During this time, some of the Handshake community’s most OG domainers will discuss what it would take to bring traditional domainers into Handshake and embrace the DWeb.
Transcript
(00:01) [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] what [Music] what [Music] awesome yeah thanks and circa sponsoring for this panel and this uh some of our event today thank you tom all right it’s full you want to introduce a panel here well we got a bunch of uh handshake or domainer ogs here uh talking about handshake we guys uh the community is definitely super thankful to have you guys a part of our community
(01:04) because um you know without some of your insight i think paul webb was talking about yesterday uh he was talking with tom giving him a lot of insight about uh how to navigate uh the web um but yeah anything else mike i think we we just let you i mean there’s some amazing people here and i think let uh joe donna take the floor here moderating he’s great thank you thank you i’ll take it and and what a privilege thank you for putting this together uh michael and um you know great great group of folks here
(01:36) and for your hard work and uh you know arranging the things and i’m going to take it over so so um uh i’m joined by chad vulcaning uh michael seiger tom barrett and ray king um i think uh you ray uh this is the first uh kind of opportunity you’ve had to talk in front of the the handshake crowd but you’re you’re kind of crushing it over at parkbun so for those of you who haven’t yet had the privilege of meeting ray king he’s the ceo and founder of uh pork bun and top level design uh chad falconing uh is
(02:11) with realty dao and gosh i mean a parallel entrepreneur over a course of many years but i’ve gotten to know him through the domaining community and the domain investment community um tom barrett uh is many of you familiar as the ceo and founder of inserca he is the chairman of the international trademark association’s blockchain committee and a very highly respected uh person uh within the registry registrar community within icann michael seiger is the founder and creator of dn academy who brings up just a wealth of knowledge
(02:50) and structure to helping educate on the secondary market inside the um sort of the classical institutional domain space and uh my name is jonathan frakes uh you’re probably already familiar with me so i won’t give too many introductions but i’ve i’ve been at this for a very long time you know work inside the icann space as a registry registrar guy marketplace i’ve co-founded namescon and a variety of other conferences so amongst this crew um you’ve got sort of a wealth of knowledge on the institutional domain
(03:21) space uh a variety of different successes and and with that said i want to dive right in because we’ve got a brief amount of time um to kind of talk a little bit about the kind of the marketplace that exists now today uh registries registrars um registrants i think we’re all very familiar with that um in the classical kind of icann iana space and you know when you get into looking at how people have interacted with domains and namespace they’re using them for a variety of uh things and we’ll get into that a little
(03:58) bit but um there are a channel of uh various players in the marketplace um ray king is uh the operator of a number of top-level domains in the um in the icarniana route um such as uh dot wiki dot gay uh and then dot inc and downtown two uh having recently um sold uh design to godaddy and then ray also operates uh pork bun so he brings the information he brings sort of a wealth of uh knowledge from the registry and registrar space uh tom barrett um uh has a wealth of knowledge from the trademark side blockchain side and the registrar side
(04:46) and mike seiger can talk a lot as well as chad can talk a lot about the registrant experience and the domain investment and having successes in primary and secondary market registrations and chad also has a significant footprint in the handshake community as well as some successes in blockchain projects such as realty dow so i know i double introduced you but i’ll i’ll go ahead and hand over the topic here a little bit to talk about um maybe uh some of the things in in looking at how institutional adoption of
(05:19) handshake i like to say uh how do we how do we operate from an uh a premise of attraction over promotion and uh you know maybe dial back the saccharin sort of uh you know um level of uh communication about handshake and dive further into how do we pull people in how do we lure people in draw so um i’d like to dive in with ray really quick to talk about um when the registry launches and what some of the process is for you know in the icann space it costs a certain amount of money to do that and then when you’re
(05:58) launching there are certain things that you have to do if you want to not only first launch a tld into the space but also you want to introduce new products and services and with that like an r-step process and things like that um yeah so ican has you know since its inception and i guess 98 or so had this mantra of introducing more competition um and to a lot of people that present more extensions beyond comnet.
(06:31) org etc and i think up until about 2012 um they had dripped and drab some extensions out and maybe reached about 22 in total that were global besides the ones that are for country codes and then in 2012 they opened it up wider and they basically said if um you can demonstrate that you have the technical capability the understanding of icann policies intellectual property and you have the financial backing then you can submit an application for 185 000 for any additional extension you think would be good and then if you pass all those tests and
(07:15) nobody else has opted for that same extension then then you get it so that’s how we ended up being the operators for dot wiki and dot inc ink if multiple people apply for the same then you have to work it out um and there’s a few ways to work it out but primarily people either went to a private auction um or if they couldn’t agree to that they went to an icann auction so eventually most of these extensions got sorted out but it did take a while because there’s it probably take too long to explain here but there’s some
(07:53) exceptions and um different ways people can apply so that’s that was the process um and it was long um but um but it was great and i think that that brought a lot of um it did bring additional competition and a lot more name space to the internet the version just before the one we’re talking about now yeah well and i mean that whole thing we could spend 30 minutes on but but really one of the cool things that i found as we get into doing handshake when when folks get a handshake tld um you pretty much like light up after
(08:36) you’ve made it through your claims period um uh and and you’ve got your your sort of reveal uh process completes you’ve got a tld and then you can do something with it and there’s really aside from whatever technical constraints there are there is no nobody you have to get to approve anything it either works or doesn’t work it’s kind of binary and so one of the things that i thought might be attractive at least for for tld operators is that there is no r step process with you don’t have to go get approved by anybody
(09:09) it either technically functions or it doesn’t function and so it would give you an opportunity to rapidly prototype or or test different things uh rather than having to light that up through you know some sort of a process of approval uh to do something non-standard so that that’s kind of exciting in that in that sense um the other the other uh thing to say here is there are an abundance of rules and guardrails that that i’ll talk we’ll talk a little bit about um but i want to make sure we get a chance to um
(09:43) like get everybody to kind of i don’t know draw in all the sunlight from all these participants i feel like it’s uh i want to get everybody up on stage to um to sing because we’ve got uh all the winners here right so i wanted to just dive in on the on the trademark stuff which is which can be kind of challenging and and call attention to that with with tom because you know you you and you and i both are spending a lot of time here talking about you know don’t register trademarks knowingly like don’t don’t do that and
(10:12) what kind of protections are there the discussion is always around um for a brand if you’re going out and you have to kind of enforce your brand they’ll do a lot of protective sort of advanced registrations pre-registrations and there’s systems set up for that inside of the um the icann space for trademark clearinghouse there’s dispute mechanism processes and a lot of times there’s a sunrise where brands can come in early and get their their names registered if they want to be sort of proactive
(10:44) about protecting them so um how does uh how are you finding successes in communicating inside the brown community about um you know the thing that they’ve had to deal with with the z access extending on the various number tlds that they have to register their brand in um when you think about okay the new tld program from icann brought you know approximately you know a thousand new tlds um handshake has 3 million tlds do you is that like a high pucker factor conversation with folks who want to go out and register
(11:20) you know their brand dot whatever or or you know how are you communicating that to the to the uh the brands thanks thanks jonathan so i i think that uh you know the brands aren’t you know the handshake isn’t making any noise right now it’s like a tree falling in the forest always there and so brand owners are not too concerned about can’t take it uh the most important next step is for handshake to fully realize what it means to be a decentralized web right name base is kind of halfway there i’ll be honest with you right they’re
(12:03) not truly decentralized second level mix such as god forever so i think you i think that the hair shake community needs to focus on truly having decentralized the advantages of handshake over uh eth over unstoppable debates is going to be pretty crystal clear if they can go to full decentralization uh certainly uh gas fees are holding back ethereum naming service there’s a lot of brands and corporates that would love to adopt the decentralized web if they weren’t uh making an impact on the climate and so that will need to be
(12:49) fixed and hopefully it’s not an issue with uh handshake and then finally if you build a decentralized web for consumers then brands will follow those consumers just as they follow consumers to social media we’ve seen a in the us alone trademark filings for nfts and metaverse are up 400 times in 2021 compared to the people so they get it the next obvious step is they need to then figure out what their presence is going to look like in the decentralized web and i i was actually on a panel this morning about
(13:30) in phoenix at mccarthy institute and i said you know what uh you’re not gonna be able to take your web2.com and think you’re going to interact with folks of a decentralized web that’s like using that’s like a business using a hotmail email address today people ask where have you been right and so you’re going to have to if you want to interact with your consumers your customers your distributors on the decentralized web you they trademark orders and brands will need a a web 3 presence separate from their web 2 presence and
(14:05) so if you get it right for consumers to adopt these digital identities on a handshake the brands will follow thank you tom and um so i’m gonna talk to chad and then uh michael looking at the time available and seeing we have some questions um boy i tell you we could take a whole half day the four of us and talk about this so i’d like to you know try to kind of uh glean some high level points that i think people can take away so chad you’ve done quite a lot of effort in um in working with creating uh sort of a uh
(14:46) wow i mean i don’t even know how to do justice to what you’ve done with realty dow and some of what you’re building there but um you’ve really leaned in on the handshake name space and i’d like to hear a little bit about that understanding that we’re we’re going to then talk with michael a little bit about the conventional i would say the classical you know comnet domains so what what motivated you and what drew you to the handshake and what are some of the things you’re doing with your
(15:13) platform yeah thanks for having me um what got us kind of involved in skipping bathrooms you know the investors that were in and just the concept of an opportunity to go into a d a true d web stack right to to de-risk off i can let’s put it that way you know 26 years i’ve built my life on the dot coms.net.
(15:35) org um but there’s also risk to that now and so we that was the only handshake was really the only viable uh web naming stack that we saw out there really and you look at the vc so kind of the name of the topic right how do we get more people involved for me it’s getting the old people involved gets the new people involved meeting you know the vcs that were investing in this five years ago need to get back involved the developers and that were invested in this early on need to get back involved like that like like it’s kind of like
(16:07) they launched it and left and said good luck guys like that’s how i think we scale is bring those people back in some capacity um and that’s going to want and you know like the open source developer ethos system was kind of our mentality too um but you know without liquidity and opportunity cost you know you know there you go there’s opportunity costs over here in liquidity over here you don’t have a need to be on a d-web stack naming stack yet you might in the future in the near future but right now that’s not top of
(16:37) mind uh to most people so this handshake could be in the right place at the right time when it’s needed you know maybe in the future so so for us that’s kind of for us that’s how we’re trying to focus how do we get these old people involved that we’re involved in early days and i think with that team and that momentum we’ll get more people kind of piling into the system right on chad and and so um maybe segwaying into this a little bit so michael i mean bless you for what you’ve done with
(17:12) dnacademy you know to kind of help create structure and really help people understand the opportunities which are vast inside of the domain name and and internet name space um so you’ve kind of gotten into uh the the handshake more and more what what would you say to um to someone who is investigating the opportunities here and and wanting to kind of bring what they understand from the um i would call it the classical uh world of domains into handshake what’s what’s there what’s the carrot what what where someone
(17:49) so um thanks for having me uh it’s great to be a part of this uh panel i will say that you know just to add to what chad just uh provided i think we need a couple of things to make sure that mainstream users are adopt handshake one we need the phenomenal group of developers that we have here and and i commend the organizers of this conference for highlighting a lot of the developers and what they’re working on because you know i know myself i don’t visit a lot of the discord channels throughout the day to see what new projects are
(18:20) being developed and how the technology and use cases are evolving so it’s fantastic because it can spur other opportunities for development so one we get the developers involved and then two we need the browser adoption i know we there’s uh one browser starting up i believe next or this year or next year that’s going to start including native resolutions of h s domains i i think it’s just a matter of paying for access to the browsers if the adoption’s not there so you know if that’s an opportunity for evaluation in
(18:54) the future but once we have the use cases some phenomenal utilities are going to come out of it and then users are going to want to get onto it and then when the browsers allow it then the floodgates are opened up for anybody that has been investing in hns domain names for anybody that wants to offer them for sale through you know the platform that was just talked about um a lot of those opportunities are going to open up and i would say in terms of valuing these tlds these handshake top level domains it’s um
(19:27) i play in the space i watch what’s going on with uh the values of these top-level domains over time and i it’s breathtaking to see how quickly the the um auction prices are rising and um you know i think that for the most part those those of us that are in this conference that are investing and are developing in h s understand the value you know there’s a a quantifiable set of characteristics that make of that domain a top-level domain valuable or worthless and you know the market pretty much gets it
(20:06) right um you know shortness words um you know syllable count character count um numbers emojis seem to be really hot they were really hot in the icann space about seven years ago five to seven years ago as well it’s sort of petered out so it’ll be interesting to see if the same thing happens in uh the handshake space but um you know for the most part the same characteristics that we’ve been using for domain names for the past 30 years is applying uh to traditional domains for the past 30 years is applying to handshake and ethereum
(20:39) domains as well that’s that’s awesome and and um you know i mean you’ve got kind of a commanding perspective on that because you’re you’re you’re training the the next generations and even you know i know people who are tenured veterans in the domain name investment space um actually go through your course and talk about learning things so it’s really wonderful that you have that perspective on handshake and you’re you’re looking at that i saw a comment from um uh richard kirkendall about you know the
(21:10) developers in this community and i and i definitely want to say that that is certainly something that attracted me to this community and the project i learned about it very early on uh even before launch when i was the executive director of the domain name association we were looking at all kinds of technologies and the evolution of how the namespace might evolve wherever it might evolve you know into into technologies like unstoppable or ens or handshake uh even things as obscure as qr codes or now we see what are the y.a.t emoji
(21:43) domains um the the spread of nfts and other sort of blockchain technology in general uh cryptocurrencies uh has become you know very widespread and so it’s drawing people into having attention into um you know what what are some technologies that can let us embrace this but at the same time we’re mired a little bit in in how things currently work so i can um you know has developed and evolved around you know 25 plus years and they’ve brought in things that are um very very core to ensuring their stability
(22:23) security resilience that things behave in an expected manner and that brings guard rails i’ll call it um which some say are uh you know maybe shackle or handcuff the ability to move forward but there are some things that i think have become fundamentally important that that you know won’t break or cause broken experiences as i look at the handshake technologies and some of the development that’s that’s here it starts off by calling itself an experiment if you look at handshake.
(22:55) org it says this is an experiment and i think that’s a good healthy sort of authentic uh way to look at this whole project as being a way to you know test and evolve and yet ray you recently with uh porgban really leaned in and and introduced and added the the ability to register and manage handshake names and tom you you adopted very early in bringing handshake names into the i guess the classical conventional registrar space um folks really want to understand what are the things that are going to attract more registrars we we saw uh name chief
(23:38) recently you know leaned in very heavily and and even acquired a controlling interest in now in name base but what were some of the things that attracted you towards this technology and making it available to your customers uh i’ll start with you ray and then i’ll go to you tom well i mean we’re in the business of selling domain names and i think it’s um you know what’s happening here is really really interesting and really cool um we’re not the first i think um name shape uh kind of led the way there um
(24:15) with the ones that they own and we’re selling and um i’ve got an um amazing cto who is like a partner to me and you know he was poking around and said hey you know we should we should give this a try because i think some of our customers we think we have a lot of customers that are techie and looking at new ways to do things we thought that our customer base would would appreciate a chance to experiment alongside us so we said hey why don’t we just you know i know there’s a ton of different you know millions of
(24:54) names out there but why don’t we pick a few and see what it’ll be like to to sell them and i think it’s been you know so far a pretty fun experiment and tom how about for inserca i mean you you were early early adopter yeah no and uh you know we’re supporting what 1400 uh handshake tlds today those are from name base uh we’re selling them at cost i i apply the same criteria that i would apply on the icann side uh you know if you want me to actually promote your tld beyond simply giving it shelf space
(25:37) i need a commit i need to see a commitment from the registry owner that they’re trying to build a business right and so there’s a lot of icann tlds that just went live did zero branding zero marketing to their targeting customers and and those frankly uh what i you know i didn’t market them on on the icann route i’m not going to market them on the handshake route if i don’t see a commitment there to build a business i do think that it’s going to come i will i will briefly want to say you know
(26:10) we’re supporting 1400 tlds we have great listed about 20 that i think have high potential for abuse right and so as you know all the icann tlds are reserved so dot com is reserved i don’t think it helps the the handshake cause to see c zero m where there’s a zero and seven o i i don’t see how that helps the handshake cause i don’t see how there’s some obvious trademark infringements and so we’ve great list of those uh we are frankly not interested in carrying tlds that are intended to confuse or defraud
(26:56) uh users and consumers but we are we’re open to uh obviously investing more uh i assume there’ll be more back ends so to speak besides name base with more uh with with uh brands and and business business owners willing to invest in building out their tld uh so we’re looking forward to that i do i would like to see a uh community-wide effort to come up with rules on why we might want to graylist or blacklist certain tlds maybe it’s a decentralized autonomous organization like ens but the community should
(27:38) police itself should should have some self-regulation uh to avoid uh certain namespaces that just aren’t healthy for the decentralized web yeah i can see that that that might be helpful and i noticed something um there was a question about this and i think it’s something that um is is kind of helpful to contemplate here so so there’s a concept of custody inside the icann space that that there’s i guess you know what 10-year agreements with uh with icann or whatever period of time you’ve got between what
(28:16) i’d be curious to see what michael and chad maybe give them a chance to respond to your question as well because i know we’re running out of time uh sure so i was told we have until we have another eight minutes and then uh there’s a break right after so we could run a little bit long if people want to stay and kind of ask questions so so uh chad do you want to dive in on this and then michael what was the specific like topic again registrar adoption yeah you know like with with blockchain names right the
(28:49) registrar registry for us in custody where i think i’m gonna lead on to the custody right so um like with realty data we have to have custody at a certain point just because if we’re trading on a asset we don’t own it’s it’s an issue um until trust or reputation systems can be built in this system and so like for us um we prefer to give that to somebody else that does that that’s what they do um like tom or anybody else so for us we like to stay off of that and build other applications and kind of hold the keys
(29:21) our castle right now with blockchain names you need to do that our problem is we have all of our names under one wallet you know we when does the hacking occur right the hackers aren’t here really because there’s not a there’s a lot of low hanging fruit elsewhere and so and there’s not a lot of liquidity again but when that starts to occur in our industry the hackers aren’t going to come the scammers are going to be coming how do we deal that’s what this assist with an industry in the community
(29:46) i think talking about is an important issue the registrar’s we’re already starting to see that the current things right shutting people off so when again we talked about decentralization and the other things that we’re working on i think from a community but these are communication and topics are really important to move us forward and registries and registrars are important infrastructure player are they really decentralized well again then you can build your own node if you really want to but if they do a good job and they’re
(30:17) open i know richard krugerdale’s been pretty open on that i think time those guys are then trust those guys with your assets and then work on building value propositions elsewhere my stuff but but then again if you want to have that opportunity we can manage our own stuff no questions asked it’s fairly easy now a lot of infrastructure is getting better to do that um but again my concern is is that uh putting our eggs in one basket and getting hacked and nobody to cry foul to like you can with icann domains right so
(30:47) um that is the black swan i’m kind of concerned about that could take down our industry really quickly if it also happens happens one time yeah i think i think we’re both focused in the same area what i was um uh suggesting here is you know with icann there’s there is a concept of that custody for lack of better term i can as the the root or the custody of those contracts and the registry has an agreement for a term of time and then the registrar on behalf of a registrant will go and provision those names a year at a time
(31:20) and you cannot register a domain for longer than 10 years on uh i can gtlds um in the case of uh you know these handshake names the the amount of time has not been defined for second level registrations but typically there’s a concept of year-long increments that are the domain units that we use in the icann space and because it’s familiar on registrars it will um registrants will see that as familiar registrars will see that as familiar and so that concept is there but i think it’s going to be difficult for a
(31:55) registry and even a registrar if there isn’t a concept that there’s some sort of custodial lockdown of the tld itself that during to in order to furnish the delivery of service that somebody buys so if i buy a year’s worth of um tom.barrett and and tom owns you know.barrett um and tom is locked into committing to that full term of whatever the longest duration of those registrations are and uh one of the things that i have to explain very frequently in the icann space is in the absence of knowing who owns a tld or
(32:34) operates a tld if you’re a registry operator you probably want to hold the custody you want to probably have the custodial wallet for whatever of the um the strings that you’re supplying into the registrar channel so jonathan jonathan to your point i think i’m a believer that third party custody meaning if you’re not a custody of your own handshake keys or eve keys third-party custody is going to be the first place we’re going to see regulation right it’s already happening with cryptocurrency and other types of
(33:09) nfts and of course these domain names are simply nfts yeah and i’ll i’ll contribute one thought on top of that you know with with the whole concept of icann being centralized rules and databases and and you hold the whole decentralized web you know we’re going to figure out these rules maybe it’ll be a dow that controls it you know we’re sort of shifting the burden of uh oversight right tom now has to review every single tld that comes in to make sure that or somebody on his team to review something to determine if it’s
(33:42) appropriate or not does it match his integrity values of the company or not would he be embarrassed if it got on the cover of some you know wall street journal or not and so people you know the whole idea of this conversation is mass adoption how do you get to mass adoption there need to be rules right that’s why everybody in the crypto space is saying let’s get some regulation for bitcoin because once there’s regulation once we know the rules then it’s probably going to catch fire right it’s
(34:11) going to con it’s it’s that analogy it’s going to be um you know uptake the uptake is going to be much greater so i think in the decentralized web world as well especially handshake we need some clarity around how things will operate before we get to mass adoption as well that’s a good point michael for sure for sure so uh one of the questions that came in was you know i own tld and i want registrars in the icann space to offer that to their customers and i can see that one of the opportunities that
(34:46) to monetize your new handshake investment is you know wanting to go and do that for for registrars they’re going to want to know that the custody is locked down on something you know there have been um i i recall uh you know central nick this is uh you know what 2003 2004 uh we’re taking registrations under web.
(35:10) com at the third level and then you know web.com just got up one day and said oh we don’t want to do that anymore and so if you had had built a business or branded around something.web.com you got rug pulled and you know at least they honored the duration of whatever contract that you did but there is the concept of wanting to build on stable land for for somebody who may want to use at least in the conventional web development process so how do we make sure that people can have confidence in what they buy that’s going to be a big important piece of uh you
(35:44) know what will help the institutional uh interest in adoption so jonathan we’ve already had that happen in handshake right one other sorry to interrupt we’re actually coming up on time for our panel um but a lot of people seem to be really interested in this we got a lot of engagement so i’m okay the next session is a break and then our next speaker is at uh 4 25 pst so we can run keep running through this and then if people want to uh leave to go take a break before our next session i just want to
(36:20) let you guys know that that’s what’s going on um so maybe it would be a good time to take some uh q a as well uh in the side panel as well yeah for sure and um and thank you for that intervention fist and um let me let me respond real quickly because this is a very important issue because we’ve already seen this happen uh with one of the name based uh staked tlds uh where someone wanted to back out they had registrations they wanted us to cancel the registration so they could i guess use someone else besides name base uh
(36:53) there needs to be a huge penalty right we’re selling names on the promise that they’re going to have these names forever and for someone just to decide to cancel those because they want to pursue a different business model or different partner there needs to be severe financial penalties before you let them get away with that yeah for sure and you probably want to be able to know who it is you’re dealing with specifically as well and it’s somewhat abstracted right now you know so at any case you know a registrant is
(37:24) going to put their hand on a throat and that’s going to be the registrar and the registrar has no uh further throat to uh to pass along that love uh up upstream and so you know if you’re on the hook to provide an obligation to a customer which we as registrars would be um you know how do we make sure that that that there’s continuity there and that’s that’s one of the um the challenges here is making sure that that’s uh successful i noticed when when um namecheap really leaned in and launched their own strings
(37:57) those were strings that they themselves held that were not being done through the gateway i o platform they did their own on their own platform which means they can control it end to end and ensure the responsible delivery of that service so i i noticed that they had their own set of set of strings and and that they were able to do that themselves in that manner so um i i did notice um there was an entrepreneur paul webb yesterday in a really good session where he was talking about what he’s doing with his platform
(38:30) and these are names he holds himself and then he’s going to make available that’s that’s something where you know if you’re working directly with the domain holder perhaps that’s that’s going to be something that they can work with um registrants or maybe have resellers in so um registrars if you are thinking about second level they interact with registries through a process called epp and there are some contracts and norms in the icann space that is as familiar as you can make it for registrars and registrants
(39:05) so that it matches what they’re used what they’re used to you’re going to have an easier time in in bringing those customers on just for people who are who are interested in that so i’m going through and just reading through the questions um i see a question that was posed to ray uh is your technically proficient customer base the reason you think pork bun has done so well selling slds or is there something else that led to what they call the pork bun effect um that’s a good question we love our customers and um
(39:46) i think that when we decided to build pork bun we wanted to build a registrar that was something we’d want to use um and i think that’s the start of it you know everything should be on one drop-down panel so you don’t have to go to six different screens to manage your name um if you want your auth code you press a button the auth code is there you don’t need to get an email you know nothing should take three steps when in fact you can do it in two so that’s one thing was you know the ui uh because
(40:17) your time is valuable so we want to we want to save you time um second pricing is important so we basically we’ve marked most domains up a dollar unless they’re really popular in the case we may mark them up less than a dollar so i think a lot of registrars will just take the wholesale price and double it so if it’s 20 wholesale name we charge 21 whereas other registrars might charge somewhere between 21 and 40 dollars um so that’s obviously a piece of the equation um and uh and we love our we love our brand it’s all just here
(40:54) drink from my pork bun mug um and we try and have a lot of fun with it and we try and do it you know a great job with support um we’re just you know we’re expanding our hours now from 8 to 13 hours a day and you know we like to be able to pick the phone up and have a knowledgeable person try and figure out what our customers trying to do as opposed to just get off the phone as quickly as possible so i don’t know that’s that’s our strategy and it it seems to work pretty well um and i’m really glad also that you know
(41:27) we’re able to kind of move in this uh direction with the decentralized web because um we’ve kind of we like the ethos of what’s happening here um we were in the wiki space for a long time and this idea of being you know free speech and you know having you know not being um controlled by rules that don’t make sense uh resonates with us all right that’s right uh guys thank you so much for your time it was really fun listening to all you guys talk uh hearing uh from your wealth of knowledge that you have about the domain space uh
(42:11) me and the whole entire handshake community definitely appreciate it but we’re coming up on time we’re going to take a short little uh break and then we’re going to go and we’re going to luke burns is going to talk about setting up an hsd node so it’s a little bit more technical but i hope you guys will stick around so you can help secure the handshake network um so see you guys in the next one take it easy guys [Music] [Applause] [Music] kinetic
(43:23) is a blockchain crypto investment firm based in hong kong and puerto rico [Music] founded in 2016 they were the first fund in hong kong and one of the earliest in asia with a portfolio of over 220 companies they were seed investors in such projects as ethereum parity and polka dot solana ftx and of course handshake and name base [Music] founder johan chu was an active investor and supporter of the handshake ecosystem over one hundred thousand domains co-founder of d-web foundation co-founder of handicon and sponsor of
(44:01) the handshake house at miami hack week 2022 [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Applause]