Shakedex is Handshake’s first DEX that allows users to buy and sell Handshake TLDs trustlessly. The anonymous founder Kurumiimari takes us through how it works and why it matters.
Transcript
(00:01) [Music] [Applause] [Music] god [Music] all right well i will not uh waste time up here um so right now we have kurumi talking about shakedex uh unfortunately um he couldn’t make it here uh today to talk about shakedex so i pulled one of his other sessions that he gave last year at namescon around september timeframe he gave a little uh
(01:05) presentation about shakedex that was really good really comprehensive and i know it sucks that this is recording um but i really wanted to include this because i think that shakedex is definitely a cornerstone of uh of handshake and kind of like the technology that we want to aim for uh decentralized exchange you know and this has to do with um matt’s nft project that he’s going to be presenting later today as well so this will kind of give you a background of what shakedex is how to interact with it
(01:42) and stuff like that so you can maybe participate in matt’s nft auction and get some cool art related to handshake and and support open source uh developers is 50 of the proceeds will be donated to the h s fund um but yeah i don’t want to take up any more time here um i’m going to let the video play up here and i hope you guys all learn a little bit uh something about shake decks and and how to interact with it [Music] i’m krumi i’m an anime character and i make open source software for handshake
(02:23) i’ve done a bunch of things in the space so i’ve been involved with block explorer i’ve contributed to bob i also made the api that the bob extension talks to but today we’re really going to be talking about shake decks which was sort of my entry into the handshake space and you know one of my favorite projects that i’ve had the opportunity to work on and lead and shake dex is really two things and i’m gonna get into the details of you know what these two things are as the presentation goes on
(02:49) but it’s it’s both an open protocol that facilitates the exchange of these names and like i mentioned i’ll explain what an open protocol is but it’s also a set of products that make interacting with that protocol really really easy and understanding the interplay between those two things is really important not just to understanding shake decks but also understanding crypto and some of my points at the end about you know how to get started contributing in a space like this one so if you’ve ever done traditional
(03:17) domain exchange you’ve probably seen a process similar to this one you give your name to some escrow you know and there’s usually like a trusted intermediary like your godaddy or your dan.com or whatever that kind of acts as the broker someone signs an agreement saying that they’re willing to buy this name and then the funds get exchanged and the names get exchanged and so in the case of shake decks the process is really really similar the first thing that happens is you transfer your name to an escrow address
(03:47) that protects the buyer so escrow address sounds really fancy but you can think of it as just an address on the blockchain that is subject to the constraints that i’ve written out in plain english for you on this slide i won’t get into too much of the details of how like you know the handshake you know blockchain works but there are two things you need to know when you own a handshake name it’s possible for you to revoke it which means you basically just ditch it back to the public auction pool it’s kind of like saying well i don’t
(04:17) want to sell you this art anymore so i’m going to put it in a paper shredder and you can also back out of a transfer once it’s been initiated that’s called a cancel and if i’m buying a name i don’t want either of those things to happen so the point of the escrow is to programmatically prevent those things from happening so that’s the first step of the protocol we we send it to the escrow the next thing is i create a bunch of binding agreements that then protect me the seller and what these agreements say is they
(04:49) say that anybody who pays me a certain amount after a certain date and i’ll explain the significance of the date a little bit later on is going to get this name so when you combine this with the escrow both parties are protected the buyer’s protected and the seller is protected and that’s really important because there is no i can there is no godaddy or whoever else that you can go to for dispute resolution we need to make sure that you know the code is written in a way such that everybody is protected by default because in
(05:19) blockchain land once the transaction is executed it’s atomic there’s no way back so the last step then is to fund so somebody includes the the buyer includes the agreement to pay the funds they also include the funds both of these are signed with the buyer and seller’s private keys and then this gets broadcast on the blockchain and at this point in time the the name is the buyers technically speaking the buyer has to wait 48 hours and that window allows the seller time to cancel but remember the escrow contract prevents you from
(05:54) canceling so you basically just have to wait 48 hours finalize the transfer and then you’re done the name is yours and this was done completely without any type of intermediary you know you don’t have to kyc your counterparty you don’t have to know anything about them all you need to know is that the things that you’re signing conform to this protocol and that’s one of the beautiful things about crypto the technology basically informs the relationship between buyer and seller and allows really interesting
(06:22) things to happen but this alone isn’t really interesting enough and the reason it’s not interesting enough is because most people want price discovery for their names so if i just go out and say i’m selling this name for two thousand dollars that’s one thing but if i have a really valuable tld i want to basically put it up for auction and so if we use the date clause of the you know the pre-signed agreement and i combine multiple of them we can create an auction and i’m going to show you how that works so let’s start with
(06:56) one of these so we’re going to say 5000 handshake after october 31st 4 500 handshake after november 1st so on and so forth until i reach my reserve price what i end up with is a dutch auction and for those of you who are unfamiliar a dutch auction is basically an auction where the price starts high and ends at a lower reserve price and the price is lowered periodically as time goes on so when i took this screenshot it was about a month ago you know this particular name started at 22 000 and is now at 21 000 and is going to end at twenty
(07:31) thousand and again all of this is enforced entirely using the programmability properties of the handshake blockchain and this is in my opinion really really cool but there’s another problem here it’s really difficult for normal people to kind of wrap their head around like how these protocols work you know there’s lots of protocols on the internet every website you go to you know is is talked to using the hypertext transfer protocol but to most people that’s just i’m visiting a website so shakedex the protocol is then built
(08:06) into a bunch of shake deck supporting products of which bobwallet is one of them so this screenshot was taken directly from mike’s amazing tutorial on how to buy and sell handshake names using shakedex in bob so many thanks to mike for putting this together but the idea here is that you know you need something to custody your crypto keys and custody your money because at no point in that protocol does shakedex ever take control over user funds and that’s a feature not a bug but it does introduce a dependency
(08:40) on a wallet and so as a result of how blockchain communities work bob integrated directly with shakedex and so here’s how that works when you go into bob there’s an exchange tab and what you can see is all the names that you’ve listed so you can see pull requests surfboard and tor were all names that mike listed there’s a list of fills which basically means these are the auctions that i bought that i’m waiting to finalize the transfer for to myself for and then a list of live auctions and these are the actual
(09:10) auctions that are live on the website when i go and create a listing this is going to define the start and price and duration of my auction and when i click that place listing button when the escrow transfer is complete bob is going to go and upload all of those pre-signed agreements to shakedex.com which is a website that just collects those so people can see what’s available and functions very similarly to any other kind of domain trading website that you would expect to see on the traditional web and lastly when you want to place a bid
(09:43) you just click the fill button and this pops up and you click fulfill and at that point the auction is complete so i’m going to show you what shakedex.com looks like now again keep in mind that this website is basically read-only all of the right stuff happens within bob and you can see that with the little cat icon next to fulfill auction but when you post your name you’re going to get a visualization that looks like this that shows you the state of the auction at a particular point in time and then you can also go into this view
(10:14) and you know view all of the names that are available their current bids and also manually submit your pre-signs if you want to like if you generated them using a cli tool or something different so that’s sort of the product side but handshake really really early as far as blockchains go there’s a ton of infrastructure that needs to be built so as a result these are the sort of current stats that we’re looking at for shake decks so 26 000 hns is about 8 000 of volume we’ve done about 2 000 auctions of which
(10:47) 224 have been purchased by a counterparty and you know handshake is really early in its life and these numbers i think are you know pretty pretty good because they’re they’re numbers that were created despite how difficult it is right now to interact with shake decks users really really want a kind of web-based experience that mimics the web-based experience that mimics the sort of centralized websites that they’re used to when they have to go into a desktop application that uses gigabytes of data
(11:20) in order to you know store all of the blockchain data and validate it it’s a huge barrier for people to overcome and the other thing is you know telling people to do things like custody keys etc are all really really scary to the average user so even though shake dex itself was a really powerful concept there’s a ton of sort of underlying base layer infrastructure that still remains to be built and a bunch of work that we still have to do as developers to get handshake to the point where it’s kind
(11:47) of going with the decentralized primitives anyway are going to be usable by regular people so i’m going to walk you through some of shakedex’s roadmap and then kind of tie it all back together so to help in this effort we’re going to integrate the chrome extension people have been really hammering the chrome extension over the course of this conference and i think they’re absolutely right to do that that chrome extension is going to be a massive unlock for not just shake decks but the entire handshake community
(12:14) some of you may or may not be familiar with metamask metamask is a chrome extension wallet that jackie actually worked on that cuts these keys for the ethereum chain and what that lets you do is it lets you build a website that talks to the blockchain and that’s really really cool because it means you can do everything directly from the website that you’re working on so we’re about to do this shakedex redesign which not only gives shakedex a brand new coat of paint but also gives you the ability to buy and launch auctions
(12:43) without ever leaving your browser without ever having to download the entire chain state it all happens directly within um the chrome extension and i’m really really excited about this because i think if we pair this you know with additional liquidity and additional people interested in using handshake we can create an amazing outcome that i’m going to walk you through separately so a little bit more about shakedex’s upcoming roadmap so again all these things so this redesign and then all these things that
(13:14) i’m about to talk to you about they depend on there being robust wallet infrastructure that integrates directly in the browser because no one’s going to use shake decks if we don’t have that but once we’ve integrated that we can do some really cool things that i’m going to enumerate these really really quickly the first thing we want to build is storefronts so the nice thing about handshake and this is very different from the traditional domain name system is that whenever you synchronize a handshake
(13:40) node you basically get the state of every single top level domain on the quote unquote internet so what that means is people can put text records or other things inside of those domains that allow them to basically list their domain name for sale without ever having to go to a specific website so anybody can go and create a big list of listings of domain name listings just based on the state of the blockchain at a current point in time and what that in turn lets us do is on shake decks create binding offers so if
(14:08) i know that you know so and so is interested in selling their name i can create a binding offer using similar smart contracts to the ones that shakedex already supports and that seller can just click the button accept this no need for kyc no need for a new website login no need to know anything about your counterparty you just click the button and the name is exchanged and you’re able to trust that the code is going to make that happen well next as we get more volume shakedex will start taking fees but one of the nice
(14:38) things about the way that shakedx is architected is that the only kind of centralized component is the shakedex api and the shakedex api even though it is you know a database that i run it’s open so anybody that wants to put shakedex listings on their website so if you’re a regular registrar if you’re somebody else is interested in crypto can get that data automatically and if you then facilitate a transfer of one of these names using shakedex your platform whatever it may be can earn a rake on the exchange fees
(15:10) that shakedex generates and i anticipate as time goes on those numbers will go up pretty significantly next we’re talking about more integration so this kind of follows from the monetization idea we’ve got you know i worked on block explorer so i want to integrate it with that basically the more ways people have to integrate with shakedex the better and lastly this is somewhat separate from shakedex but is really important to the functioning of a healthy blockchain we need better infrastructure and we need better
(15:38) liquidity and one of the best ways to do that is to partner with folks that are you know in the traditional financial system to allow people to buy handshake with a credit card and then use it immediately on block explorer immediately on shakedx and that i think is going to you know create the kind of fun experience that we want people to have buying and selling these effectively like powerful nfts by through handshake names so i’m going to tie it all back together now you know what i hope you’ve kind of seen
(16:05) from this talk is that you know none of these projects exist in a vacuum this is very different from your kind of typical like industry conference where you’ve got lots of companies but each company is kind of out to its own end and the game is kind of zero-sum in the sense that companies compete and then whoever wins kind of kills the other one with a chain like handshake the more people use it the more utility it has the more people who hold the token are going to be better the better off the people are going to be who hold
(16:33) the token so sort of you create the rising tide that raises all boats so at the bottom layer you have the chain itself you have handshake which in this case was created by some of the best people in the industry on top of that you have your kind of custody hardware things like bob wallet or gohan which is a wallet that i made and then on top of that you have your apps or the apps that you make because now like i mentioned at the beginning is the best possible time to get involved in handshake you know i kind of like this diagram i know that i
(17:05) made it and i’m not supposed to toot my own horn but the reason why i like it is that like it kind of shows that every layer of the sort of crypto stack can enable a number of layers above it without handshake there’s no bob wallet there’s no shake decks but the better shake dex gets the better people can build stuff on top of shake decks that you know is interesting and drives utility and value to handshake and so to draw a parallel to another chain that’s been very successful you know i want to basically talk about
(17:33) uniswap so not everyone’s familiar with uniswap but uniswap is a decentralized exchange on ethereum total value locked it’s sort of a crypto specific metric but for those of you who aren’t sort of super into crypto you can think of it as like if uniswap were a bank how many assets does it manage even though uniswap doesn’t really manage anything because it’s decentralized but that doesn’t really matter just think of it as like the number of assets that people are putting into this exchange
(17:59) you can see that for a really really long time no one was using uniswap for anything then all of a sudden around about you know august september of 2020 you know its value like the total value locked exploded what created that jump in the total value locked well it’s this thing called defy summer people realized that they could use uniswap as this kind of infrastructure layer to facilitate the exchange of ethereum tokens and they then built all kinds of cool and interesting and fun things on top of that and then people build things on top
(18:31) of that etc and the impact that this one team the uniswap team has had on ethereum as a whole has been enormous up until very recently they were under 20 people but that’s the power of these open networks no one unisop did not have to ask permission to build their exchange they just went and did it and then other people went and built on top of that and that’s now led to you know a uniswap tvl of about you know what six billion dollars and a total defy total value locked of i think like over 100 billion dollars but i’ll
(19:07) have to check on the actual number it changes on a daily basis but anyway the point is these are the type of outcomes that you can create if you embrace the permissionless innovation that crypto provides you shakedex is just one such project you know i’m just one anime character in a basement somewhere and you know i was able to create this thing without asking for anybody’s permission and it’s seeing a degree of success despite how difficult it is to do things on handshake if you’re interested
(19:34) in getting started this is the time to do it and you know you’ve got people like me who are happy to donate our time to kind of on board you into the community and make sure that you know you’re able to feel as welcomed as possible and do amazing things on top of this ecosystem so that’s about the end of my talk depending on how much time we have left i’m happy to take questions i’m gonna have to like minimize the screen share see the chat but uh otherwise thank you very much for your time uh you can hit
(20:02) me up on twitter kurumiamari1 kurumi protonmail.com don’t forget the one on twitter the person who has the kurumi amari handle is weird and then where else can people hit me up discord has a number that i can’t remember on the end but what’s whatever twitter and email are good ways to hit me up and then you know we can go from there if you’re interested in chatting with me otherwise thank you very much [Music] all right i hope everybody learned a little bit about decks again this was recording and
(20:35) kurumi uh wasn’t here unfortunately but maybe next year we’ll get him um in the q a i saw some questions about uh slds and stuff we’re actually going to be covering uh decentralized slds uh later today or hold on oh yeah yeah we’re gonna be hitting uh decentralized slds uh later today uh but i do not want to run us uh too much into time i’m gonna end this session and we’re gonna move on to a panel about the philosophical uh importance of the d web so i hope you guys enjoy that [Music] you