HandyCon 2025 | Day 3 - Naming infra applications in the Advent of AI - YouTube

Transcript:
(00:08) just getting used to this platform all right hey everyone I am Chango and I'm a longtime contributor of handshake sorry I'm just getting I'm gonna go to my other tab now so the thinking that inspired this conversation is handshake just needs to survive right and and how does it survive so long as we can keep it going it can survive until some event happens and I know that handshake started with the ethos of gifting however to keep your business that is based on decentralized naming alive you need to start earning Revenue
(01:01) there's got to be profitability so now that kind of thinking inspired the direction of my talk which is well what sorts of applications could be informed by the infrastructure that we've built today and and in the f um you know how much Network effect and distribution could maybe one of your projects eventually get so this is is naming applications in the Advent of AI we know we ignore AI um it's here and I am going to assert that most of the applications in the future are going to use AI in some way shape or form so this is sort
(01:48) of like a strategic layout for 2025 and Beyond we're thinking know 10 years 20 years down the line can what you're building today profitable sustain your business so that you don't leave handshakes so that so that in the future when some big event happens know we're all still here building and building something useful some application that many people use and then that's ultimately going to Fest the ultimate vision of handshake where everyone's using a decentralized subdomain so um first of all background is handshake
(02:27) dead so I kind of alluded to this right is it dead well the price action is one story but that's not the whole story The blockchain keeps going just like Bitcoin does just like Dogecoin did just like Litecoin continued to chug along and the Doge case study was such that um there was nothing going on in Dogecoin for 10 years until Elon came along and he thought the meme was funny and he started talking about it and now Dogecoin is worth a lot of money right it's it's one of the few um you know first generation coins that is still in
(03:11) the top 10 it's never really sunk sunk below top 10 right next to next to bitcoin everything else in the first generation of blockchains has fallen to the Wayside below top 10 so this same thing could happen to handshake so long as the blockchain keeps along and blocks keep getting minded then something like that could happen so this is what I mean when I I talk about some like know some awesome event this like one to 100 moment that can happen it hasn't happened yet but it can happen sometime in the future and that's why you those
(03:49) of us building here need to sustain our business to keep the party chugging along so to speak uh the metaphor of handshake being a gun or like a a weapon is I I think I I like to use this metaphor a lot like what is one thing that you don't necessarily need in everyday life but you absolutely have to have if hits the fan and that's a gun right you you you don't want to be able to you don't want to have to use it but when you do have to use it you're damn well you're you're damn well happy to have it right right
(04:30) so that's that's what it is we're we're trending towards I don't know if you've paid attention but we're trending towards more a future of financial surveillance centralization of Technologies right there's there's giant companies doing like running in the AI race the Fang company centralize all your data and then they track you to like very precise levels and they infer your demographic and and what you like and what you don't like and feed you ads specially like suit special suited for
(05:08) your preferences and so all this information that these giant companies have ultimately converge in a future where there is no opting out it's hard to escape and get privacy anywhere without your phone listening to you your computer listening to you anything with a with an internet connection listening to you and so it's sort of a dystopia head it's it's we we need to have this to circumvent certain certain actors in the future that are much much more powerful than than we are as individuals um so
(05:47) it's a dystopia hedge so I'll share with you my macro lens of the world we're currently in the attention econ economy and this is the like capturing and monetizing attention has been the way to get Alpha the way to make money and that has been dominated by influencers people with eyeballs so I think that that meta is about to change and we're about to shift into a new meta where attention is no longer the I guess the the digital gold so to speak it's going to be intimacy and and the reason why I say
(06:39) that is because everyone will have their own AI the AI is learning about you as you ask it questions um and it stores data about you so just just like a friend like a close friend does a close friend remembers things that you like what you don't like what you work on and like all these little little nuances and so once more and more people become dependent on AI it's almost as if you have a pocket boyfriend girlfriend executive assistant employee whatever it it's it's going to know enough about you
(07:23) to have that knowledge about you have as much knowledge about you as an intimate partner does so because it has such precise information about each individual it's even more effective than an influencer it's going to be more effective than the attention economy so now we're going to shift into the intimacy economy and the conversion rate for intimacy is so much higher like think about think about any time you've had just like a candid conversation with a best friend and then you're like oh yeah like this is going
(07:59) on in my life right now or I'm trying to have a baby or whatever and and then your your best friend just happens to have gone through the same experience before and they give you like a cheat sheet they're like oh yeah I recommend this doctor and that doctor to do this whatever or if you want like a you know like a birth in a tub or whatever I know like the right doctor too so the AI will be able to feed you different suggestions based on what your needs of that time is like if you need if it realizes kind of sad maybe recommend a
(08:31) therapist and so now you could fold in eCommerce advertising affiliate marketing into the AI product and it's going to to the end user feel like a candid conversation with the best friend so you can imagine how high the convertibility of that is going to be compared to Instagram or Tik Tok or whatever feeding you advertisements right because the advertisements is you could clearly see that it's an ad even though yeah it it's feeding you stuff that you typically like but the AI you're not even most people are just
(09:07) going to forget that that that's the case and they're going to think oh well my AI companion is actually genuinely looking out for my best interest so I am going to see the you know check out this list of five doctors that it sends me and I'm going to go there so that's how iny is going to be monetized and the Tam for that is really really big I'm using 276 billion as the current Tam of like the entire advertising Market but that that Tam is only going to grow bigger in the future so where's the
(09:40) opportunity well these these these five these five these five I guess tablets are some ideas about like these are the existing infrastructure that we have now ai companionship being one of them with your pocket girlfriend Co pocket boyfriend that's something that I'm bu I happen to be building right now decentralized names we have that right now right AI filters vtubers privacy preserving content creation advertisement crypto wallets that are going to be managed by your AI executive assistant some sorts of applications
(10:17) could be in tourism could be in being an EA obviously it's going to be powered by Google but you know no one's going to have to go to Google things again and and what I alluded to ads hidden in Daily conversation so the way that I believe we should monetize names in the future is so if you look at the ens model the with like selling subdomains as like te's and like launch your token off of it that's that's a really 2017 meta as in it's it's old it's the past and I don't think it's the best way
(11:00) of scaling decentralized names and distributing it to the masses right like the people who hold ens names are still very very Niche um they're part of like a like a subgroup within a subgroup and so it's not really widely adoptable and therefore it's a thing of the past and it's hard to compete with like regist and and uh companies that are in the traditional domain space right so I don't believe really that selling tlds or selling subdomains themselves is really where the big opportunities are I
(11:37) think it's going to be that needs to be distributed widely and freely so if you have one TLD let's just talk let's just say do Cosmos and that's what we're going to talk about after I give this presentation if if we that the cosmos Foundation has that and then it distributes it for free to like a subdomain for free to like everyone in the cosmos community it gets wider distribution but that acts as your access point it acts as your single sign on or or Gateway into the destination application that they actually want to
(12:11) get into and the destination application could could be anything it could be a Pokemon game it could be the AI companion or any of the applications that I previously alluded to and so the upell after you distribute the premium model would be to sell subscriptions or some service from your destination adver sorry your destination application and on top of that if you have like an intimacy AI or like some some other EA like service oriented AI you could fold in the advertising that I alluded to before so these are some just some ideas
(12:51) to inspire you to to to think about yeah and that's it that's my that's the end of my presentation and I I hope that you walk away from this getting some more like business ideas going so that you could keep your business going for the long term hopefully hopefully you can start keep generating revenue for the next 10 to 20 years right until Elon tweets about handshake in the future or whoever yeah so if if Magnus is here unless he's not so I wanted to bring Magnus up here Magnus is the he he's
(13:28) running he's one of the people running the cosmos Foundation right now the entain foundation and interchain Foundation is currently talking to D3 D3 is a kind of web 3 Web Web Two web 3 bridge and that registers names I can you know some of you must with it he's coming up in a minute just so he's chatting to us okay yeah yeah and so they they are registering Cosmos with I and with with the with cooperation from the ICF um all Cosmos naming systems are already integrated with handshake and so that will Doos will be integrated with
(14:12) handshake you know Doos as well yeah and and probably we'll do some kind of Premium model like I mentioned and for the better distribution and then hopefully all all the layer One Foundation names uh hopefully can be can be integrated with handshake and then we'll have we we'll finally do the do the Dane thing and bypass what is it TLS yeah so yeah that's my presentation if you guys have questions um please go ahead and ask them in the general chat and Magnus you were waiting for him I think he is here but there's just
(14:57) some setup oh here's here he's here here okay great all right hey Magnus I'm very sorry I thought this was EST but it was PST I'm sorry I should have clarified yeah all good is there anything I can be helpful I'm sure you gave a great presentation but is there anything that I could add on oh so I just gave everyone the download about what's going on with do Cosmos that D3 is working to register.
(15:30) Cosmos with Ian and there's some integration with there's going to be some integration with hand the handshake docos so that there is no naming collision between the I can one and the handshake one so so we've had to in the past there there are a few cases of naming Collision uh and that got re namely being music so there was there was the owner of Music great guy I met him in person and helped him resolve that conflict and so one the ICF once the ICF is the holder of Cosmos um it can integrate it once the do Cosmos name on I can gets registered which by the
(16:10) way it's that's going to be like probably at least like a fiveyear minimum ever because you're working with Ian by the way gotcha yeah what's that said hopefully I'm still alive in five years yes yes let's I I hope you will be I know I will be yeah but let's let's I hope you'll still be alive from all the all the work at the ICF you're doing yeah that sounds great yeah I mean hey everybody I'm Agnus I work at essentially the cosmos foundation and we've been building
(16:47) Cosmos technology and trying to build this open version of the internet since roughly 2017 when it when it first came out um we are when Chango mentioned this idea I thought it was really awesome I mean I would personally change all of our domains to at the foundation level to Cosmos and even at the labs level which which are I think at minimum 10 to 20 websites I thought that was really really cool idea and it's funny because we have basically our own version of ens in Cosmos which is done by stargaze so
(17:19) ens is sort of like domains in crypto but we have a cosmos there already but it would be great to link those to real sites people are yeah yeah stargaze has their handshake name and so so actually their their names are completely resolved with with handshake so there's there theirs are completely on chain so they don't have like an I can portion and same with icns the interchain name system with the what Kepler built they Theirs resolves to almost well there's so they oh yeah they do synthetic tlds so they do osmo do
(18:04) like whatever like name your Cosmos layer one but it's not actually I don't believe it's actually uh like it's it's it's more of a like a yeah like the synthetic simulated TLD that's right yeah whereas yeah whereas whereas with what D3 is going to help help us do is actually register with Ian but again that's a really really long road map because I believe they actually closed the the applications last year so it's like it takes a few years for them to even open it back up I see Goa yeah it's like one
(18:45) of those thing there the the Ian web 2 world operates in decades right they're like they're like sea turtles and and we're like we're gonna we're g to die by the time you open your applications up yeah makes sense well I will be around for that I'm very happy to help yeah can you share what the latest conversation with D3 has been I think having Nico explain some of that or CMO would be really helpful I think from my perspective it's not been my focus area recently but as far as I understand he's
(19:23) the one that that is managing that relationship and I could probably give you a yeah I could probably check with him and give you sort of an update yeah okay sure okay we could take questions from the audience if you guys have excuse me if you guys have any questions yeah otherwise I think we we've gotten the point across yeah by the way Magnus the unit of account on handshake is called dollar dues I see I see very cool I like that we should come up with name for a unit of count single unit Atomic unit of a cosmo of a atom yeah yeah
(20:06) something better than U atam at a minimum U at yeah I know you yeah okay well I mean okay we we'll we'll collect we'll collect questions yeah okay how do I can I like okay well anyway there's a Q&A tab I don't know if you see it Al sorry I was just gonna read it yeah Alex asks do we believe that every AI agent and girlfriend will need a unique identifier like anld that is a good question have you thought about that mag how much have I thought about AI girlfriends well hopefully not too much since I my actual
(20:48) girlfriend would be upset about that but I I think it could be interesting I don't necessarily know that they will need them I think the unit of identification could be in multiple different places right so you could imagine within a domain you could have a bunch of sub specific names for the actual AI agents and you wouldn't actually have to have like a specialized one necessarily I think this is actually a place where crypto is really good right because like for example in stargaze you you could you could
(21:19) register these without having to go to Ian each time or or create separate full web two domains and and I think I see that starting to happen a little bit but yeah I mean giving more identification to AI agents I think is something that's going to be coming up in a very big way in in in web 3 yeah now that I think about it it does make sense that like why why not like why wouldn't an individual agent have its own subdomain you know and you could you might even in the future be able to query a specific
(21:57) agent that's I don't know good at a specific task or if you just wanted to talk to it because it had some like little personality Quirk or something you'd be able to you be able to query it based on a subdomain why not we should build that definitely possible yeah Al you are applying to the do Cosmos G General TLD with the goal of bringing the web 3.
(22:26) Cosmos to web 2 I I wouldn't say that's the goal I think the goal would be to basically create a native domain for our ecosystem our ecosystem is pretty vast it has over 150 blockchains included inside of it uh it has over hundred billion dollars of real money secured on top of the technology in in Aggregate and I think the goal would be to what we say our goal is and what I do believe is what we are trying to create with Cosmos is an internet of blockchains right that's the that's what how we frame it and the idea is for that
(23:01) internet to be a lot more open and competitive with the traditional internet and to have it be user owned and much more censorship resistant and have these properties that we believe are really important for the future of of humans and so I think in this case it's like really giving that internet that internet of blockchains an a internet identity in web to right so that it feels more native that folks can identify that they're on this other internet right the centret of blockchains and I think the fact that we
(23:33) have a cosmos already on web three rails in Cosmos is just a reflection of that right like people love the identity of Cosmos they want to use it they want to use it personally they want to use it professionally for their websites but we don't have the ability to actually host things there so I think what we try to do is connect the two right so if you have a doc for example I'm Magmar doc Cosmos that's my that's my domain like I could connect that to a real website right right now I own the website me or
(24:03) I own the website mn. us which is like my name but I'd love to switch that to something that that reflects sort of where my professional career is and things like that asks so you applied for Ian you applied Cosmos for Ian we did touch on that a little bit oh like like that domain specifically I can.
(24:26) Cosmos or no no no no no do doos application on like yeah ni would be the best to speak to that just in terms of the status of that application yeah so so I had I had spoken to D3 last I believe it was last year or maybe like towards the end of 2023 and they they were they were pushing me they were saying that okay well like the registrations are are closing right it's it's like it's like a multi multi multi- layered process like the first part of the process is like like there's an application just to like open an auction for a name and
(25:09) that was that and then once once once there was there's interest for a a a domain name then then they open up the options like bidding and everything and and then it actually gets registered so like in that period typically 10 years lapse he lapses so so so we actually missed the window because during that time it was the previous leadership at the ICF and they were unresponsive that's and then and then now like the conversation is going but then we have to wait for the application window to open up again and so I I don't
(25:54) know when that is but from what I understand I think the next window opens up in about three years maybe two years from now because the year had elapsed okay okay yeah that answers Santiago's question what's the estimated timeline to get a do Cosmos name okay pencil domains asks Cosmos as a suggestion should handle any subdomain as a name under. Cosmos imagine pencil.
(26:24) Cosmos would exist as pencil. hns.com domain in traditional sites did you think about it what I think about it sure yeah I I think it just depends sort of what people would want in this case and personally I mean my uh my recommendation here would be to sort of try to as an ecosystem co-opt the cosmos pure domain I'm sorry domain and basically make it feel more native by just doing what something.
(26:58) Cosmos and having that Association build which would require like a lot of investment a lot of folks to use that domain so a good example of this right is money so money was not really a very popular domain name I think it sounds a little bit like overly commercial or something but it was used by the Tera ecosystem and of course Tera didn't end well but they all used that it was Tera money and every project within it we named money and the but the result of all that was people feeling like Ah that's like our native domain name right and I think
(27:34) when you create that it's really cool that ask this the same Tech as stars on Cosmos or the osmo one from Sunny they're both similar both are domain name Services built on top of Cosmos rails in that in this case they're competitive right stargaze and the osmo one compete with each other as far as I last checked or or when I last checked the stargaze one was generally more adopted and but but the technology is quite similar they use the distributed Ledger of the blockchain to basically code a least parameter least
(28:09) parameterized loan for for a certain essentially domain name and then they have a smart contract there somewhere that that basically stores who who has rented what yeah and the the the stargaze one is integrated with handshake so they can resolve websites um they can it's just not like officially registered on I can and I believe I believe the the icns one the the osmo one from Sunny um I believe they also own osmo on handshake I I don't recall if it's integrated with handshake just yet they they've got they like their primary
(28:59) thing is uh Kepler it's it's built by Josh and Tony from the Kepler team not not Sunny from osmosis John M mckone asks could I create some dually functioning web 3 identity by leveraging between my handshake name 9ja Cosmos and registering nj. Cosmos sure you you would have to create that link right so I suppose like you would have to sort of register both options and then I guess it would just depend on the the nature of the link right so for example if you wanted let's say messages forwarded to
(29:37) to something to then be passed to the other or an email from one to to link to a website which then links to your web three domain all those would be possible Magnus I have a question in the future once the ICF has the handshake docos domain and let's say it's fully integrated with our our name ging stack would someone with would a user need to duplicate registrations or would they just be able to go and buy a subdomain off of like I don't know like ICF or whatever or like get a subdomain from from from ICF and
(30:17) just go from there yeah I mean probably the way I would do it is the the initial custody of the domains was with was with the ICF then um probably work with the provisioners of the cosmos domains already in Cosmos in the web 3 form and basically say no work with them to say something like okay if you have this.
(30:39) Cosmos on stargaze or on Kepler or whatever then we'll just give you free access to the the cosmos one that is the web to equivalent that's what I would want to do yeah so that there's some continuity and it's not people the ones that they they know that other people will want like that that's probably how I would structure it yeah that makes sense there yeah John mck asks where does cosmos have potential for technical integration evm brc2 BRC 69 s token 2022 I know some of those the there's a lot of stuff going on with
(31:22) Cosmos I mean Cosmos is a is a stack to build blockchains on top of right it's the most used blockchain stack in all of crypto and what some we're adding some things to it that we think are really special so very soon we'll be adding our own canonical evm deployment so that you can build a cosmos L1 with an evm on top and deploy solidity smart contracts and things like that in the future we want to add other BMS too so big one that we're chatting to the salana team about isvm and basically our goal is really to
(31:56) make the stack as customizable as possible and to as extensible as possible which means being able to integrate with everything you may have heard of IBC or use IBC that is the ability that is the the the bridging standard that all Cosmos chains have to transfer tokens to and from other blockchains we are actually adding a new version of that very soon in the next two weeks which will enable IBC to connect to ethereum natively that's what we call IBC or so these are the I'd say the two the e the Focus the evm plus the
(32:30) connection to ethereum right now is is big for us is IBC Eureka built inhouse or is that what polymer is building that is built inh house so there's only one IBC team and it's the IBC team at the ICF as it has been since the creation of IBC uh and IBC Ure Builds on ibcb 2 which is a modified protocol spec that enables native IB to extend polymer Union ax these are all folks that sort of built third party bridges that resemble IBC but are not IBC themselves yeah there sh what about Toki the one that they're building the the
(33:15) one with between ethereum and BNB chain I'd have to take a look at it I haven't I haven't looked at that one too closely there yeah there should be I don't know there there should be some kind of like IBC extensibility with like all the people building different flavors of IBC right I I I mean there can be flavors of IBC but IBC is not is a specific protocol right like when you say IBC it's something it's IBC right it has a certain code implementation it has a certain set of security properties and
(33:52) what we found is folks that build extend IBC they can extend IBC but oftentimes with additional work and additional implementation details and additional security assumptions so that is sort of what we mean by they we want to protect the IP of IBC because it is an specific implementation and if everyone called themselves IBC and one of them got hacked and reflected on the actual IBC protocol then that would be challenging right because IBC itself the actual protocol has never been hacked ever in over four years um and so that's why
(34:28) folks that say oh we're IBC forx that doesn't resonate so much for us because you're a bridge right you're not IBC uh but maybe you have an IBC like implementation yeah okay all right migs you're up seems like you're kicking us off I would never do such a thing but the agenda does have to go on I think Andrew Lee is here to hop up next so I was mostly checking to see if that was the that was yeah thanks so much Jango and Magnus you can just turn off Mike and Cam and you'll move off stage but
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