As a smart name registry system one of the primary things we think about are use cases. The more use cases out there the more we can expect the HNS to percolate into society. There are some things being done to create awareness and possibly build some use cases.
Transcript
(00:01) [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Applause] and last but not least for day two sergeant i’m really excited you’ve been uh we’ve always been in touch through the community over the years and i’ve seen you been building and and growing and uh and and we’re talking about india you know and what’s happening there you’re mentioning maybe a conference in person maybe in june stuff like that i mean i really appreciate and notice what you’re working on um fistful you have some things to say
(01:02) before he starts yeah i just you know we had seljen at uh namescon and he definitely got everybody hyped up there he gave off a lot of good energy so so i’m expecting the same thing you know sergeant’s gonna kill it up here uh talking about his his new uh micro registry so i’m really excited to hear more about this uh so yeah we’ll just let you uh take it away man yeah let’s go hey thanks everybody uh this time i’m gonna have to stay in the backdrop and it’s gonna be a presentation so
(01:34) let’s just get on with it uh we have a lot of stuff uh planned for this half an hour session so i don’t want to waste too much time i’m just gonna get on with it um so while i wanted to talk essentially about future use cases and some of it there’s been a lot of requests from the community uh from many who wanted to create a registry for themselves so how did we go about building a registry so i decided to spend about 10 minutes right in the beginning quickly i don’t want to get too much into the technical stuff we can
(02:03) always connect later but if you’re a developer you have some understanding you should be able to figure it out um but while our product right now has moved from that point which was a minimum viable product at that point of time but uh i i can’t really get into the details of where we are now we are we are you know we have uh we had building stuff but yes um i want to share how we got to that mvp and how uh other friends from the community can do the same and uh we can ship those uh tld so that you know
(02:36) people get to understand what these smart names are and what their use cases so let’s get on with it so i’ll just quickly introduce myself my name is sergeant i represent agave technologies we are a handshake registrar based in india and uh um so just before i get into it by profession i’m a marketing guy and i’m a filmmaker an ad filmmaker and uh as an agency we had significant amount of exposure to the travel industry so in 2020 when the lockdown came that was not a good time for us and i knew that while the rest of my friends
(03:13) could kind of you know do remote work shooting especially travel is not something you can do remotely it requires physical presence so we knew we were going to be on the bench for a while so just wanted to re-look at my investments just see you know how things were going to go and how long i was going to hold on and what other career options i could look at so just one of those days uh i was let’s just go with that yeah so i was just there and now um looking at uh youtube um google low cap coins to invest so after spending some time doing some
(03:49) research coming across a few things i don’t know how many of you heard of something called lansing um i ran upon this uh anderson horowitz chap and while i could make out all the other tokens in his portfolio i’d never heard of this one handshake i was like okay what is that because i kind of knew the rest so i looked it up on the internet and soon it led to me this place and the rest as they say in popular literature is history this was end of 2020.
(04:20) fast forward to end of 2021 we had agave so how did i get to that point from an enthusiast who was interested in a new technology uh dabbled in a bit of domain buying selling auctioning you know like all of us uh i i spent my time on name base um but then then we got to this point so one was uh uh i we will get to that um aspect later in the presentation as to why we are doing this and what our plans for the future are uh let’s quickly get over with the how did we make this thing so as a non-tech person who had no exposure
(05:00) to technology i had to learn a lot of stuff i had to go online i had to look up youtube and i don’t mind being an ambassador for youtube today because truly an amazing platform that humanity is created or somebody’s created you can learn anything under the sun there you can go from being a filmmaker to a techie overnight it’s just awesome so after all of my studies i figured out a handshake registry essentially has four basic components now a lot of techies in the community may not agree with the way
(05:32) i think um because unless uh since i’m not a techie i do not have the tools that techies think so i had to take a different approach uh so that led me to these things a handshake tld naturally everybody needs to have one an ns infrastructure that consists of a tld name server and an authoritative name server a registry solution and a registrar solution so if i were to look at it a little visually there’s a user whose browser sends a query to the root zone to the handshake blockchain which then forwards that query to a tld name server
(06:11) in our case it’s dot bar or could be any other tld which then forwards that query to an authoritative name server so in which case you have the domain name there which then gets back to the user with the ip address at the back end there is this registry and there is a registrar solution that helps the registry talk to these servers as and when required this is the larger overall high level picture of most registries okay so if you can kind of get this picture in your mind you kind of have solved the problem
(06:47) going forward now this is the minimum viable product which we launched in um jan as i said we’ve moved beyond that point right now but again it had four components a handshake tld ns infrastructure a registry solution and a registrar solution a handshake tld and then its infrastructure a tld name server authoritative name server and a registry solution handshake tld well i don’t think i need to tell the community how to get your hands on one you can we’ll just move straight to the ns infrastructure
(07:21) now an ns infrastructure should ideally have two servers a tld server and an authoritative server there are many big company systems who uh and it is possible to use one server to kind of do both the jobs but it’s kind of bad practice uh especially going forward where people have individual identities and they’re going to put important information on your authoritative server such as tax records for wallets uh your email logins and so on so forth so to prevent a single point of failure you want to ideally break these up
(07:58) so that you have your risk is kind of distributed so um my experience is if you have multiple tlds you should have multiple servers for each of these tlds and they all should have their own authoritative servers and you should have backups technically speaking there is no difference between these two servers they’re exactly the same it’s just for the purposes of labeling we’re labeling them as separates you can look up various solutions power dns atomia dns bind and there are quite a few others in the end we decided to go
(08:28) with power dns because i love the ui as a non-tech person i thought that it was something that i could kind of use on a day-to-day basis this is what the larger dashboard looks like three users we have about seven domains 863 events and it’s been up for about four months three weeks and 18 hours so as you can see very user friendly very clean night a nice ui so that’s the ns infrastructure let’s now go to the registry solution now what is a registry it sounds very complicated but if you break it up a registry is basically just
(09:06) a register a database of names tethered to a bigger name as you can see here google is tether2.com so what is that tool out there i don’t need to probably create it what is that tool out there that helps me to manage a database with a primary name and secondary names tethered to it that’s it if i can get that done voila you have your registry so we did look at some other solutions like nomins and fred but they were just way too complicated and i didn’t want to go through that so i wanted to look at something that would
(09:40) help me manage a database manage the users who interact with that database are easy to use ui both for me as well as the users payment gateway and billing now why do i mention billing now there are a lot of solutions out there that offer billing but if you are selling domains because there is renewals there are various other factors you need to be able to uh customize that billing solution now while it may seem far away from what we are trying to do billing solution is going to be important so if you are picking up a ready-made tool make sure
(10:12) it has a robust billing solution that you can customize so where could i find something that had a billing solution and an ability to manage so i decided to look at industries close to the domain space and i managed to again go on youtube do a lot of googling and hosting solutions now hosting solutions are typically sas products used by local resellers or affiliates who manage their customers so you’ll find a lot of them who are basically downstream sellers of godaddy or hostgator and so on so forth and they
(10:46) had local level sell hosting solutions to small companies and so on so forth so they have a robust billing solution and it’s very close to the industry and you can again look them up quite a few of them available in the market some of them are open source we decided to go with whmcs at that point of time because we liked the overall ui it offered a lot of features and the one interesting thing i found about all of these hosting solutions is they have a small domain registration module this is usually there for clients who use
(11:20) hosting from them and sometimes they may need a child domain sometimes they may need a backup domain sometimes they may need additional domains so all of these solutions have this little domain registration thing built in so now i had what i wanted a domain registration system and a billing system that can manage the users who are using that so we basically stripped everything away from that we just kept the domain registration and the billing and got rid of everything else and that formed the heart at that point of our registry
(11:52) so boom whmcs add they should pay me anyway that’s what the dashboard looks like very neat very clean uh nice interface easy to manage this is an admin panel which is the backend panel so you don’t really need to get into a whole lot of this codes and stuff it’s pretty much an easy to go no code solution so something i’m very fond of because the community may have a lot of entrepreneurs not everybody may be a techie so here you go and on top of this whole whmcs powered register we built a registrar module
(12:27) which helps us connect and talk to these uh name servers for instance when somebody sends a query like sergeant. is this domain name available or not the registrar module checks with the name servers and gets back with the query saying if it’s available or not so and so forth so if you update your dns records and all it the registrar module helps it uh find uh reflect it on the servers so that’s what the registrar so this is essentially what our deck is now if you guys want to reach out and have a you know better chat we can do
(13:01) that later if you want to know how to make a registrar i can’t really put it out here but again google and youtube is the way to go that did it for us i’m sure it will do it for you just a snapshot of what we have so we are handshake mega registrar that’s what we call ourselves we started out as a micro registry we are now a mega registrar why we have our own registry we have our own tlds in fact that’s what we are going with so the tlds are owned by us we will eventually move to staking as well so we’ll take tld’s from outside
(13:32) we are registrars we offer name servers so our users have dns management systems so they can add records and stuff like that we plan an app ios and android um soon sld marketplace so we have a tld marketplace but i think we also need an sld marketplace so that all the people who are currently buying slds they can put it to some use so uh typically in my experience domain domain years are the ones who show the initial interest in these market segments and uh they like to flip so it’s important to give them a platform to flip while we
(14:10) also work on other use cases which the average user is not looking to flip but for looking to use it for personal purposes can use it just some initial screens of our app um uh it’s still working progress but it looks neat good ui and uh so anyway i’m glad we got kind of that part and coming to the interesting bit why are we here so why did a filmmaker have to kind of go through all of this and get into tech apart from the obvious financial considerations which can happen in any field why this because for the first time when i came
(14:49) across handshake i felt here was a piece of technology that was truly inclusive it took care of everything it grandfathered the entire past of the internet and it was poised to father the future of it so given this powerful tool that is available to us and looking at the way web 3 is coming up now if i just want to spend a little time on identity here today if you and i connect on say a current web to legacy platform like facebook even after our interaction is over even after we’ve left the platform we are still there in that platform our
(15:34) data our identities everything whereas in uh say real life if you were to meet in a coffee shop we would not be there in the coffee shop until we are there if we are there for half an hour we are there the moment we have left the place we are not there in the coffee shop again this is because we control our identity our identity moves with us wherever we go it’s there wherever we don’t go it’s not there but that’s not how it is in web 2 your identities are somewhere else and you kind of lease it from them in a way
(16:04) web 3 is going to ensure that everybody has their own identity everybody is going to have their own names that’s also one of the reasons why we are able to look at things like meta wars because now you know you can literally move with the identity so here we ran a huge risk of creating a digital divide unlike entrepreneurs where everybody is going to have a username and a significant part of the human population is not an english speaking or a latin alphabet based culture that’s a is better way to put it because you may not speak english
(16:39) but if you are still familiar with latin alphabets it’s it’s fine non-latin alphabet based cultures there there was a huge risk of all of these people not being onboarded into this new digital revolution it’s important that they’re able to access critical services in their mother tongue so that’s where that’s the genesis of uh where we came from and in a country like india with 1.
(17:10) 3 billion people and only 125 speak english that’s a whole lot of people who don’t and if you add to whole of south asia and other cultures that’s just a lot of people so we wanted to address that part create an internet that works for everyone the world has 4.6 billion internet users and that number is growing fast 1.
(17:37) 35 billion speak english that’s 3.35 billion people who do not speak english and that is the target audience that we are primarily looking to target while we will have products that look to speak to the uh the latin alphabet based cultures we want to primarily serve these 3.35 billion people and out of this 3.35 billion people 1.
(18:00) 5 billion of them are in india and the middle east and if you actually expand that out a little say if you think bangladesh sri lanka bhutan nepal so if you look at south asia and the middle east that number goes higher that’s two billion people right there and that is our starting point and focus area for the next two years this is what we are going to target and here is where we are going to try and create a regional vernacular internet for people how are we going to do that we will start with nft lds in both
(18:34) vernacular and emojis uh so in the vernacular side half of hara so in india india is called bharat in our indigenous languages so the starting alphabet would be the sound so there are various languages so we are starting with in hindi bengali malayalam and that’s arabic so these are the vernacular series that we have planned for this year on the emoji side we are going to have country flag along with professions so if i have sergeant or the indian flag and music that name communicates the information that i am an indian musician
(19:23) or and i am an indian filmmaker and so on so forth so i know most of you know these things but there are a few of our friends who are not from the community we’ve invited so just so that you know smart names can become your unique name for your avatar in the metaverse it can be a unique wallet address just like for those of you who are from india you would be used to using your phone number as a wallet address for upi so it’s it’s a pretty similar concept with the handshake name for the entire digital space and even as
(19:56) future government currencies come out uh it opens up a possibility of developing wallets that can even maybe support these blockchain based fiat currencies in the future it can work as a domain name for your website it can be a universal login to all the dapps just like we use our google and facebook ieds to sign into various apps it’s an investment as a non-fungible asset as we we are working on uh decentralized slds uh a long way to go still uh once those come out they can they will also be non-fungible tokens
(20:32) it also supports vanity email ids like namaste at neha. or even emoji based ones in short these smart names are your de facto social security or aadhaar cards if you are in this part of the world for users of web3 i use the word web 3 now but in some time there will be no web 3 they’ll just be the internet web 3 will be the default we are available at these four um names agamin for uh that’s our handshake name we are also on the hindi and the bengali uh tlds of dot pha which is agamemn dot bhai in india nagaman dot pa in bengali
(21:11) and for all of you who are still unfortunately on the legacy internet agamemn dot in other languages in uh forms of slds will follow soon our team that’s our rockstar dev raju lead developer i don’t know if you’re attending the event but if you are do say hi in the chat so that the community can reach out to you then there’s dakshita when i ask for her picture this is what she sent that’s because she handles everything and i get it we are we are overworking you so that’s our team uh we are three
(21:46) of us we are bootstrapped and what is our roadmap to handicon 2023 we are sitting at 2022 what are we planning for the next one here i’m gonna spend one slide looking at what are the stuff we’ve already covered on the 1st of jan 2020 to 000 hours we went live with the hindi tld and we got a lot of press coverage you guys can google us and you’ll get to see that on the 15th of feb we came out with dns management our name servers for our users so now they can add records wallet ids and all of that stuff can
(22:18) happen dark mode sorry dark mode on the 25th of february i have to give a shout out to that uh that mike require chap some gazetsky his tweets about darkmoon just literally made me paranoid and i just had to get one so dark mode there it is and on the 8th of march we had we launched this women’s day special uh tld which is an indian flag and a lady so indian women now have a exclusive name space for themselves and on the 25th of march we will go live with the bengali tld for this is what we have planned for march going
(22:59) forward on the 15th of april which is the regional new year in many cultures in our country malayalam punjabi and the tamil plds will go live for dot on the second of may which is eid the urdu versions will go live in india and the arabic version of dot uma um i don’t know how many of you are aware of that culture but uma means community and it’s a very uh core tenant to the cultures over there uh so that will go live in the arabic script on eid on the 2nd of may in the middle east soon we are looking to kind of finish
(23:39) the app and launch it on android and ios sld marketplace by june july time um that’s what we are targeting [Music] we have a separate app for the marketplace or will be integrated into adamant uh we’ve not yet decided but uh in either form we will have the app out by that time or that’s the um that’s the uh aspiration that’s what we’re working towards rest of the indian vernacular tlds by october 2022 and by december we will wrap up all the emoji tlds now in jan we don’t know we i know there are email
(24:16) services in the handshake ecosystem and so we will see how that develops if that develops then we may not need that but so we’ll have to take a call we’re not sure but otherwise we want to make sure that all of these regional names are going out they find expression as vanity emails and people can start personalizing them straight away so that is something we have in mind depending on whether we do that or not there may be an email app in feb and of course feb 2023 hopefully i will see you again here
(24:47) so i know it’s been a long 24 minute 49 second winding presentation thank you for putting up with me i have a little gift for all of you uh who attended this little session you may be aware that we’ve launched dot rarity for all of those nft d gens out there so uh so if you guys find it interesting and if you want to get slds on it they’re live right now on our website you can use the promo code handycon 2022 2020 and 22 to get yourself a 30 discount the code is valid till 24th of march before i end the presentation i would
(25:25) like to uh uh give a shout out to a lot of members in the community who’ve always been there and have helped in many ways some by way of interactions some by way of direct feedback some by we have direct action a big shout out to ritwik for helping us with our product thank you so much man uh matthew uh both the webbies uh steve and uh nit paul um michelini uh these and many others i i may not be remembering thank you all of you you’ve all contributed to creating this in some way and thank you so much namaskar uh if anybody
(26:10) has any questions i’m happy to take it all right you killed this sergeant same same energy as names khan awesome awesome awesome uh yeah there’s questions i uh prashant says great work um i think one of your team members is in chats that’s great yeah yeah if you guys are there please say hello so that the community can reach out and connect with you well yeah i noticed i think it was paul webb said in a chat it’s great you’re using like yeah you use some existing frameworks right a lot of people try to
(26:51) start from scratch and build from the ground up oh dakshita i see in the chat she’s not there that’s one of yeah there she is hey great so that’s that’s what we’re trying to do right now um yeah so these are plans um and yes i’m sorry i i need to update the community because something amazing happened yesterday i saw that presentation from ritwik so uh that hip to uh uh solution that’s just uh that’s also something we are really excited to uh ship so i i couldn’t add it in the
(27:25) presentation but that’s also going to be there preferably to the earlier part so i’ll be reaching out to you real quick thank you all right awesome yeah great a lot of you’re excited yeah uh also i think luke is working on that it is okay on that uh hip too yes agree i think a lot of us are excited for the wallet address well it’s also known as well-known wallet and then once that’s implemented on the protocol level by ritvik and and uh luke uh then yeah like everyone can use it right like name
(27:57) basically integrated gateway uh everyone you know you i just wanted to understand a lot of uh tech people here uh if if these uh all of these wallets typically in my experience start with the token name right if it’s a bitcoin wallet it starts with a btc if it’s an ethereum wallet it has a zero whatever all of them have uh so what about a solution where maybe uh we just put that uh name in front of our handshake name say maybe btc sergeant.
(28:29) i don’t know can we fool the wallets just because it has the same starting extension oh i don’t know about that master i think you got to put the at symbol in front of it in hip to because they don’t want it where you can register a handshake name with with a ethereum address or uh and look like an address when you’re actually a a name so i think in the protocol it’s gonna make you put a hat symbol at the beginning i don’t want to be quoted but i’ve seen them discussing that because you won’t
(29:03) just be able to type the name directly you’ll have to put like a at symbol before the name in the in the address yeah so what what i was asking was something very similar where instead of the at you just put the uh the relevant chain thing so you put maybe a bit btc or whatever let me just take a look at metamask say how does a metamask address look like metamask addresses look uh like like zero it’s like zero x and then whatever chain of letters yeah so you got it so if it’s like uh maybe i put zero x sergeant
(29:40) to use it in the ethereum ecosystem i put btc sergeant to use it in the btc ecosystem i use juno sergeant to use it on cosmos chain so because all of those wallets tend to start with that so that’s what i want to do since i’m not a techie i don’t really know can a wallet be fooled like if i instead of putting the actual ethereum address if i put 0x sergeant will the wallet get it uh will the wallet take it as an address i don’t i don’t i have no idea but i i probably if you sent funds to xerox sergeant or something like that
(30:17) it’d probably get like lost or something or the funds would basically be burned or something like that but you know i’m also not a techie at all so i can’t 100 percent uh respond to that for sure but i don’t know the farm don’t get bored because the idea is you have a you know okay i’m getting a let’s wrap up message so okay it’s up to the wallet to implement they wouldn’t let you send it if they couldn’t resolve names okay there you go thanks for the answers yeah it doesn’t
(30:48) work like that it has the ticker in the url all right all right okay so i think we are out of time we’re perfect timing perfect time yeah i’m so happy you made it and shared and gave us some of your insights of how you built it as well and i’m looking forward to seeing next year the amazing progress and of course hopefully whether we meet our yeah our ceo online future events unless we will be in touch we will be in touch so let’s just do this okay great yeah thanks everybody have a great day all right so you guys we’re going to be
(31:29) doing this happy holi to everyone thank you [Music] kinetic 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
(32:33) with a portfolio of over 220 companies they received investors in such projects as ethereum parity and polkadot solana ftx and of course handshake in 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 handycon and sponsor of the handshake house at miami hack week 2022 [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] so [Music]
(33:44) [Applause] [Music] hmm