The handle I'm logged in with just sold for $60,000 as a sub-domain that redirects to a page of
It was the first ever emoji auctioned by Y.at (Yat), and I bought the Handshake equivalent on the Namebase market for 280 $HNS, currently about $176, the instant the first $10k+ USD bid rolled in.
🔑.y.at - AKA - y.at/🔑, the first single emoji Yat ever sold, went for $425,000.
To bid in the destiny.y.at auction, you needed a prism key, which is basically a $200 ticket to enter the auction. There were 500 available & all sold leading up to the auction.
Prior to this point, you could only buy 3 emoji Yats or longer with a credit card. Several Crypto Twitter influencers posted about maxing out their cards doing this.
Not a single one of the 16 double emoji combos available at the Destiny auction sold for less than $30,000 and the Infinity Key, which is a wildcard of sorts that grants the owner the opportunity to select any other double emoji subdomain combo, sold for $288,888.
It's important to note these buyers are trusting that they actually "own" these emojis within the context of the Yat ecosystem, because they're 4 layers down the ownership stack on Web2.
4 - Buyers have access to emojis as subdomains/pages
3- Y. controls the emojis (Second-Level domain > pages)
2-
1- ICANN controls
Right now, you own a Yat in the same way you own a Twitter profile, and the best hope Yats have for decentralization is a 4-of-7 multi-sig on ENS, or a similar type of contract on Ethereum or another chain.
Maybe the registry of
Still, for trying to be a decentralized identity solution, Yats feel like a centralized, pre-mined, walled garden that's more similar to a Bitclout than a DID.
For contrast, owning a Handshake name such as 📈📈 is owning the private keys to the punycode that browsers & devices use to render your emoji. It's the maximum level of decentralized, censorship resistant ownership possible for emojis or any other domain for that matter.
Handshake is an implementation of Bitcoin optimized for DNS (Domain Name System), meaning it's a proof of work, public protocol where top-level domains like .com & .at (which are reserved for their owners along with 30k $HNS) are registered directly with the protocol, since the network itself is a p2p root zone.
Emojis & other names became available for bidding each week and were spread out over the course of a year, beginning in February 2020, to ensure equitable distribution. Each auction lasts 5 days, giving everyone a fair chance to bid.
Despite being nearly a year & 2 months since launch, I was able to recreate ~90% of the Yat Destiny auction on Namebase for about $1.
It ends almost exactly 24 hours after the start of the Destiny Auction. The highest bidder wins & pays the second highest bidder's amount.
The winning bids on these emojis will be burned by the protocol, not pocketed by a corporation. After the 10 day bid reveal period, you can withdraw the emojis from Namebase to a wallet like BobWallet.io (assuming you didn't start with Bob), own the keys, and securely store your new assets. You can also use your new name with Akash ($AKT), Sia ($SC), Fleek (@FleekHQ), IPFS ($FIL), & numerous others for decentralized compute, storage, and other solutions.
Again, what you own with an $HNS emoji is on-chain Punycode as a top-level domain. So, with 📈📈, I bought
This enables me to securely log in here, create an email at hmail.app, sell second-level domains like
Basically what Yats are doing and more, directly on-chain, and without all the intermediaries.
Badass.Domains recently demonstrated Ethereum interoperability with Handshake, and so using these as wallet addresses and interchain identities seems more probable than not in the mid-term, especially with the highly skilled & engaged community around Handshake. Progress is also being made around browsers natively resolving HNS names & HDNS.io is an incredibly easy-to-use resolver in the meantime.
While the similarity of narratives between Yats & Handshake will undoubtedly be a fascinating case study for various reasons, I feel a great deal of empathy for everyone involved with Yats because it's apparent no one knew Handshake existed.
In terms of decentralized infrastructure, name distribution, and cryptographic ownership of emojis at the most fundamental level, it will be incredibly difficult to compete with Handshake.
Centralized options of course will initially enjoy a rich ecosystem & be easier to use than decentralized options in the same way that fiat is easier to use & is accepted more places than crypto, but I know which I would rather own long term.
If this is the first you're hearing of Handshake, welcome!
You can learn more at learn.namebase.io, learnhns.com, skyinclude.com, check out videos from our recent conference at handycon.org, & of course visit the original site at handshake.org
See you at the auctions!
Yats vs. Handshake
y.at/
🔑/
.at/
.at/
.at/
.xn--ht8ha/
hns.📈📈/
Comments
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Looks like my referencing of Twitter handles & domains with / changed the formatting a bit, but I trust you can figure it out 😄
Great insights! , at a level its hard to convince people who believe in y.at emoji as some valuable asset to tell them handshake emoji is better version of y.at emoji on almost all frontiers especially when they are heavily invested in them. What we as handshake directors can do is spread the word of handshake as much as possible as far as possible as fast as possible, so people can have a border perspective before making a choice.
I wonder what our one and two emoji TLDs with be worth in 1-2 years.
wonder how nb interops with AR 🥽 ➕ GPT 🦾💋 ➕ speech rec 🎙❓
This is a great breakdown of Handshake vs yat emoji names. I think Handshake emoji names are superior as well (no surprise there) but we can all learn something from yat's great messaging. They've done a great job explaining names in a way that anyone can understand and see value in. I think the key is that they introduce the concept of owning your name along with a slew of use cases you can use with your name. When I talk about Handshake I usually talk about how the names are TLDs, then I introduce all the things you can do with them after. Domains and TLDs are esoteric so most people are already lost at this point. Here's a better way to describe Handshake:
"Handshake names are your universal name or identity on the decentralized internet. They are NFTs that you can use for websites, usernames, and more. If you own a good top-level name like defi, you can even sell second-level names like ilove.defi and earn revenue."
I've always focused on Handshake names TLDs anyone can own until recently after we started logging in as .namebase names.
I've since been playing around with messaging where Handshake allows you to actually own your identity on the Internet in contrast to having a Twitter-controlled handle, Google-controlled email address, or .com-controlled domain name.
I'm really liking how you've tied in like everything relevant into these 3 sentences though, fro NFT and defi to the usernames, domains, and selling subdomains. Will try incorporating this in how I talk about Handshake moving forward
true - the identity, seems to be a selling point for sure.
https://flamingohandshake.com/
also putting this together with some others in the community to help show more awareness of Handshake and emoji domains -
thanks - trying to show people emojis are on handshake too!
got this comment on the youtube:
Highlighted comment
RantsNReviews said:
9 minutes ago
I bought a Yat today. To be totally honest, I hadn’t heard about Handshake before this. It does seem like they’re both very similar in terms of overall concept and prospective applications, and perhaps Handshake does offer more. However, just something to consider — the point you made about Yat having more hype, a more visible driving force pushing it, and a presentation that’s more structured/corporatized (instead of community-based/grassroots) and aesthetically pleasing may end up being the difference that pushes it ahead. It’s all about who achieves widespread adoption faster, and history has shown that it often isn’t the format/product that’s objectively, technologically superior (classic VHS vs Betamax). As someone who has been just barely dipping his toes into the NFT space, I can simply point out that the people at Yat got to me (wound up in front of my eyeballs, one way or another) with their marketing strategy, made their case effectively enough to incite FOMO, and made it SUPER easy to access and purchase their product. The process for purchasing NFTs on a platform like OpenSea probably seems too daunting to a lot of average users and scares many away, limiting the potential size of the market, whereas acquiring a Yat is literally more streamlined than using the “Buy Now” option on Amazon — you can just touch Apple Pay once and boom, you’re done.
I’m not trying to convince anyone here that Yat will definitely win out and become the center of the next big crypto boom. I’m just offering another perspective.
This YT comment resonates a lot with me. Overall I think they're right. As a community I think we can be doing a lot more to think about how to better communicate and distribute Handshake. Yat and BitClout have both done an amazing job at distribution even if their technical fundamentals seem much shakier (no pun intended).
just cant wait to sell SLDs - if we can monetize SLD instead of flipping TLD and also users can pay with credit card - I think more in the community can be compensated for their marketing.
Going live tn! (fingers crossed)
awesomee!!! keep up the good fight and all you do for Handshake!
Thank you!
I really like what they've been able to do around creating ways owners can show off the names they've gotten. Obviously emojis are a bit more visually appealing than raw text, but we have emojis as well. If we do make a shift toward framing Handshake domains as public identifiers, owners will need easy ways to show off their collections/name.
This is an awesome write up, thanks. Clearly Handshake needs more promotion if these inferior centralised alternatives are selling for so much! Need a simpler version of this to promote for the masses as there's a lot of technical info in here most folks won't get.
Good writeup.
One idea I now have is: if people think <some-emoji>.y.at is cool, what if someone bought a very short domain like `h.at` and made that a gateway similar to HNS.to + y.at?
Super accurate and hilarious meme by 🦎/:https://twitter.com/HnsMemes/status/1379328953983381505/