah a couple of things that that are you know coming down the pipeline that that we could talk about is you know this rap you know eventually you can wrap handshake tokens um or you could wrap your tods and turn
(32:49) them into nfts right you could let’s say for example you um you’re a tld owner of let’s say kiba and then you stake it or or lock it up and you wrap it and then you issue like 50 keep the tokens right and then um those nfts could itself be sold to sld uh people and you could basically create this this whole new economy that is uh interoperable with ethereum and this other blockchain called flair which is also pegged to all of these different layer ones and so what we’re really doing is um integrating this economy with a whole
(33:25) bunch of different economies and creating really cool different novel applications off of this and you know it’s it’s it’s really it could take off from anywhere from here um just building this kind of infrastructure and anyone can build anything super cool and that’s that’s what the foundation is ultimately after as well as um pursuing the traditional web domain where we want them to integrate hendrick natively into everything that’s nice nice and just a few more words i think um the officia an official announcement
(33:58) is going to be coming a little bit later but you know the d-web foundation is really envisioned as again an independent kind of body that’s really dedicated to supporting handshake in all of its manners trying to create different types of educational opportunities uh outreach everything from like pr trying to get pr for handshake proper as well as supporting core development and giving grants small grants to developers and people who are helping to kind of secure the infrastructure so i think that’s going to be a really
(34:27) important aspect of the the foundation’s role in addition as you know handshake kind of came from like a virgin birth type of um scenario uh with all of the funds uh that were initially raised in handshake being given out to free open source software uh organizations and so there is no real treasury in the way uh for handshake the way that other protocols seem to be sitting on you know 30 40 50 60 of the treasury and so everything in handshake community is volunteer and donation based and so you know we are all contributing to it
(35:03) uh and we’re going to be relying on the community to also uh you know try and help support in every way that they can uh and then we’re going to help try and redistribute those funds uh to support handshake um in all it’s in many ways all right thank you so much everyone we didn’t you know get to cover a whole lot but we did cover enough around to give people uh a good takeaway [Music] thanks [Music] so