Tieshun Roquerre, CEO of Namebase: The Decentralized Web Explained

Tieshun Roquerre is the CEO of Namebase, a secure and easy platform to interact with Handshake. In this conversation, Tieshun and Anthony discuss what Handshake is and why it’s important, how the decentralized web is coming fast, and how Namebase empowers people to buy, sell, and hold Handshake coins while also buying and selling domains. TRAVALA. COM-----Travala.com is the world’s leading blockchain-based travel booking platform trusted by thousands of customers worldwide as their preferred online travel agency. Book over 2 Million hotels and accommodations and pay with 25 cryptocurrencies or credit and debit cards. -----If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Check out Off the Chain newsletter by visiting offthechain.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Tayshaun Roquerre is the founder of Namebase, a secure and easy platform to interact with Handshake. In this episode, we talked about what is Handshake, why is it important, how the decentralized web is coming fast, and how Namebase empowers people to buy, sell, and hold handbase while also buying and selling domains. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. But before we get into it, I want to talk about the sponsor for today's episode, Travela. Travela is the world's leading blockchain-based travel booking platform trusted by thousands of customers worldwide. Their value proposition is they've

• 0:51Anthony Pompliano?

  created a frictionless travel booking experience that incorporates next-generation blockchain technology and tokenized incentives. Travela.com connects travelers with one of the world's largest selections of incredible places to stay, including everything from hotels, apartments, villas, and hostels to five-star luxury resorts. It was founded by a team of seasoned travel, fintech, and blockchain industry experts. Travela.com's mission is to bring the travel industry as a whole transparent pricing, innovation, authentic truth, enhanced security, and efficient stakeholder interaction. Travela.com's vision is to align travel booking with the ethos of decentralized technology. Head on over to Travela.com and book a place to

• 1:34Anthony Pompliano?

  stay tonight. Again, that's Travela.com, T-R-A-V-A-L-A.com. Now let's get into this episode with Tayshaun.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. Got Tayshaun here, lots of stuff going on. We invested in Namebase a while ago, pre-Handshake, Namebase launching, and it's live.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's on.

• 2:29Anthony Pompliano?

  It is on, game on. But let's first talk about your background and kind of what you did pre crypto and then we'll get into into what's going on with the handshake.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. I have a bit of a non-traditional background. Basically, I got my career started at a company called Teespring, which was really big a while ago. It's still pretty big, actually, but their customer apparel selling platform was an engineer there and actually left high school to work there.

• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Left high school?

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Left high school, yeah. After sophomore year.

• 3:01Anthony Pompliano?

  You left high school after your sophomore year? I didn't know that.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't share that before.

• 3:05Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I didn't know that. Alright, what was the logic behind leaving high school as a sophomore?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they were, it was, it was pretty crazy because I'm from Boston, but I'd emailed the CEO and I got an internship there for the summer. And at the time, they were doing a million dollars in revenue every day.

• 3:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  So it was just blowing up like a rock shit.

• 3:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And most of that was coming through Facebook, I think?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Mostly it was through Facebook, yeah. So it was just an insane amount of revenue and growth. And it was just like empowering people to be their own entrepreneurs effectively. So I saw that opportunity as like I really wanted to work there and get the experience. So it convinced my school, let me take like a gap year effectively between my sophomore and junior year. And then I worked at Teespring for that year full-time.

• 3:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the biggest takeaway?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, biggest takeaway was that I can do something that I want to do that is ambitious and still be pretty good at it. It was pretty, you know, it's pretty non-traditional. Some people kind of thought I was crazy, like they didn't think it was a good idea. And it ended up working out. So I think like taking the bet on myself was something that I kind of internalized.

• 4:08Anthony Pompliano?

  That's, that's one of my favorite things to tell people is just bet on your fucking self, man.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 4:13Anthony Pompliano?

  It's one of these things where when you bet on yourself, if you succeed, you win. If you bet on yourself and you fail, you can sleep at night.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, the worst thing in the world would be to be in that situation, want to go do it, not do it, and then every night be worried about, you know, damn, should I have done it? And so what year is this that you did?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  This was 2014.

• 4:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so 2014, I'm at Facebook. Facebook, I'm running the growth team.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Oh, nice.

• 4:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Facebook pages.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And Teespring was absolutely killing us because they were doing all kinds of crazy shit on Facebook. And it was one of those things where like, it's good because someone's super excited about Facebook, but they were also doing things. I think Teespring was the one who was taking people's last names.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Facebook hated Teespring.

• 5:02Anthony Pompliano?

  That was, that was huge at the time. So what Teespring was doing, which was very smart, was they would basically run an ad. And in the ad, they would pull the user's last name. And then insert that last name onto the T-shirt image and then put that in the ad all dynamically. So I would see like Pompliano Family Rocks T-shirt.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm like, oh shit, like that's a cool T-shirt, right? The problem is that not everyone is dumb like me. And some people are like, hey dude, that's creepy.

• 5:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And so Facebook was like, I think we had to like literally change the rules on the advertising system. To prevent using last names and all kinds of stuff, but Teespring was very, very innovative and cutting edge when it came to a lot of that stuff.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, and it wasn't necessarily Teespring specifically. It was the entrepreneurs on Teespring. A lot of them were these like affiliate marketers and those guys were really creative in terms of what they, what they could do.

• 6:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Because the Teespring system, if I remember correctly, is essentially allows me to come up with a design. Post the design, I don't have to touch T-shirts, I don't touch supply chain, I don't have to touch payment processing, anything. I can just put my design up. And then people can come in and buy it and Teespring takes care of everything.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 6:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Super smart. Alright, so you do that, would you do it again?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, a hundred percent. Everything, I mean, everything really worked out. So. I think in a parallel universe, things wouldn't have worked out and like that, that risk was pretty capped in terms of what would happen. If I didn't like it, I would go back to school after that year. I'd be a year older, but I would still go down the traditional path. But I didn't, I didn't have to do that because at the end of that gap year, I ended up starting, starting a company with my friend who was a T L fellow. The time and we got into Y Combinator so.

• 6:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the company?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  A strong intro. So that was a recruiting startup. We basically help tech companies grow their engineering team through employee referrals. It's probably the best way to grow your early team. And then we ended up getting into what was, you might have remembered the Y C fellowship, which was like a short experiment that they started. And we were in the first batch. We actually, the first company accepted into that. It was like 20 out of 6,500 applicants. And from there, we got into the core Y Combinator program. And that's when I officially dropped out of school to do that because, you know, people try multiple years in a row again to Y C. It was like a once in a lifetime opportunity.

• 7:26Anthony Pompliano?

  To me, Y C is probably actually better than high school. If you know that you want to go build companies, right? Like, like that education that you get and kind of practical application is going to be much more applicable to your life than going and sitting in 11th grade math, right? Like, what, I was talking to somebody recently and I was in like the, the basic classes. But somebody was like, yeah, like, you remember anything about trigonometry? No, right? Like maybe some algebra you remember, but other than that, there's a lot of education that goes, that's kind of more generalized. And for people who don't know what they want to do, that's really valuable, right? But for people who know, hey, this is what I want to go do, something like a Y C is probably actually more valuable to them, right?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  I agree 100%, yeah.

• 8:10Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's get into,

• 8:14Anthony Pompliano?

  what you're doing today is all built on and around handshake. But before we talk about handshake, I want to talk about kind of the legacy website domains and kind of technology stack. So walk us through, how do these naming services work? How do DNSs work? Like, how do you think about that infrastructure that currently is based in the web that we know as today?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's really fascinating, fascinating actually, because DNS, the domain name system, it's infrastructure that powers the entire internet, right? Every time you type in google.com or facebook.com, you're using DNS. But it's basically technology that was duct taped together and barely works effectively.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Um, the reason why is because when it was started, no one really assumed that the internet would get as big as it would get, right? There is that famous uh Nobel Prize winning economist who was like internet.

• 9:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Paul Krugman.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's that uh, you know, it'll never get that big, it'll be like one company or whatever. Um, but anyways, and then it blew up. So the internet DNS infrastructure has basically not scaled with the usage of the internet and the importance of it. The way it works today is uh, it's basically like a tree hierarchy. You have uh, TLDs and the root zone. Uh, TLDs are top level domain names. So an example of that is dot com, dot org, dot net. Uh, and then each of those TLDs are owned by an organization or an entity. Uh, VeriSign, for example, owns dot com. Um, and there's.

• 9:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So let, let's go real slow here because I think this is a really important part. So a TLD is a top level domain that dot com, dot org, whatever, is actually owned by somebody.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So VeriSign, for example, is a private company?

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so VeriSign owns dot com. And so they just, when they bought dot com, or how did they come into ownership of dot com?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was kind of a weird situation, but they basically had ownership over dot com. And then when I can't try it, like there's, there's some like controversy and then they like sued them to like get the rights to it or whatever. Uh, so there's a lot of controversy, but basically there's a long history, but now they own dot com. And they uh, basically are able to charge everyone who buys a domain name, uh, you know, a few dollars, uh, like five, $10 every year.

• 10:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So the top level domain is the dot com, dot org, dot edu, dot whatever, right? When I buy google.com, facebook.com, etc., the Google, the Facebook, the, you know, whatever comes before the dot com, what is that called?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that is a second level domain.

• 10:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, a second level domain.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And those are, uh, and those are what you get to buy normally.

• 10:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so if I buy, let's say all of a sudden I found google.com through one of these uh, uh, website, um, you know, services that sell domain names. I could buy google.com from Google, right? Kind of the person who currently owns the second level domain. Or if no one's ever owned it before, I would be buying it from VeriSign. Is that right?

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, it's actually an intermediary in front of VeriSign. So there's this, uh, another ecosystem participant called a registrar. A domain registrar and they're, uh, they basically work with VeriSign and they're able to register, uh, .com domains. And then they, they, they pay VeriSign a cut and then they usually charge, uh, a little bit of margin on top of that.

• 11:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so when I'm buying through GoDaddy or one of these domain, uh, services, I'm either buying from the person who currently owns it, who's another corporation, individual, whoever, or I'm buying it through a registrar who is basically acting for VeriSign and they're splitting the revenue from that sale.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Exactly, and GoDaddy would be the registrar in that case.

• 11:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so as that system has worked for, you know, decades now, who comes up with more top level domains? Right, like so there's .com, then there was like .co. Now you could pretty much buy all kinds of top level domain or second level domains for those top levels. Who comes up with those?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  So it's this, uh, entity called the ICANN and they, uh, effectively assign the new TLDs and they decide who gets which TLD. Uh, it was actually, it used to be run by the US government and then they basically spun that out as like a nonprofit, uh, because other countries were uncomfortable with the US government having that much, uh, power. Uh, but the, uh, ICANN is still a US-based organization, they're based in LA, um, and they decide who gets which TLDs.

• 12:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, uh, so I'm already seeing some issues here with, uh, the registrars, ICANN, etc. I'm assuming that they have, uh, pretty good oversight and governance over this system, even after you've bought the second level domain?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there are basically, there's like a significant number of rules that each of the TLD owners have. And then the TLD owners are able to basically extract, enforce policies on the domains that are sold. And they're able to revoke them, or seize them, or shut them down. And then ICANN as well has a lot of discretion in terms of how they manage the issuance of new TLDs, and also existing TLDs. So for example, the ICANN recently lifted the price caps on .com domains. Like this happened just two days ago. And those domains are now going to become 70% more expensive over the next decade.

• 13:34Anthony Pompliano?

  When you say a price cap, what does that mean?

• 13:36Speaker 02

  So before, there was a limit on how much VeriSign could charge for each domain. And that was just removed.

• 13:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What was that limit, do you know?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  I forget the exact...

• 13:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Like $5, $10, or like $100?

• 13:49Speaker 02

  It was, it's a percentage cap on like how much you can increase the percentage price per year.

• 13:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, got it. All right, and so in this system, when ICANN hands out the top-level domains, how do they choose who gets to own the top-level domain?

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:07Anthony Pompliano?

  That seems like a situation ripe for either corruption, or influence, or something.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  It's really funny you point that out, because it is a corrupt system.

• 14:18Anthony Pompliano?

  It sounds like there's a nonprofit that's handing out a basically free product to somebody, and that person can turn around and make a lot of money with it. And so I can imagine there's jockeying for who receives it.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  So there is this huge controversy recently, because ICANN tried to sell .org, which is,

• 14:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  You know, obviously one of the...

• 14:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Very popular.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Most popular TLDs in the world. And they basically sold it for a very cheap price to a private equity firm that was, that had no other participants in the auction. It was just a private deal with that private equity firm. And it was run by the ex-CEO of ICANN. So the private equity...

• 14:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, the private equity firm that bought it...

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Is run by the ex-CEO of ICANN?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, or strongly affiliated, it was partners of the ex-CEO. So it basically just reeks of corruption. There is a huge uproar on the internet about it. And it's still not settled. They still might be able to sell .org to that private equity firm.

• 15:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so let's say that worst case scenario, it's corruption. Best case scenario, it's favoritism. Right? Is that probably accurate?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's, it's hard. It's a hard pitch to even frame it as favoritism.

• 15:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, why?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  It's pretty corrupt because the, the entire deal basically was like, everything was done behind closed doors. There was not a period for other bidders to come in. It was just done with that one private equity firm as a, as a deal. So it's pretty hard to even frame it as favoritism.

• 15:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And ICANN previously owned .org?

• 15:49Speaker 02

  They basically had to determine.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  It's a complicated situation, but they kind of helped determine where it goes effectively.

• 15:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And so, uh, do you remember what the purchase price is proposed?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  It was around like a billion or something.

• 16:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So for only a billion dollars, you could own .org and every time somebody buys a .org domain, essentially you're getting a cut of that transaction.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 16:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm assuming that they make more than a billion dollars a year doing that.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  The, it's, uh, it's actually less than a billion dollars per year, but you, you basically do the discounted cash flow. But the thing that they did not include in it was right before the private equity firm bought it, they got ICANN to lift the price caps on the .org domain. So the valuation was based on the previous revenue and then they lifted the price cap and then they got it for an extreme discount effectively.

• 16:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Uh, yeah, sounds, uh, pretty sketchy.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:42Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So the old world, we understand, we all use it. Some of us understand the technical components. Some of us just have the user experience by typing in a, a kind of human readable URL. And then Handshake comes along. Talk to me about what exactly is Handshake? Kind of what are they trying to build? Who's behind it? All of that?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Handshake is a new protocol that is effectively putting these TLDs on a blockchain. The easy way to think about it is, functionally, it's actually very similar to Bitcoin. It's a proof-of-work based chains. It has UTXOs and all that. But instead of using the coins as money, use the coins to register names on the Handshake blockchain, and these names are TLDs. So, anyone can register their own TLD on Handshake. It works through this Vickrey auction, completely on-chain. And the benefit of having this TLD on-chain is that, one, the entire issuance process is decentralized, right? So you don't need an ICANN to determine who gets what. It's just an open system.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  And the TLD being on-chain makes it very, very difficult for these names to be seized or censored. It also makes the issuance very private. You don't need to go and reveal your identity when you're buying these domains, effectively. And then it also improves, it provides a SEP function improvement in the security. And that, I would have to get a little bit more into the technical details. But basically, when you type in like HTTPS into your browser, there's an entire system that manages that. And that system is not very secure today. And Handshake is effectively providing a more secure system for this.

• 18:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so Handshake has rebuilt the domain system that is going to be based on a blockchain. And that domain system has a couple of key differences, right? And you just named some of them. So, one of them is, now there's a decentralized kind of assignment process. So, ICANN can't go to the ex-CEO of ICANN and say, "Hey, you get .org," right? And that decentralized process really is this Vickrey auction, right? And as I've learned more about this, what's interesting to me is that, rather than say, "Hey,

• 18:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Handshake's launching," which it just did, "Here's every single name that could possibly be available." What they're doing is they're essentially just releasing a kind of infrequently, a couple at a time, right? And so, you may... Like let's say for me, if I want, uh, you know, dot, um, I don't know, dot Bitcoin, right? I can't just go today and buy it. I've got to wait for dot Bitcoin as the top level domain on handshake become available. But that may not happen four months or whatever, right?

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So handshake, uh, basically learned from predecessors and previous naming attempts. And there are a few key differences that, uh, basically helped me build conviction that handshake could succeed. One is it's not replacing the entire DNS system. It's just replacing the root zone. So just the hierarchy at the top. Everything else is actually pretty decentralized already, but basically it's very focused in terms of what it's trying to improve. Uh, and then the other issue is, you know, early adopters getting to bid on all the good names in previous attempts and, you know, basically squatting on every good name. So the names are rolled out over the course of 52 weeks. Uh, any name is available for bidding and will be available for bidding at some point over the 52 weeks. But if you come on day one, you only have, you know, one over 52, uh, of that entire namespace.

• 20:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay. And so, uh, in this auction process, let's say that dot Bitcoin name, uh, in week 14 becomes available, right? I'm making this up, but in week 14, you and I both want it. We essentially are going into a system. We'll get to what those systems could be. Um, and we're going to bid a monetary amount to get it. Whoever has the highest bid wins?

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Uh, yes, exactly.

• 20:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so this is a pretty good way to do price discovery.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And then remind me, a Vickery auction is basically, I put a, here's the most amount of money I'm willing to pay. And every other participant does that. And then I, if I'm the winning bid, I just pay $1 more than the last, the second highest bid?

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Uh, you just pay exactly the second highest bid.

• 20:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So I would, so let's say I say I'm willing to pay $10,000 for dot Bitcoin. Everyone else is less than 10,000. The second highest bid was 9,500. I pay 9,500. Because I was willing to pay more, but I just have to pay what?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 21:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Very interesting. Um, okay. So. Why exactly does a DNS need a blockchain?

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:19Anthony Pompliano?

  As kind of you think about what Handshake's built, like, why is a blockchain necessary?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  That's a great question, and there's a few reasons why blockchain is helpful in this case. Honestly, when you're talking with developers, and those are probably the people that you really most strongly need to convince with something as technical as Handshake, the key reason is actually security. So blockchains, at least today, are like pretty inefficient, they're difficult to use. There's a lot of negatives when it comes to using them in comparison to a normal database. But the thing that they're really good at is basically trust, right? They are trust minimizing, and in systems where you don't want to have a single entity in control of that trust, they're really good at solving that. So in the traditional system, the way that security is on the TLS, which determines HTTPS,

• 22:08Speaker 02

  basically that system is managed by this group of entities called a certificate authority. So these certificate authorities basically determine the security of the internet today. And those certificate authorities are very vulnerable to hacking, and they can be compromised very easily. Because the way it works is that when you visit a website with HTTPS, if any one of these certificate authorities that are involved in that system gets compromised, and there are thousands of them, then your internet traffic is compromised. So it's like a one-of-many failure system. Instead, what Handshake is saying is, instead of using these certificate authorities, let's shift the trust to this distributed blockchain.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  And instead of this like one-of-many system, you need the entire blockchain to be, basically be compromised in order for the security to be compromised. So that is the key insight for Handshake of why it's providing a set function improvement in the security. It's shifting the root of trust from a certificate authority-based system to a distributed ledger that is basically backed by the blockchain.

• 23:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so do I prove my ownership of the root domain or kind of top level domain? Like, how does that work?

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it basically works like owning Bitcoin. You have a private key and a wallet. And as long as you control the private key for that domain, you own that domain and only you can update the records or move it or do anything with it. So, you know, outside of security, there are additional benefits that come from being on the blockchain, which is that you can truly own your domain name. You know, most people don't realize that they're only renting domain names when they buy them today. So you're effectively only a renter, you're not an owner.

• 23:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's why you have to keep paying on an annual basis.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 23:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  With Handshake, you can truly own your domain name. And no one can seize that from you. And also, for the end users that are trying to resolve it, right? You're trying to type in google.com. Google.com doesn't work in every jurisdiction. It's very easy to basically do DNS censorship.

• 24:05Anthony Pompliano?

  China.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And Handshake just makes that significantly more difficult to censor. So you by being on the blockchain, you get this sense of true ownership. You get the privacy, but you also get access because now end users anywhere around the world can access your name effectively.

• 24:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so part of this system that's interesting to me is if I can now be that private equity firm that owns .org or I can own .com or .bitcoin or whatever, and I truly own it, can I sell you as somebody else a second level domain? So like, could, if I own .bitcoin, could I then turn around on Handshake and sell somebody else like pomp.bitcoin or tayshon.bitcoin, etc.?

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, you totally can.

• 24:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so really, by getting a top level domain, I could essentially be getting a business, right? Where I'm able to kind of cut up the second level domains and then sell those off as individual assets to people who want to use those. Do they own the second level domain or are they just renting the second level domain?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in that system, it actually depends on how you construct it.

• 25:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  There is a world in which you even create a side chain effectively on top of your top level domain that you own. And that can be its own completely decentralized system. Because this is all managed on a blockchain, you can, you know, basically write technology that makes it very decentralized. Or you can go to traditional route where you say, okay, I own Bitcoin, or let's say I own, you know, .pomp, and I want to sell all these second level domains. And there's like a, basically a system that you can plug into that makes that very easy. And you can go and sell those domains. So you can run that own business. And what we've seen is that, you know, there are other companies in the space that are selling these, you know, specific extensions for those domains, and they're, they're doing very well.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  So effectively what Handshake enables is anyone can build their own business like that and start selling these domains.

• 26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  How long ago did Handshake launch?

• 26:04Speaker 02

  A week ago.

• 26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  A week ago. Isn't there a rap song, "A week ago, a week ago"?

• 26:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the highest price someone's paid for a top level domain so far?

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we've yet to see that because right now we're still in the mining period of Handshake. Basically, they, the, the network has a limit on transactions for the first two weeks to allow for a sufficient mining capacity to come on to Handshake.

• 26:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  And, and right now it's great because there is significant like interest in Handshake. So I think the current mining rate is something like 15, like Terra hashes.

• 26:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I know CoinMine, which people know I'm quite, quite fond of, an investor. They actually enabled, I think they were one of the first ones, they enabled their consumer devices to mine Handshake right on day one.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah, they support it as well. So basically after this two week period, then the registrations open up and that's when you can start bidding on these domain names. And so what we have for all of our users is they've already started adding these names to their watch list so that they get notified and they can automatically go and bid. So there's a lot of excitement there.

• 27:07Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You're not part of the name of the Handshake business, right? You're not on their engineering team. You're building a completely separate company called Namebase. What does that do?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. So Namebase is...

• 27:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I know the answer, just so everyone's clear. We are investors, I'm just leading him.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  This is actually the first time I'm explaining the business to Anthony.

• 27:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I just invested blindly.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so basically Namebase is, what we do is we built a domain registrar on top of Handshake and an Onramp for Handshake. So in order to participate in these auctions, you need to use H&S to do it.

• 27:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's the Handshake token?

• 27:47Speaker 02

  That's the Handshake token. And the actual process is kind of difficult to do. It's kind of annoying. You have to be a developer. So what we realized is we saw the potential of this technology. We want to make it spread as fast as possible to as many people as possible. So we built tools to make it easier to use. So we have an Onramp, so you can come on to Namebase and buy H&S anywhere around the world. And you can use that H&S in Namebase to bid on any of these domain names. So we have a GUI that makes it really easy. An easy way to think about Namebase conceptually is we're kind of like a combination of GoDaddy and Coinbase.

• 28:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So right now, if I want to buy H&S, which is the Handshake token, and I need H&S to buy a top-level domain, are you guys the only place I can get it?

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so the only place I can get it right now is on Namebase. Once I get H&S after this two-week kind of waiting period for the mining capacity to come online, then I can actually go buy .bitcoin or whatever top-level domains are available.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. And I would also note that the way that we enabled that, right now we're the only liquid exchange for H&S, is basically we were aware of this two-week mining-only period, and so we partnered with miners, actually, mining pools. So they mined directly into Namebase, and so we're able to sell that H&S now, even when it's not available anywhere else.

• 29:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so if I buy that top-level domain .bitcoin, can I then turn around and sell my second-level domains to other people through Namebase, or will I have to go somewhere else?

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, you will eventually be able to do that. Right now, that infrastructure hasn't been built out.

• 29:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, okay. And so... What has this become, right? Like, when I think about, uh, kind of the web infrastructure, it makes a ton of sense, um, to have domains that are hard to censor, that are hard to take down, etc. Um, and, uh, there's a number of people working on this, right? Handshake and Namebase, there's unstoppable domains, etc. Um, what is kind of the end game here? Do we replace the entire internet with these, um, kind of decentralized domain systems? Or is there kind of coexistence? Like, how do you think about that?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, the way that I see this adoption happening, happening is, uh, there is a sense of coexistence. Basically, what I expect is that Handshake is going to eat TLDs. Handshake is going to be how new TLDs get issued. Uh, pretty much everyone in the world is going to be on it eventually. Uh, even if you talk to existing DNS people, um, they, they kind of see the potential here just because it's, it's very hard to solve the problems that Handshake solves without a blockchain-based technology. Uh, so even if it's not Handshake, eventually, there will be a blockchain-based tool that does this. However, there is a significant amount of DNS infrastructure that's already built out that the world relies on. Uh, and it is, uh, infeasible to just completely replace all of that.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  So that is why Handshake is just replacing the root zone, which is where most of the problems are. So you, you get 90% of the benefit by just replacing that with a blockchain. And all the second-level TLD, uh, domains and that normal issuance and governance process, that can happen, uh, as normal. That just plugs into Handshake. So what I expect is that Handshake is going to eat that. But then everything else, all this existing infrastructure, because we have path dependency, it's gonna keep on being there, right? It's like why the New York subway is, is still not super fast, even though Tokyo and China have a lot faster subway systems. So that existing infrastructure is gonna stay there, but Handshake is gonna replace the top-level, uh, root zone.

• 31:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then, what's the user experience like if I want to go to one of these websites? Right? So, uh, somebody's bought a top-level domain, they've actually set it up, etc. Can I just go to my Google Chrome and type in something to navigate there? Or do I need to have some kind of special browser? Like, what's that user experience look like?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there are multiple different ways to use HandShake. But effectively, there's, and it's also dependent on your trust profile, right? Whether you want to use a third-party tool or just run your own, right? Kind of like running a full node. So effectively, what you can do is, there are third-party resolvers, uh, and we're partnering with a few companies, uh, to make this really easy, uh, that you can just use. And it's effectively similar to using, uh, CloudFlare's 1.1.1.1, or Google's 8.8.8.8.

• 32:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are those?

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:08Anthony Pompliano?

  CloudFlare 1.1.1?

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Uh, 1.1.1.1.

• 32:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So four ones?

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Four ones, four ones.

• 32:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, what is that?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Uh, and four eights. So basically, these are DNS resolvers that CloudFlare and Google respectively run. And what they do is, uh, basically, they just make your DNS resolution a little bit faster and more private. Uh, and also, it's a little bit more censorship-resistant because they unlock access to certain domains that are blocked in certain countries. So these two resolvers already have hundreds of millions of users. And so this is an existing behavior that people have, which is you just point your DNS to a new resolver. It takes like five seconds in your computer, or you can do it in your router, uh, and then you're done. And then you're using that. So HandShake is the same way. HandShake, you just point your DNS to a HandShake resolver, and then you're able to resolve these HandShake names in any computer that you use.

• 32:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Any browser, any computer, etc. As long as I've pointed, what, you said, my router?

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Or your computer.

• 33:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Or my computer to the HandShake resolver. Can I have multiple resolvers that my computer's pointed to?

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, yeah, you can.

• 33:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, can I, can I use the regular internet and also go through this resolver at the same time? And like, have multiple tabs open and go back and forth?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  That's a great question. So HandShake is actually completely compatible with the existing internet. So that's, that's one of the things that gave us conviction is because, you know, if you're Trying to go and replace the entire internet with this blockchain based system and it's like a whole new system. Uh, that's basically gonna, uh, yeah, I have, I have very little conviction that such a system like that would be able to succeed. Um, what Handshake did is they're compatible with the existing system. So all the normal domains that you would access, google.com, facebook.com, segment.io, all those things, they will work as normal. The existing TLDs are all functional on Handshake. It's just that the new TLDs that are registered through Handshake are gonna be resolved through Handshake.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  So when you're using a Handshake compatible resolver, uh, your internet experience is basically only improved because everything else works as normal and you just get access to this new namespace effectively.

• 34:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Um, what do you think is the reason why this couldn't work, right? You know, obviously you're bullish, I'm bullish. Uh, what are the reasons or the biggest threats to it not working?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, that's a great question and I, and I think the easiest way to identify these issues is to look at, uh, what issues have played previous attempts. So first of all, you can't have any component of the system be centralized. It's kind of similar to, um, you know, the, uh, Bitcoin predecessors, right? How they always had a central entity that effectively was shut down by the government and so they never took off. And then Bitcoin basically decentralized everything and then it, you know, is eating up the world. Um, same thing with Handshake. So there have been alternative root zone attempts in the past and their only value add is that they're just like adding a new namespace. And that is not sufficient to basically, uh, unseat the network effects of the existing system. So that is the first component. It needs to be fully decentralized.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  The other thing is that the issuance of the names is incredibly important to get right. You don't want a system where the early adopters and whales are able to buy up all the good names. Cause what you end up getting is if, when that happens, and that has happened in, in previous naming attempts, is that someone comes in, you know, eight months from now, they are interested in the system. They see none of the good names are available, but also that system has not, you know, basically taken the world by stride yet. And so why would you ever invest in that system and buy into it if you don't get access to the good names and it's not even that valuable yet? So you really want- To prevent these early whales from being able to squat all the good names. You want people, allow people who come in a little bit later to still adopt it and get benefit from it. It's like digital real estate, right? You want some of the good real estate to be reserved.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  So what Handshake did is they created many mechanisms that effectively helped prevent early adopters and whales from getting all the good names. You still get an advantage, that's inherent in like a naming system. But it's not such an advantage that it's gonna kill the system. So that's, that's basically what we're, those are the mechanisms that Handshake has created to help mitigate failure. But you know, we still haven't seen it work out yet, right? It's, you know, Handshake, the naming registrations haven't even launched yet. So there is a world, if, if anything were to happen, I would see that mechanism not being as effective as we thought it would. That could be a potential cause for failure.

• 36:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so as you think through this, who are the people who are coming in first and interested? Is it the people who are traditionally squatting on domains and used to kind of benefiting from understanding the system?

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, the shocking thing for me is how diverse the initial set of community members is. So some of our earliest adopters, people who have been in our private beta for a while, because we were built on the Handshake testnet before. They're just crypto enthusiasts who are basically true believers. They kind of see what's wrong with the internet. They want to improve it and they're just super interested in it. And so it's interesting there because they're not only motivated financially, right? They're going to speculate on the coins and the names and all that. But they also believe in the potential. And I think that's like the, the true power of crypto, right? You have this effectively a political or philosophical cause and you can pair it with an economic opportunity. And the combination of that is incredibly powerful. So we have those people.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  We also have just normal speculators, we have miners, but we also have actual normal domainers as well. So there is, for example, one of our community members, park.io, they're a very popular domain registration site. They basically let you just like order.io domains ahead of time. And they're, they're also in our community. So we have existing domain brokers, domainers, developers as well. And there's a few partnerships that we're doing with people who are, are pretty big in the developer community. That we're going to be launching live pretty soon. So it, it's very varied, but pretty much everyone in the ecosystem who can be interested is already interested, which is super cool to see from my end.

• 38:01Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Who's the team behind Handshake? Because it's a pretty impressive team, if I remember correctly, right? They previously did something with the internet?

• 38:09Speaker 02

  So it's a...

• 38:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, hold on, that sounds really ridiculous. They did something with the internet, but they worked on like core infrastructure components of the internet, right?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're pretty involved with Bitcoin early on. So it's, Handshake in general is, at this point, is a very decentralized community. So there originally was a Handshake Foundation that was put up, and they actually raised 10.2 million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz founders fund, Sequoia, Greylock, pretty much every investor in Silicon Valley. And they ended up donating all that money away to nonprofits and open source developers.

• 38:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever heard.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:49Anthony Pompliano?

  They raised money for their foundation, but people didn't get equity in anything? And then they turned around and gave the money and donated it all?

• 38:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, those investors got tokens in the pre-sale. But then they literally didn't even use the money to develop it. And then the people behind that, you know, some of the people involved were like Persadio, Joseph Poon, who made Lightning Network, and there's another Andrew Lee who made Private Internet Access. But they were basically only involved in the inception of it. They kind of kicked things off. And then now there's pretty much multiple ecosystem participants that are all involved in Handshake. There's us, there's another team called Urkel, and there's multiple developers, there's a developer community as well that's basically not them. And what we've, what basically we've seen is that the Handshake Foundation at this point is completely stepping aside. They basically just launched it and they're letting it out into the world.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  If you go onto the handshake.org website, you'll see they even say everyone is a director of Handshake. Like literally, you can be a director of Handshake, you just have to say you're a director of Handshake. It's not owned by anyone, there's no creator of Handshake. So if anyone says they're a creator, you know they're just lying, it's bullshit. And pretty much it's a very decentralized community, that it's community-driven at this point.

• 40:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you think through this, like what keeps those developers building on Handshake? Because the way I think about this is Namebase's business is to facilitate the buy. Buying and selling of HNS and then the actual top level domains. And then eventually it'll be a second level domains, etc. But you guys are dependent on those developers staying in the community, building this and kind of furthering what's being built. Like, how do you think about what that incentive looks like?

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a few different incentives at play here. One is that there is this really amazing airdrop mechanism that Handshake built in. They basically recognize that for this kind of thing to succeed, you always need the developers. And so what they did was basically there's a fully decentralized airdrop where the top 250,000 developers on GitHub are effectively eligible for this airdrop. And they can claim around 4,000 HNS. And so that gives the developers an economic incentive. Honestly, for developers, usually they're like pretty well off and they're not that motivated by money. So really, it's an easy way for them to play around with the protocol. And usually with the way that new technologies are adopted is like you have developers playing around with it on the weekend. And then it like becomes their like full-time thing and they're like super interested and it becomes like the thing that everyone uses.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Same thing with Bitcoin, right? It's like developers playing around with it on the weekend. Ethereum developers playing around with it on the weekend and now it's like everywhere. So there is this decentralized airdrop that gives developers some skin in the game. And then the other reason is that there are a lot of developers who are, if you know about DNS, if you're familiar with how the domain name system works as a developer, you're pretty much going to be not happy with how it works effectively. So we get a lot of people who are just like, oh, this is a way for us, this is like an incredible improvement over the existing system. And it's a way for us to just like unseat ICANN or unseat these bad actors that currently control the internet and effectively plague it. They collect rent on everyone in the world. So there's a lot of interest just from that.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  And I think that's probably the main driving reason for developers being interested. Because typically developers are more philosophically, you know, they're more philosophically driven than anything else, right? It's like the entire open source movement. Like, why would you contribute all your free time on building this, like, you know, writing free software that anyone can use? It's because they, developers just believe in it, you know, they have a cause, they want to create something for the world. So that's really the driving motivation for a lot of these people.

• 42:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Why are you working on this?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for me, it's a kind of interesting backstory. You know, I grew up in the US here, so we don't really have too many issues with censorship yet. It's gotten worse over time, but you know, compared to the rest of the world, it's a significant improvement. So I'd never really seen too much of this problem firsthand. However, when I went to MIT, that's where I studied after starting the company.

• 42:49Anthony Pompliano?

  They let people into MIT who didn't go to high school, who didn't finish high school?

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I got pretty lucky.

• 42:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, how's that work?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  You just apply.

• 42:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe I should apply.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:59Anthony Pompliano?

  They'll let me in their undergrad program?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are like 60-year-olds at MIT undergrad, so.

• 43:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Did they already get an undergrad degree somewhere else?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Sometimes it varies, like, they're really, like, one of my friends, he was this guy from Canada who, he like never finished high school and he was like a car mechanic for like 6 years. And he was like 28, and then he went to MIT after he like applied and got in. So I think if you're interested in your, like, technologically interested as well, that's probably a good fit.

• 43:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I would be dumb enough to just apply, get in, and then drop out the first day and say, "I dropped at MIT."

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you do that, you do that.

• 43:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm sure there's some people who do it.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  But, so anyways, when I was there, you know, one of the first things that I did after one of the semesters was I went and traveled to Turkey. My old roommate was Turkish, so I got to travel with him. And the thing that struck me was not the cultural differences, because I was actually kind of used to that with my roommate. It was when I tried to visit a few like normal websites like Facebook or Twitter, it was blocked. I couldn't access, say, I got this like blue screen, like, you know, seized by the Turkish government or whatever. And it was shocking to me because, you know, I had grown up on YouTube and Twitter. I learned how to program on YouTube, so I wouldn't even have gone a job in the first place if I had never had access to those resources. And I basically realized that none of those people in Turkey have access to this. Or it's very, very difficult for them to get access.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  You have to, you know, jump through a lot of hoops to basically avoid the censorship that they have. That's one of the reasons why, you know, Klafler and Google's resolvers are popular, actually, in Turkey. So I solved that problem, but I also kind of... Didn't do anything about it. I was like, I'm an American, like, this isn't affecting me. What can I do as an individual? Uh, and so I didn't actually take action at that time. Uh, I just continued my trip and I went back to school and I, I didn't really think about it. Uh, but over the next, you know, few years, over the last few years, what we've seen is that the security and sovereignty on the internet is getting worse and worse. Uh, effectively, you know, I grew up on an internet that was very democratic, right? Any website in the world you can access, there's no borders effectively.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  And now what we're seeing is that there, the internet is starting to create its own borders. Uh, and they're, they're physical borders, right? It's like China has their own version of the internet. It's pretty closed off. And they're now exporting that to other countries. Russia is effectively creating their own internet as well. So what we're starting to see is this, uh, crazy trend where the internet is becoming more siloed over time. Uh, and you're starting to see this, uh, insane amount of censorship. Um, you know, in India, they're censoring a lot of regions right now. Uh, Spain, they censored, uh, dot C A T, which is the Catalonian government's, uh, T L D when they're trying to hold like a, a referendum for, uh, in- independence. So it's gotten worse over time and it's gotten more frequent. Um, when I came across Handshake, I basically saw the potential because I'm a, uh, engineer.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Um, I could, you know, I was, I was familiar with some of the concepts that Handshake was trying to improve upon. So when I saw that, I basically realized like, oh shoot, like this technology is something that can actually create a set function improvement in how the internet works. And it would create an internet that is, uh, global and democratic again. Anyone, anywhere, uh, anywhere around the world can resolve these names, which is something that is, uh, very difficult to do today. Uh, and so I saw the potential that, for that, and I wanted to make a difference there. Uh, and so that's why I wanted to build, uh, Namebase. Effectively, it's, it's tooling and infrastructure that makes Handshake easier to use so that the adoption can spread.

• 46:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the things that's really interesting to me, uh, and I don't know how this would work, but let's take right now in China, for example. Uh, coronavirus is a, a huge topic and, um, there's been numerous examples of people who either one have tried to raise concerns. Uh, and, um, you know, there's the doctor who got sick and ended up passing away. Uh, there's, I've recently read a story about a gentleman who. He went into cities in China and basically was a reporter. He was like a citizen's reporter and he was sharing videos and all stuff. And then all of a sudden, he's disappeared. And then you get people on the ground who are taking videos and stuff. And I saw a video on Twitter, I think it was yesterday, that again, I don't know how valid it was.

• 47:05Anthony Pompliano?

  But in the video, what was depicted is basically they were visiting a woman and saying, hey, you have to take down the thing you posted on social media, right? Or you're going to get in trouble essentially. And so what that brings to is like, there's this separation right now. And I think the coronavirus scare and kind of issue really highlights like, people outside of China don't know what's going on there. Right? And people inside of China normally don't know what's going on outside the US. Right? So it's kind of like, we're now experiencing a little bit of what they experience on a daily basis. But I'm wondering if somebody in China could, if they got their hands on a top level domain on the handshake platform. Could they basically set up a website and use that website to publish information, etc.

• 47:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And then now people outside the US or outside of China and inside of China could all access that website. And now that quote unquote, source of truth of what's going on inside of China would be available for anyone in the world to see? Or there's still things with like the great firewall, etc. that could prevent that from happening?

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's actually a spectrum, but effectively that is a first step that you would have to having a website that can't be shut down by the great firewall. And actually, what would probably end up happening is basically there's this arbitrage period always because governments are kind of late to adopt technology. Where just using handshake alone with the normal internet is sufficient. But handshake is solving a very specific layer of the existing internet infrastructure. There's also like the storage layer and resolving. So you know, the great firewall, they do like IP based filtering. They even do like packet filtering. So like they're censoring you based on like the literally the data that you're sending out. So there is potential that they would be able to do something like that.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  But when you pair handshake with as like a primitive with something like Sia coin or IPFS or Filecoin, then You have something that's that's very, very difficult to censor. So, yes, handshake would be able to do that now. And then basically, it's always a cat and mouse game. So probably what you would see is, you know, a few years from now, you wouldn't just use handshake alone. You use handshake with like this decentralized storage.

• 49:08Anthony Pompliano?

  With a whole stack.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  With a whole stack, effectively, yeah. And it's really great that you brought that up. There's actually a Ben Thompson article about this recently. You might, you might, you probably like a reading, I'll send it to you after. But effectively, they, he talks about, this is probably one of the strongest examples of why censorship matters. And it's really easy to explain to anyone in the world right now, normally censorship.

• 49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  He wrote an article specifically about coronavirus.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, wow. Okay, I would love to read that.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  And effectively, what happened was, the doctors in China, they knew about coronavirus early. Like, they reported, they, they basically saw a ton of patients start coming in with SARS-like symptoms. And they're like, there's this like new thing going on, they're really concerned about it. They started talking to other doctors about it, and it was this like phenomenon where they saw like this was becoming an issue.

• 49:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And this is, if I remember correctly, in the news, they'd say like as early as like November or December.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Last year, and we're talking, you know, three, four months ago.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So they knew about it, and they started to raise the alarm bells. And then the local jurisdictions and the governments were like, everything's, yeah, they're like, shut up. Everything's under control. There are only like forty-nine patients that have this. And like the doctors, they saw, there were like literally hundreds, there are hundreds of these patients coming in. They're like, there's only forty-nine patients and their symptoms are calm. And then the initial doctors who were spreading this news, they were punished. Their punishment was like publicized too, like everywhere. It was in the newspapers, it was like, these doctors have been reprimanded and they were spreading false news and don't listen to them. And basically what you saw, yeah, it's crazy. And what you saw was every other doctor who was aware of this problem now was silenced, right?

• 50:45Speaker 02

  They didn't have the conviction, they didn't really have the ability to go and share this because they knew that they would also be silenced. And they would, you know, their families were at risk and all this, and so they didn't speak about it. And the consequence of that censorship is now coronavirus is spreading to the rest of the world and it's getting worse and worse.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Because of the top level down censorship, right? The individual doctors, they want to share this and they were sounding the alarm bells. But the governance layer at the top is what is preventing it. And I think if you tie that back into Handshake, that's really what Handshake is doing. It's trying to create an internet that's not controlled by governments or organizations at the top of the hierarchy. It's letting the internet be controlled and literally owned by individuals. And that's something that we've never had on the internet before.

• 51:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm looking up right now what the coronavirus death toll has surpassed 1,000 people in mainland China.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's probably a very under-reported, that's probably like under-reported by like 10x.

• 51:46Anthony Pompliano?

  35 minutes ago is when that was written. And so if that's even remotely accurate, it's a big number. And I think a lot of people are saying it's going to be under-reported number.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is pretty damn sad, to be honest.

• 52:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so I guess as you look at this, like, what are the next steps here? So Handshake, we've got the two weeks where we're going to get out, kind of with the mining capacity. Make sure that that's working. People will begin to come in. The first domains that become available is top-level domains. Those are going to be the less desirable ones, the more desirable, a mix?

• 52:20Speaker 02

  It's actually pretty much equally desirable. Basically, without getting too much into the weeds, you take any name that you want to bid on and you hash it to a number and you take the modulus 52 of that. And that determines which week it is available. So basically, it's completely random, effectively. And each week, there's a new set of names that's available and they're all like pretty good each week. And it's not like a specific set. It's like any name that you can think of, you can go and bid on. It's just at some point along those 52 weeks. So even in this first week, I think like .coin is available. I'm pretty sure that one's going to be pretty popular. There's a few other ones.

• 52:59Anthony Pompliano?

  How many names become available each week? Like a thousand?

• 53:04Speaker 02

  No, no, it's like

• 53:05Anthony Pompliano?

  A hundred?

• 53:06Speaker 02

  So there is like 63 characters, I think, that you can use in a domain name. So I was like 26 to the 63, like the namespace is massive.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Basically, one, like, 2% effectively of any name that you can, any of the names that you can think of are gonna be available each week. It's not like a

• 53:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It's definitely thousands.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, million, millions. Yeah.

• 53:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, wow. And so what happens to the ones that nobody buys?

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so those are just unregistered. So, basically what happens is, until you start the auction process, and you have to submit a specific transaction to start it, that name is just sitting there. And then when you start it, then other people can go, and anyone can start the auction.

• 53:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I got it. So, just because it's available doesn't mean that it started the actual auction. The first time somebody bids on it, then there's an auction process that starts. And how long does that auction last for?

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, the auction lasts for five days, and then there's like a 10-day reveal period. It's kind of like a blinded auction. There's some intricacies to it. We make it easier on the name-based side, but basically you have a blind auction, and then there's a 10-day reveal period where all the participants reveal their true auction bids. And the owner, the winner, can claim their name after that period. So, the entire process runs about two weeks.

• 54:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What name do you want?

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I want, I just want my, my name, Tia Shan.

• 54:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Dot Tia Shan?

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, dot Tia Shan. Yeah, and also dot Regir, my last name.

• 54:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  I try to get, yeah, I try to get tia Shan dot com on the normal internet, and there's like a Chinese company that owns it. I'm half-Chinese. I want

• 54:40Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the name of their company, or?

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like the name of their company. Yeah, so it's just like, ah, they got it. I don't think so. There's a world in which I can get that eventually.

• 54:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah. Just, just tell them that, that you'll, you'll help them out with something.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. I think the best, you know, a lot of the people who are interested, there's this like a new namespace, and there's already a lot of excitement around it. So, you can kind of see like, it's kind of like the people who kind of got into domain name, domain names early on, right? Like, they bought like, you know, airplane dot com or airport dot com, and they sold off like millions of dollars a few years later. So, people are kind of

• 55:13Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a speculating component to it.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is. And people kind of see that potential now, right? It's like, okay, the first time I might miss it, but now there's like a new namespace, and there's like people that are very excited. It's like the crypto dot com era, effectively. And so a lot of people are trying to get in early and reserve their personal name early, right? When it's, when it's still a little bit easier than it will be even six months from now. So, that's, you know, for me, I'll reserve like dot Regir, and I'll, you know, issue domain names for each of my family members. So, that'd be like a really cool thing.

• 55:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you gonna sell them to them? You gonna make them pay you?

• 55:42Speaker 02

  I think I'll just give them like a freebie.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Maybe some other ones, but you know, those are examples where it's like anyone can benefit from that, right? Because like who doesn't want their family name as a TLD? Honestly, for some of like the really popular family names, right? You imagine like .lu, there's like millions, like even like million .lu's out there. So you can like, if you reserve that one, you start selling them. You know, you don't, the amazing thing with this is that normal TLD's take cost millions of dollars to register. First, there's a $200,000 application fee that you pay to ICANN, basically for doing nothing. Yeah, it's absurd.

• 56:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Sounds like a racket.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then there's like this like auction system, so it costs a lot of money.

• 56:21Anthony Pompliano?

  They keep your 200 whether you win or not?

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. Yeah, they've made like over 100 million off of like just application fees. It's pretty ridiculous. But if you think about the cost, that basically what that means is it drastically limits the use cases of these TLD's, right? You need to have a business model that can recoup that cost. However, for handshake TLD's, you know, you can be registering a name, maybe it'll cost 1,000, maybe it costs 5,000. It might even be $10, right? It's like, so it's just determined by the second highest price. And what that means is that if you register something like .lu, you could just be selling all those names for like 50 cents. If you sell it to, you know, 100,000 .lu's, you just made like $50,000.

• 56:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  So it basically just, it's really interesting thinking about all the things that you can do with these TLD's. Once you've basically had the costs of acquiring them and lowered it by multiple orders of magnitude. And we'll get to see what people do with it.

• 57:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe and I both got brothers. Joe, we're gonna buy our last names and then we're gonna, we're not giving them to our brothers for free. We're gonna make them fucking pay us.

• 57:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. All right, before we wrap up, I ask rapid fire questions. What is the most important company in crypto outside of Namebase or Handshake?

• 57:31Speaker 02

  I think Square Crypto is pretty interesting.

• 57:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  They are introducing a lot of consumers to crypto. Square Cash is like immensely popular and I think they're, I have to read the report again, but like they're selling a lot of Bitcoin actually through.

• 57:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah. 100 plus million dollars a quarter.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they really get.

• 57:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm pretty sure that's right.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think so. And they get, they like understand consumers, right? Like if you see their Twitter, like they're really good at like memes and all that. And I think honestly, that's like how things spread today.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  Although I'm personally very bullish on Handshake, I think a year from now, most of the people using Handshake won't even know that it's powered by a blockchain. They'll just realize that their internet experience is better effectively and more rich and more broad. So I think Handshake is probably the most exciting thing, but if I wasn't looking at that, I would say Square Crypto is pretty interesting.

• 58:21Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the one regulation or law you would improve or change if you could?

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the money transmitter laws are pretty, and also like the Bitlicense, like that entire suite of regulation. There's a reason why it exists and it's good for some sort of that to exist, but it also is drastically limiting. Because the MTL laws also apply for virtual currency to virtual currency transactions. And that basically just immensely limits what companies can do. It's a huge hurdle and other countries in the world don't have these laws. And so these other countries and citizens are getting access to this new technology that's really easy and amazing for them. But in the US, it takes an immense amount of capital to even get started and navigate that. So that, I think that changing would open up a lot of interesting business models, even like, you know,

• 59:12Speaker 02

  Cloud Wallace or custodial solutions that would make crypto much more adopted that right now is being limited.

• 59:18Anthony Pompliano?

  What is your most controversial thought in all of crypto? Like something you believe that everyone else would disagree with you on?

• 59:27Speaker 02

  I think maybe not so much a controversial thought, but in terms of what I have conviction around, I have conviction around Bitcoin and I have conviction around Handshake. I don't have conviction around anything else in this space. And that's not to say, that's not to say that those things won't succeed, right? I think as I mentioned, like the history of Silicon Valley is people thinking of new technologies as toys that'll never go anywhere. Or they like laugh at it and then it ends up, you know, eating the world, right? And everyone ends up using it. So when I don't have conviction in something, it's not to say, oh, I don't think, I think it will not succeed. It's just that I don't have conviction that it will succeed and I don't have my belief in that.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  So I think that is pretty non-standard of just having only conviction in those two things.

• 1:00:13Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Oh, there are many. I don't, I don't think there's a single book that I could say is the most important. All right, what are like some of the top ones? What are the few? Um, let's see, I love reading stories about how companies got started. So, uh, founding story of eBay, um, the, uh, the perfect store, uh, founding story of Amazon, the everything store, uh, founding story of Walmart, uh, Sam Walton, Made in America. Those are all really good books. Uh, Nike's Nike founders, uh, Shoe Dog. Those are really good. Yeah, and I, and I think the reason why those books are important to me is because, uh, as an entrepreneur, it's really, uh, hard sometimes, right? Because you have all this, all these bad things happening all the time. You have to deal with it. And it's really hard to see like the light forward. Um, and then so reading those stories, you also get to see,

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  oh, like those people went through situations like far worse than I'm experiencing and they were able to persevere and come out on top. Um, that has been, uh, that basically just helping to build my own conviction is, is phenomenal. The other book that's really good is, uh, The Courage to Be Disliked. Um, it's, it's kind of like a philosophical book. Uh, I, I, I like reading like philosophy and, um, Yep, it's very good. I read it. Yeah, it's very, very good. Yeah, that would be a good book to recommend as well. Aliens, believer, non-believer? Uh, yeah, believer. Why? Um, I think in some form, right? I don't think it's like humans like us or like, you know, sentient beings. That would be wild if there was other fucking humans out there and we didn't know about it. Yeah, yeah. Like, no, I've asked that question over 200 people. No one's said that yet. Oh, really? Like, what if there was other humans?

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, have you read the, um, That would be fucking crazy. Have you read, uh, The Three Body Problem? Uh, that sounds familiar. What, what was it about? It was this like sci-fi book by C. Sin Lu. Uh, it's like a Chinese sci-fi book, but it like was, No, somebody told me, I haven't read it yet. No, no, no. I, I forget who it was, but somebody I think told me to read this book. That's why it sounds familiar. That, it's, it's a very good, uh, book and it really explores implications of if there are other sentient beings, uh, what would happen? Um, not, not really good outcomes actually.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  But that's a pretty good book. But yeah, I don't know. I haven't really researched too much about like aliens and all that. So I wouldn't be able to say. But I think there's probably like at least some sort of like form floating around somewhere.

• 1:02:29Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, that's definitely my feeling is like, if there's going to be contact made, we want to be on offense, not defense.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, for sure, that's a pretty scary idea of like us being the ones that are, what is it, Independence Day, where the aliens like, they're just like coming out of the sky. It's like, what are we gonna do? Right? We're all gonna run inside and hide. All right. What one question you have for me to finish this up?

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. What domains are you gonna be bidding on?

• 1:03:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if I want to tell people. I feel like that kind of fucks it up.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, you might want to keep it quiet, actually.

• 1:03:06Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I mean, like, there's, I would say that there's probably really obvious ones, like, it'd be awesome to own, you know, .bitcoin, right? .crypto, those types of things.

• 1:03:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm assuming that there's not the like .googles, .facebook domains, but if there were, like, I'm sure people will definitely want to grab those to basically screw around with the internet giants.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, the top 100,000 Alexa domains are already pre-reserved for those companies. And actually, that's another conviction point, which is that like, if you make it difficult for those companies to adopt, when they already own those trademarks, then it's just not very going to go anywhere. But every other name, you can still get it. So .crypto is actually one of them that you can get.

• 1:03:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay. And then, there's always like the personalized ones that I think people would want. And then actually, I think that there's, there's a pretty interesting thing around, if people look at this as like a revenue opportunity, right? You know, where's the world going? And kind of what domains fit into that? Well, one of the best stories that I've heard recently about a domain name, so a friend of mine, Brent B. Shore, he was having a conversation with a friend of his, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and they used the term permanent equity a few times. And Patrick went home and he bought the

• 1:04:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Domain. Well, Brent just changed the name of his firm from adventures to permanent equity. He now has permanent equity.com because Patrick had the foresight to go and buy it. Right. And he just gave it to Brent. And so it's, uh, it's pretty interesting how like even in the kind of centralized traditional world, how important URLs are. Right. In these domains. Um, and so when you think about that from a top level domain or a second level domain standpoint, uh, if there is this new name space, you know, it's a pretty important thing for people to, uh, to kind of take seriously and pay attention to.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, the existing domain name industry is worth, uh, tens of billions of dollars. Um, and this is basically.

• 1:05:12Anthony Pompliano?

  People don't realize how much money like, I think like GoDaddy makes like two or four billion dollars a year.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like a stupid amount of money that they make.

• 1:05:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Your 1099 purchase of, you know, whatever stupid.com or dot org or whatever, they made four billion dollars slash or something like that.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it's, it's an interesting thing. And I, I think what's cool is like handshake democratizing that economy and allowing anyone to participate. And basically start their own business and do all that. Uh, it doesn't need to be this obscure thing that a few participants are benefiting from right now. You know, everyone can go and do it. Uh, so that's really personally very exciting.

• 1:05:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Well, listen, where can, uh, where can people find you and find, uh, name base?

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, we're on Twitter at namebasehq. I'm on Twitter at Tashan R. Uh, namebase.io is the place to go if you want to buy HNS or, uh, buy handshake domain names. Uh, pretty much anything, uh, having to do with the handshake ecosystem and economy, we're going to try to build that infrastructure for, uh, so that's a good place to go.

• 1:06:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming to do this. We'll have to, uh, do it again in a few weeks, maybe.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:06:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.