Hey Namers, with a lot of upgrades coming to Namebase on the horizon, I wanted to share a bit more info on Namebase's upcoming roadmap.

For context, we've spent the last half year working to improve tooling for developers who may want to build on Handshake. dLinks (

) was created to showcase how you can use Handshake names to create decentralized websites, Namer News was created to showcase how anyone can use Handshake names to log in (

https://www.namebase.io/blog/handshake-login/

), the Namebase Record Assistant (

https://docs.namebase.io/guides-1/namebase-record-assistant/

) makes it easy for users to set DNS records on their own names, and HDNS (

http://hdns.io/

) was released so developers can easily build Handshake services without running their own nodes. And all of this can be found via the new developer documents at

https://docs.namebase.io/./

We also went ahead and quickly released a lightweight version of the Namebase Registry (

https://namebase.io/registry/

) so we could unblock those who have been eager to jump start their subdomain business.

It's been really rewarding to see how all this has played out too. dLinks was a helpful case study for accelerating Fleek's integration of Handshake (

https://blog.fleek.co/posts/handshake-domains-support-release/

), Handshake logins is now used for logging into the Handshake Wiki (

https://handy.wiki/

) which gives you editing access, hmail.app uses the Namebase Record Assistant to set its auth TXT records, and HNS.to is now running HDNS so it should be a lot more stable now. And in just the first month since the registry's launched, more than 500 TLDs have already been staked!

Now that the developer tooling is in a pretty good place, we're reinvesting back into improving the Namebase core product. This includes rehauling our egregious onboarding experience, helping newcomers better undestand what Handshake is and how the auctions work so they don't get their personal names sniped, revamping the dashboard (

https://news.namebase.io/post/1655/

), squashing papercut bugs like the annoying one that shows won names as "lost" for 20 blocks, launching referral and affiliate programs, integrating wire transfers and additional payment methods, and of course improving marketplace and make an offer features such as marketplace auctions, paid default sorting, batching names together for portfolio sales, regex and fuzzy search filters, setting a minimum for offers, declining offers, and buyer/seller communication.

In the meanwhile, the Handshake community will also continue to grow in parallel. The dWeb Foundation (

https://www.decentralizedinter.net/

) is taking the lead on pushing for browser adoption and coin listing, Directors

marksmith/

and

graham/

are soon launching a name gifting platform that we think will be crucial for community growth (name gifting is a keystone to Handshake's culture and we're going to kick the platform off with an event, stay tuned), we're developing a code conduct together to honor and reflect our shared values, and we'll develop a crowdnerfing blocklist (rough draft at

https://www.notion.so/Public-Blocklist-8eaf6a3cd15040c79b18a4ec607932fa/

) to discourage name squatting while encouraging name gifting.

If you'd like to get involved with helping grow Handshake, you can check out

https://community.namebase.io/join/

for a lengthy list of explicit ways you can immediately get started! Specifically, our team at Namebase thinks that right under browser adoption, the most important event for Handshake is integration with other dWeb projects like Filecoin, and all it takes is a little outreach — perhaps you'd like give it a try? I've personally found other projects' communities to be super welcoming, which makes sense since if any of them reached out to our community about integrating, we'd be very excited to help as well!

Handshake is the gateway to the dWeb and our community already has great relationships with fellow dWeb pioneers like Skynet and Akash team, so let's keep reaching out to other projects to work together until the entire Internet stack is fully decentralized!

Ping me at

johnnywu/

on Discord (discord.namebase/) if you want help with getting started 🤝

Happy naming~