Moving to an era of Decentralized DNS registry

An ambitious public blockchain project is trying to reinvent the process of assigning domain names on the Internet

We are at the cusp of a paradigm shift with Web 3.0 on the horizon — triggered under the influence of emerging technologies of which blockchain is one. The current structure of the internet as we use in the West is the freedom to information access without censorship, but this vast swath of data is mostly lying on servers in physical locations, which are owned and operated by centralized authorities.

Accessing the internet in the current form is pretty straight forward. You type in the name of the website like www.medium.com in your browser and a request is sent to a network of computers called the domain name system (DNS). Each website name on the internet is mapped onto a string of numbers called the IP address (e.g 192.68.210.52), which is basically the address of the server where the website is located. The browser locates the website via the DNS using this IP address.

Now a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol called the Handshake Network is trying to reinvent the DNS name system. Almost a year after the project was unveiled, the project has launched its main net. In its current form, DNS is a hierarchical global network where DNS root sits at the top of the hierarchy. DNS root is under the centralized authority of ICANN — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (A Los Angeles–based nonprofit). ICANN oversees the allocation of top-level domains like .com, .org, .net, and most two-letter country codes (.ca, .pk).

“Handshake is an experiment which seeks to explore those new ways in which the necessary tools to build a more decentralized internet. Internet services and platforms may benefit from building on top of a decentralized system which is specifically designed for resilience against sybil attacks.” ~ HNS website

Relying on single centralized authorities to make internet access decisions like this have been critiqued for creating censorship, apart from being prone to hacking. This is where the project handshake intends to create a decentralized DNS root using blockchain. The UTXO-based blockchain protocol differs from its predecessors in that it has no concept of namespacing or subdomains at the consensus layer. Keep in mind though, Handshake does not intend to replace the whole DNS registry, but to decentralized the DNS root server only.

Handshake’s network is similar to any other blockchain network like Bitcoin with its own transaction verification system and native cryptocurrency. More importantly, however, the blockchain network will keep track of the registered domain names. Interestingly, the top 100,000 domain names are already residing on the chain. If the domain name you typed is not on the network, your request will be automatically redirected to the regular DNS servers.

You can access the network by simply installing the Handshake software suite, which will be directly embedded into your browser. Registering a domain name on the network is a little more tricky — you will need to participate in an online auction using the native handshake coins. In a similar endeavor earlier, a startup called Unstoppable Domains, which builds domains on different blockchains has launched a .crypto domain registry on the Ethereum blockchain.

It would be a big challenge for Project Handshake considering so many other blockchain-based internet naming systems have failed previously. Building a vibrant community of miners and dApp developers and more importantly convincing users to switch to the decentralized DNS would be the key.

You might also be interested in reading about Cloudflare (decentralized redundancy network) and Brave (a blockchain-powered browser).

The latest source code for HNS is available on GitHub under the MIT license.