Could look you in the eye.

You're just like an Angel.

Skin makes me cry.

Slow like a fish.

And I'm beautiful.

I wish I was special.

You're so very special.

I'm a creep.

What the hell am I doing here?

OK, if it hurts.

I wanna have control.

I want the perfect body.

Wanna play with so?

Now.

When I'll let her know.

You're so very special.

Yeah, I wish I was there.

What the hell am I doing?

Most.

Roy.

Ohio.

I said.

Whatever makes you happy.

Whatever you want.

You're so very special.

Yeah, I wish I was special.

Man, we're crazy.

I said.

Hello.

One more minute.

Comma.

I agree.

Song.

Different change of pace.

What's up guys?

WAVY how we doing?

Yeah, very well, champ. I think the most anticipated space of 2023 or 2022. My bad.

He's already in 2023. That was a great, great opener. Hilly Reinhardt, cover head of Ravi. Cover of Radiohead. Nick, how are you? It's great to meet you. Nice to finally chat with you.

Well, thank you. Good to be here.

Love it, love it. Thank you so much for joining us. I can't tell you that this has been the topic of so much discussion over the last few weeks. And I mean everything comes from passion. I mean, people are, I mean, I've seen at the end like the only other place I've seen passion like this. If you see my PFP, I'm part of another community. It's the VC community. And as a fellow Kiwi, are you familiar with the with TV comedy and the Dan and Dave and those guys and what they're doing? Nick?

By any chance?

I'm afraid I'm really not sorry.

Ohh OK, but I hear you are a Star Wars fan. Is that correct?

Ohh, you know I I enjoy most geek media. I if if you want me to weigh in on Star Wars versus Trek, then I'm going to have to abstain.

Ohh no, no, we're definitely not gonna go down that rabbit hole. But what I did want to tell you is that is the one place that you will find the premium digital collectibles. It's licensed IP and TV actually has a license with Disney Corp. So all of the brands that fall under Disney, right? You we have Marvel. I mean, I mean every not every Star Wars character, let's be serious. But we have Boba Fett, we have Vader, we have tie fighters, we have lightsabers, Yoda Skywalker.

It's pretty awesome so I would definitely suggest to check it out, cause Weinert out pretty much every day so it's pretty awesome.

Cool.

All right. So here's kind of how I kind of want to run through this. If it's cool with everybody. Nick, we have you for 90 minutes. Yeah.

Uh, yeah, I think so.

Beautiful. Alright, good stuff. So here's kind of the way I kind of want to run through this. Like I don't we don't have to make it. So business like you know what I mean like I I like running these spaces because I think it's really important that we we we humanize like certain individuals and situations, right, to realize like like we're all kind of going through this together. Everybody kind of plays a very, very similar role in or rather some everybody plays a role within the ecosystem.

Whatever you know intensive that role is yours obviously has the most effect when it comes to obviously being a founder of this thing. So the way I want to kind of let me just lay out the agenda in terms of like what we're doing here kind of and kind of what we're going to go over. So I'd love to start off you. Obviously you give us a brief intro on you kind of give us your background if you don't mind. We can then get into EN we can then get into the Ethereum naming service to start we can talk

True name, the Dow, the structure. After that we can maybe go into one of the biggest topics I think is I think the information that you know that the Dow is putting out. How we actually do a better job or how can we work together to potentially get make sure that that information gets down to us here at least in the in the Twitterverse. From there maybe we talk about some harberger taxes.

That was definitely a big topic in my Sunday office hours a couple of days ago.

And I I just really want everybody to walk away. Like today. Being like that was a great space because we got to humanize Nick as a human being. We see that we're all in this ecosystem together and we're better off working together than we are being shouting heads on on Twitter, completely disagreeing and misinterpreting text messages. So if y'all are good with that WAVY, that that sound good.

Yeah, absolutely perfect. Yeah.

My man Nick, that sound good to you?

Yeah, sounds good to me.

Beautiful, so give us a brief intro on you.

Sure. So uh, I've been a software engineer for going on 1516 years now and worked at a variety of companies, most recently prior to to working in the Ethereum space at Google. And I got involved with Etherium back in 2016. And oddly enough, a recruiter for like a financial firm contacted me and said, hey, do you want to come work for us on etherium? And I'm like, no, but this etherium thing seems.

Interesting. And started playing with it and got more into it from there. Next thing I know I'm being offered a job by the Ethereum Foundation, working on initially the Swarm team and they needed some sort of naming service. That was something that already interested me because I've always been interested in DNS. I've been you know, the first thing I noticed when I joined a theater in community was how terrible the UX is around sending things to wallets and so forth and and Wallace dresses. So I

Initially is basically a side project at the F and then it became basically my full-time project. And then the EF gave us a really generous grant and spun us out into our own organization. And I hired some of the community contributors who had been helping get it going. And it's sort of gone from there, like up and up.

Gotcha. And how? How old is he NS at this point?

Uh, five years, give or take.

Yeah, sure.

Gotcha. And so I watched your, your keynote and in Bogota and I thought it was, I thought it was great. I mean, I think the, the presentation that you kind of gave was really awesome in terms of kind of how far we've come. And maybe kind of, I know that as much as I tell people, hey, you guys got to go watch that. You guys got to go watch that, nobody really goes to watch it. But can you maybe kind of give us a synopsis of ENS because like kind of like how you did on stage there, where it was li

I don't remember all the stats offhand, although I can pull them up pretty quick. They basically you know.

That we've reached about 2 1/2 million names registered and a million NS accounts and a million accounts that have interacted with the NS at some point and you know things continue to go great guns on that front you know we continue to see increasing adoption. So it's it's you know we EE's initial start was productive but fairly quiet. You know we we had a lot of time to work on engineering when you know we had sort of 50 integrations and.

You know, and and you know, 100,000 names or whatnot. But then recently all the work we've put in has really been paying dividends. So in fact I now have the stats here and we're up to.

3 two and a half million registrations, 1,000,000 users. Like I said, six and a half million years of name registrations are being made, and the Dow treasury is about 38,000 ether.

Wow.

That's a big jump from where it was, from where you came. I remember those numbers. It was literally.

Yep.

Those are insane jumps, so yeah, so.

Hmm.

However, in regards to when you said, when we talk about like the work that we're doing right in terms of like the Dow, like and sorry, like, I'm coming from a very novice perspective. I'm four months in here, right? So I apologize if they're super rudimentary, but I think it's important to kind of dumb things down sometimes. How many are like are there, like how many devs are working, how many projects do we currently have going at at any given moment, integrations and so on. So we can kind of

Umm, so you know the we've sort of got two things to look at there. There's the ENS labs, which is the organization we run that, that does most of the sort of intensive act of software development for unions and we're up to about 12 people, full timers and a few sort of part time roles. And then there's the day itself, which of course by its nature is a bit harder to Misha. We have three active working groups. We have numerous subgroups.

Under those, I think year to date, the Dow has given out grants totaling about. Let me just.

Chick that.

Uh and UH-400K in grants for the last quarter, which includes funding the Protocol Guild to help fund core DPS on Etherium, Get Queen Grant matching pools and grants for, you know, smaller projects aligned with the unions or aligned with the wider Dow ecosystem.

Got it. So I don't want to be here too, too much because I think we can maybe address this down the road, but I mean later in the conversation. But in regards to like the grants and and like who priority, like how they're prioritized and like where the grants are going. Are we mostly focused on like or is the Dow rather mostly focused on internal integrations or most of the resources of in terms of grants going there or are they going towards like newer initiatives from like community members an

Like a what's the split?

So the in his labs gets funding from the Dow to the tune of about four million a year. That's like an ongoing grant stream and that's all the funding that TNL sorry we were formerly called true name summited. I'm still getting used to the name change that that's all the funding we receive. So the remainder is you know everything else is, is the Dow giving grants and funding projects you know directly itself and we've seen some some pretty cool stuff like you know.

Somewhat predictable, but still relevant is uh, sign in with the thorium through spruce and they've continued to, you know, to break ground post down and things like Karma have built plugins for the forum and so on that that can be used in any DAW to provide more insight to participants, show showing like how their delegates are performing and what they're voting on. You know, all all manner of of things like that.

Got it.

Now in terms of that, so let me kind of get like I kind of want to walk you through kind of like my experience like and kind of how it went. I'm not gonna draw it out, but I think.

Hmm.

I I'd love to kind of hear kind of how you view it cause I heard how a couple of the other like stewards viewed it when I approached an I I was just asking questions in regards to like how is the doubt maybe we start there like how is the Dow structured because I feel like you know I've only been in in in the in the crypto NFT web three sphere for just under two years right. But I come from a financial background so I feel like I have a decent understanding. But in terms of Dallas obviously that

1000 kind of how whether like the voting is structured and so on. Is there any way to give us the the, the, the quick version or the like the the simplified version of how the Dow was structured to where we can maybe easily like process it or understand it?

Sure. So, so basically, you know, Dow, the Dow is ultimately governed by votes determined by the, the DNS token, the UNIST token was given out as an ear drop to Ennis users, you know, last November. So we're coming up on a year now. And because it's impractical for everyone to to be informed and vote on every single proposal, people generally delegate their votes, you know, using a built-in mechanism to people that they believe will represent their interests. So we have.

A large number of delegates, you know, in the top ten makeup, you know enough to to sort of reach quorum. But we typically get a lot more than that participating in each vote. And so some stuff is decided by direct down votes, but that's also still fairly high over here. You know, you don't really want to have to have a vote of the entire Dow in order to approve awarding like $1000 bounty to somebody who built some called integration. So we have.

To the delegation there in the form of working groups. So we've got three working groups, ones focused on the NS ecosystem, ones focused on public goods as a whole, so, you know, building things like Dow tooling like Etherium itself and so on, and one focused on meta governance, meaning improving the doll itself. And those are three working groups are appointed on a by yearly basis, as in twice a year by votes from the entire Dale, and then the, the.

Working group set 3 stewards. Those stewards are appointed and they run those working groups between elections effectively. And it's up to them to request a budget for their operations from the Dow again down wide vote, and then decide how to use and spin those. And they're ultimately accountable to the Dow, but they don't have to consult them on every single decision.

So when they request funds, do they like is that based off of what they're seeing, off of what the community is needing? Like how is that decision like how does that decision made for the stewards like when they requesting budget?

Pretty much, yeah. So the the stewards will will look at the initiatives that they think are important and you know that might be might have been what they campaigned on you know would have become a steward or it might be just based on you know previous stewards terms and what worked and what didn't. So they'll see for instance there's a need for you know X amount of grants for for you know improving the units tooling they might identify there's some particular thing that needs to be built and t

The Umm, the ENS ecosystem budget included, sorry. The metagame budget included line items for improving proposal automation and so forth recently, because that was a big enough thing that it warranted its own item. But then Ian's ecosystem and and public goods have a line item for sort of small grants, rather than trying to enumerate every single thing that could possibly need a grant.

Got it. How? So I have so many questions in regards to everything that we just talked about, but I'm going to work my way back. So in regard. So let me ask you this simple question. How do you, who, how or who rather, let's just say who do you view as the ENS community? Like where do you see the ENS community being right? Like obviously we're one facet here on Twitter. Where do you think the rest of the ENS community is or are we literally talking about because we're decentralized, like we're ev

Hmm. I mean there's definitely, you know, it's kind of trivially true but there's definitely places where people gather more than others. And I think Twitter is a major one. Although lately a lot of the Twitter activity I see around the East has focused on clubs and name speculation and so forth, which, you know, I don't have a problem with. But it's it's I sort of find my home more in the developer end of things. We have a discord, which is pretty damn popular and then of course we have the Del

And that's where all of the governance discussion takes place in a fair chunk of development discussion as well.

Got it. So if you're saying that Twitter, like if I guess if we because I, I view it as well, I think Twitter is a powerful, powerful tool. I think it's the probably the loudest tool. I would 100% agree with you that a lot of the times like what we're talking about out here is pure price speculation. I think it is our responsibility as a community to educate ourselves and be able to answer, you know, basic questions. When newbies do come, when people do come and ask us like simple questions. Som

Very seriously, where like I should know how to answer certain basic questions, but what role do you think the Dow should play, the steward should play in regards to when they're because if they're requesting funding, right, like are they talking to the community? Do you get that sense that they are, do you feel they have, I don't know, obligation, but like do you think it would be like like prudent of them to kind of just like touch base and be like kind of immerse themselves a little bit in th

Yeah, it definitely like, it depends a little on the scope. You know, so we have the small, the small grants rounds they run once a month and you basically put up a proposal for here's how you'd spend it or here's what you've already done that deserves it and off you go and that sort of thing, you know, it helps to be part of the community, but the expected level of engagement is, is fairly, you know, fairly small. On the other hand, if you're approaching the Dale because you have this massive,

Will enhance the dower enhancing anius or enhance public goods in general and deserves you know $2,000,000 of funding. You're going to be a lot more successful if you take the time to engage with the community and and you know show them your proposal has merit and also take feedback and and use it to improve your proposal than if you just kind of come along and rock up and be like hey you know here's our very polished PowerPoint deck you should give us $2,000,000 you know we've seen both version

And you're a lot more likely to get your proposal funded if you can show that you've really engaged with community on it.

I like that. I like that, that that's definitely a good sign. Obviously like emerging with communities a huge deal because I think that's where you're really going to get the pulse and kind of the beating heart of really like what what people are saying.

So I also want to talk about we we we really touched on obviously ENS tokens and and when you mentioned like delegates.

Can you give everybody, I mean as much as I can give it to, sometimes I get a little too technical, but in terms of ENS tokens, how many were airdropped, how many are still in the Treasury and what are the future plans for the tokens that are in the Treasury?

So the.

The distribution upfront was was pretty straightforward. The, uh, the Dow received 50% of the tokens, the AirDrop was 25% of the tokens and 25% of the tokens went to to pass and present contributors to the protocol. And almost all of that was was locked over a four year unlocking period including most of the dowels like 90% of the dowels allocation. And so the Dow still has very nearly half of the.

The leanest tokens and they've spent some you know they've allocated some to projects. You know where they've done things that are aligned with ENS. There are no immediate plans for sort of large uses of the tokens. You know, undoubtedly that will come in time but the we, we really try to draw a distinction. You know the Treasury as it is contains funds that have been collected from from Eunice name registration fees and it contains Dale tokens and the RIB.

Kitchen really is that the funds collected from the fees are what we should use to pay for things like grants and development and so forth and the.

The ENS tokens are basically used as a way to give a governor a say in governance to organisations and people that are well aligned with the US values. So if you build something that you know that enhances the dowel, like the the, you know, the the forum integrations or the grants proposal tracker or something like that, you might get something in its tokens in addition to compensation for your work because you've shown that you're well lined with the Dow that you're wanting to make it.

Data, and therefore you should have sort of a voice and where it goes I should I do stand corrected on one thing. We did give out a fairly substantial ground to beginnings tokens to the Protocol Guild which are going to be used to, they're going to be sent to core developers who work on you know, etherium based infrastructure and so on.

Protocol Guild that's internally like within the Dow.

No, it's an external effects. Their goal basically is to get commitments of tokens from a large number of projects that build on top of on top of etherium and use those tokens to you know to to compensate developers of core infrastructure like you know etherium clients and so on to sort of recognize that what they do is an impact on the success of all of these protocols and therefore they should ever say in them.

Got it. How many tokens did you say that was?

Roughly.

And it worked out to yeah, hang on, let me.

I'm going to have to look that up.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, and I don't worry. I'm not gonna hold your feet to the fire if you're off by a little bit. If you don't know it, don't worry about it because it trust me, I know how it disappear. Sometimes people be like no, but he said 3,912,056.

Umm.

So I know, yeah.

Yeah, 200,000 units tokens.

Ohh wow. OK.

Umm.

100,000 NFL and those and that protocol Gill is essentially worked. Is it freelance? Where are they? They're working full time on integrations like sorry if I missed it even doing one more time.

So, so basically they approached um, Ernest, they approached a bunch of other organizations including you know, swap and have and so on to solicit grants and the native token. And then those tokens are given out over a vesting period to core developers of death and you know, all of the Ethereum clients and and other base layer infrastructure.

So.

Got it. And is it just that like it's the Ethereum ecosystem or is it other EVM compatible change by any chance like are you guys making any like an effort like on on that front or is it mostly like just focus on the Ethereum chain directly?

Yeah, so there's, you know what we, what we say typically is Ionis is the Ethereum name service, not because it's only for etherium, but because it's built on etherium. And so there's two ways we support other chains. One is that you can use the NS to address resources on other chains so you can point your DNS name at your Bitcoin address or your Dogecoin address or you know Solana or whatnot. And and the other is the the off chain resolution support we're building with something called CIP read

Host their ENS names and records off chain, including, you know, the L Twos, any external system you like such as even a centralized database, side chains, and so forth, with no additional trust requirements over what bridging to those chains would typically require.

That's amazing. I like that.

That's gonna end with my life.

Yeah. And it's, uh, that's already being leveraged by Coinbase, for instance, for the CB dot ID usernames and other projects are working on it as well. It's been gratifying to see it being picked up with such equity.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah. So let's talk about Coinbase for a second because I I really, that's a super, super interesting use case. How is Coinbase using like ENS? Obviously there's no daddy, that's CB dot ID. There was in my opinion there's the good and the bad, right? It's like you got 8485 million potential new people that are going to be exposed to to ENS. But on the downside, it's like, is it really the decentralized component of it, are they really taking advantage and are they benefiting from the best that t

So yeah, they're they're current integration. The way it works is.

They giving everyone CB dot ID usernames which work as Native DNS names anywhere in this is supported, uh, you know, using those new protocols CIP read requires upgrades to the wallets and so forth, but it's already supported in common libraries like ethers and and it allows them to hand that out to everyone at 0 cost to the user or to them per name. Currently they're doing that by hosting it all on a database they control, but.

I know they're actively interested in moving to storing this on an L2 of some kind, and we're working with them on that because they're, they're strongly committed to, you know, maximum possible decentralisation. And I've been quite impressed. They could have rolled this out and be like, Yep, this is how it is, you know, you know, you, you trust us with your funds, you ought to trust us with your name. But they're actually really committed to making this, you know, in a truly decentralized solut

Umm.

Have they? Have they seen a decent amount of adoption like since implementing it like? Are people actually registering names?

Yeah, I so I can't recall off the top of my head whether the figures are public or not, so I can't share the numbers, but what I've seen has been truly impressive.

Wow, OK. That's, I mean, look, that's great news.

Yeah, they, they are seeing a lot of adoption, yeah.

Uh.

I like that. I mean that I mean look that's great and that's the first I'm hearing of it, right cause I've never really heard Brian Armstrong come out and say like he's committed to the the the whole aspect of like decentralization so that that that's interesting. So like when when you integrate a client like Coinbase, right, is there ongoing support that needs to happen that that the Dow needs to support or have staff enough to to be able to support Coinbase or is it protocol to yours and kind

You have kind of more more the less I like you know we've worked closely with them, you know to help them them integrate this then by we I mean mostly in his labs, but they have an extremely competent engineering team. They understand the protocol well by now. And so a lot of it has been just you know US consulting about what the piece, what the best design is that works well with the NSA and so on rather than having to you know hold their hand on anything. So naturally there's always a bit of l

Large integrations and any of these labs and the Dell. But really you know the protocol is well designed and documented. It can be mostly hands off.

Hmm.

Yep, Yep.

Got it. And if I remember correctly on your in your Devcon keynote you talked about how the protocol not the protocol so much like it was the app that pretty much got like an entire overhaul right in terms of like new features, usability, mobile friendly, how we looking on that front and and how we looking on timeline for the name wrapper and we're going to get to that in a little bit, but how we looking?

So for the front end, uh, it's it's live on the girly testing it right now, it is a little bit dependent on getting the name wrapper on my net before we deploy the app because a lot of it's new functionality is based around not just the name wrapper, but also contract updates that we've made that themselves depend on the name wrapper. And so in terms of the name rapper Timeline, it's already been audited. It's also live on girly we have identified thanks to the the public testing.

One or two more issues with the the code that needs to be remedied. And so we're actively working on that now. I think we're still very much on track for getting it out on main net and to Adele vote for for all the improvements before the before Christmas.

Hmm.

Got it before. OK, so that's good context because I feel like we've been saying like I like, I personally been saying cause I've been hearing like oh it's coming next week, ohh next week, next week and I'm like wait what? When is it coming?

Yeah.

Yeah, please.

And yeah, so, so funny story if you permit me, but.

The name rapper started its life as an improved sub domain registrar's you know the the goal being that it was specifically for registering sub domains in a trustless way and our our the the lead of our front end team Jeff Lau had wanted to sort of broaden his experience to include back end development and I said oh here's a great like first Solidity development task. You know right this this new name wrapper it should be fairly straightforward and then we got part way through and we you know wh

This out so that you get you know all of the functionality you need in the base contract that isn't that gradable and then you can build a name wrapper on top of it without having to lock your name permanently into one one implementation you know this is way better than just a name wrapper because sorry than just a sub domain registrar because if you do that you basically you know you pick a solution and you're stuck with it forever because if you could take it out you could sort of rub your use

There's lots of design space to explore here. There's lots of subtleties about getting it right and making sure that the way it behaves is intuitive to people because you know you need to be able to form some sort of mental model about what it's doing to your name.

And So what was supposed to be like a simple first solidity task has turned into a solid 18 months of smart contract engineering, and the result is going to be good. But I feel a little sorry for GF having like dumped him in the deep end there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's super interesting. Yeah. It's like, it's almost like, oh, no, what if we changed this? Oh, no, no, wait at this. No, no. But we could do this. We could do this. I could just see that like the way that that that that's kind of rolling out. But no, that's really good context. I appreciate that info that that definitely helps give me at least like a better picture before Christmas, not too far off, right. Like. So I think everybody can kind of recalibrate right now and just be like, OK and t

And use and familiarize ourselves with what the like everything that the name wrapper has to offer. Is there actual content like that has been created or or or anything around that matter for us to be able to educate ourselves as like let's say the Twitter community?

Hmm.

Specifically about the name rapper, the best we have at the moment really is the audit docs that were well put together for the the audit and they describe sort of how it's intended to behave and therefore you know what orders should be looking for. But we don't have, we don't really have user facing documentation for it yet. And part of that is part of the reason for that is that.

Ideally like most of us, functionality is going to be hidden behind a much more user friendly front end. You know it won't be like here are the fuses that are currently sit on your name. It will be you know the owner of this name has revoked these permissions, you know they can't replace your sub domain, you know they're a human user friendly explanation and and that sort of stuff isn't quite ready yet.

Yeah.

Got it. So I and this is where I find it super, super interesting in terms of how your view, like what you interpreted what I just said versus what I kind of meant it to mean, right. It's so funny because I'm thinking from the most simplistic standpoint like if I'm new coming into ENS, it's like how do I know what the name wrapper does. It's like, OK, I could talk about burning fuses all day until I'm blue in the face, but it's like what else can I like, what else can I do? So what would you lik

Well, First off, let me ask this question. Do you agree that there is a gap in terms of like either information being created or disseminated from kind of the ENS labs and the Dow down to let's just say us here in the Twitter community?

Yeah, I think that's fair. Like there's sort of, there's two tiers of communication here. Tiers is the wrong word, but two, two different types of communication. One is developer communication because there's no point in building something if nobody understands how to use it. And one is end user communication. And I think with work for there's room for both us and the doubt on approval on both of those. You know, we, we recently hired our first developer advocate, Luke Van Kampen, who's been doi

Umm and uh, you know, his job is basically to communicate with developers better, but we still need better user and communication as well. Someone who can take the technical changes and improvements and communicate them clearly. I think probably the the person doing the most outstanding work and that area at the moment is probably daylon, who is maintaining the the NS newsletter and he summarizes each each fortnight's ENS happenings into an easily digestible.

You know format that is is understandable by end users.

But we we do sort of lack you know ongoing communication in some ways and on the non-technical aspect other than that.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah, shout out Dylan. Like for real. He did. Like, I like that's the one that's the go to piece that I, I look at like twice a month when he releases it. So like big, big, big props to him and everybody to doubt newsletter. So how would you envision it? Like it like what? What would be like? Because it's one thing for us to be like, like it's one thing for anybody to just be like, hey, we have a problem. Like we're not getting any information, but then it's also like, all right, well, how do we

Case scenario be what would you like to see happen?

Hmm, I guess.

Like the the the staff Dillons doing is is really valuable as a as a status update type thing. So you know there's sort of two ways you can divide up the sort of info. One is event based so you know here's what happened in the last fortnight and one is sort of state based like you know this is what what is available and this is what it does and this is what's planned and this is how it will work. So better like better structure of of user facing docs and.

These are sort of more focus on keeping those up to date with the latest happenings. So there would be a page which is like, hey, the name rappers coming and here's what it means. And that would be kept up to date with current developments rather than just being, you know, a blog post that's immediately out of date.

Yeah, yeah.

So when you say user docs like be a little bit more specific for me because I think user docs, I think instruction manual and like instruction manual is like, really? It's technical to me.

Yeah, so.

And sort of more speaking about, you know the the if you go to the, you know the about page on your typical thing, it'll give you a description of the protocol and it will drill down to, you know, more detailed documentation on what it is and how it works and that sort of thing.

Copy. OK. So this is what we discussed. Like, because I figured out that that's kind of the way it was. And this is what we discussed the other day when Alicia actually launched, she like, like surprised to me, like she launched like a total AMA, like out of nowhere. And I was like, Oh my God, this is great, let's get in there. And to her credit, huge, huge props to her. We gave a ton of suggestions that were like, in there. I mean, I was throwing. I mean, I know personally I was throwing everyt

Wednesday, is this gonna be kind of like, can you tell us a little bit more about the town hall, what it's going to consist of, what it's going to look like, and do we plan on making this a regular thing?

Mm-hmm. Yes. So the the primary goal of the town hall basically is to give the Dow and the Ethereum community as a as a whole or sorry the Inest community as a whole insight into what in his labs has been working on how it's going you know status updates basically. So you know it's a presentations and Q&A from everyone yet and L sorry again everyone at beginning slabs and and you know how we're getting on and what and what we're up to and and what to expect and.

We should definitely speak this to be a more regular thing, you know that that sort of presentation to our our funders sort of thing.

Got it. So would you guys be open to kind of like, I, I'm, I'm really big on this concept of like managing up. Right, right. It's a matter of like the people that are on the ground that are dealing with the day-to-day like, yeah, then you guys might know everything's on the protocol, but there might just be different nuances and instances that come up where it's like you always want to hear from kind of like.

The ones that are using this everyday, right? And obviously when we're not talking about price speculation, we're actually building stuff and actually doing like like stuff to move this thing forward instead of just speculating on price. But would you be open to including either one person, a few people and kind of like giving the Twitter community like a voice within that? And I know it's not your decision per se, but like would that be something that you would you endorse?

You mean people from the Twitter community speaking at the town hall?

For the yes.

And I think, yeah, I mean as you say, kind of not my department, it's, it's Cory, our executive director who's who's organizing the status updates.

I think it, it would depends. Like it could muddier, but the purpose of the town hall being, you know, an update for me, any slabs to the community. And you know, one thing we want to make really clear is that like we're not the entirety of the community, so we don't want to create the perception that we do everything, you know, and that this is all us.

Got it. Yeah. No, that I definitely understand. And the reason I ask is like, I was part of, I mean I've been a part of a bunch of different organizations from really small to really big. And what I found is like during the town halls that we used to have, it was the CEO, right, like giving everybody the updates and it was also like.

Like from sales like individual sales Rep like brand new, like rookie sales Rep all the way up to literally CEO, CFO and we're all kind of gathered in one place and I think that really builds a sense of community in the sense of I don't even want to say communities. I feel like that's just used so often. It's culture, right. I feel like because like the Dow is not really often referred to as like like a business. It's we're we're lacking kind of like the culture or the cohesiveness because we're

They're more prone to kind of just hang out with the people that we know. So I think if we step out of our comfort zones a little bit, I would love to. And who did you say was Corey?

Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah, I would love to chat with with Corey and kind of just discuss like how we can maybe make it work because I think when we, when, when every department, I guess per se, if you want to call it right. I know that I'm getting business references, but when, when, when every facet of the community feels like they're involved. I've just based on my experience like I feel like it's just that much more productive when we get so much more done when we're working towards a common goal together.

Yep, that's a fairpoint.

Cool.

Alright, I just want to take a quick second. I know there were 45. Wow, that was a quick 45 minutes. Holy cow.

Hmm.

Quick 45 minutes. I have to review this e-mail because I did. We are going to.

I'm gonna give out the secret word. We do have like a commemorative poet that we wanted to give out. I feel like this is a pretty commemorative occasion. One of the members of our Community Meta 888 big shout out, he did the art design for it and collabs was actually the one that sponsored it for us. So that was super, super awesome naked. You know that like our etherium names literally have a one of one unique algorithmic sound.

I can. I can certainly imagine you could generate one from it, yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty freaking cool.

It's really, really cool. Some of these novel ideas are just so like, it's amazing, like really what you can do. But I did want to take a quick second. I do have to check kind of the PO app e-mail out because apparently like I might have messed up the date because I had to put it in UTC time, but WAVY.

You want to kind of go down what's it called oh real quick actually for everyone that's requesting to come up give us until around like 610 after six or so, 610 after 6615 ish and then we'll let her like we'll let you know a bunch of people up if you guys want to ask questions or you know anything that you wanted to comment on from from this session. But I kind of wanted to we spent time gathering information from the community and I kind of want to get into it. But wave do you want to maybe sta

Wanna start that? Maybe harberger taxes. Nick, you good?

Yeah.

All right. Good stuff. Maybe you want to maybe start down the harbinger taxes and kind of let's kind of open up that can right now.

Yeah, I'm Nick and thank you for everything so far. And one of the topics, obviously I'm hearing the open discussions regarding Harbinger taxis.

We obviously we're discussing proactively the impact that this would have on us both you know, squatters and or builders and what what have you. So some of the things we've been discussing is potentially things like incremental increases based on maybe 5 or 10 year periods. Yeah, where were there any insights or anything you could share with us if there were any further developments?

From that conversation.

I mean, I guess I think you know my my own personal position hasn't really changed from what I what I expressed in those threads and posts with italic which is.

I I think that the the ENS has to prioritize secure ownership of names above the above everything else. You know the the if somebody wants to retain a name and, you know can pay whatever the the recurring fee is, you know, which should be predictable and bounded, then they should be able to retain their name as long as they they continue to want to use it. And my worry with all variants of harberger taxes is that somebody sufficiently.

Motivated, you know, financially motivated and with enough money can escalate the cost of of retaining the name that maybe, you know, you acquired and you built a reputation around in. Your users are depending on you to steward properly out of control and and unbounded to the point where you can no longer afford to hold it. And when that happens, when it changes ownership, the consequences can fall disproportionately on other people. You can imagine a situation where someone owns say wallet dot

And then because it's now a big brand and and really visible, the price gets bit up and they lose control of it. Whoever obtains it is going to be in a position to you know to to mistreat the owners of the subdomains potentially. And the original owner has no control over that. You know, they've got no ability to to prevent it and the costs fall on their users. You know, they got no income from operating lists, but the users are the ones that pay.

Yeah. And then maybe also if there was any change likely to happen that would only impact kind of forward.

Uh, uh, forwards kind of actions on ENS.

I assume that would be the case, right? If there was anything likely to be implemented in terms of Harbinger?

Yeah. So the, the way the ENS dot Etheridge history is constructed, once you've registered a name or renewed a name, it is 100% secure out to the date that you've registered or renewed it to. There is no action that our can take to revoke or restrict that name in any way. They also can't prevent you from transferring us and so forth. The Dow does have control over new registrations and on renewals like they can choose what the costs are, they can choose what the terms of those things are. You kn

Through something to say prohibit all new registrations and renewals of say three letter names and you know, which I think is extraordinarily unlikely, but if they did, all the existing names would continue to exist. There would be a period during which anyone could renew their names for as long as they liked before the new changes came into effect and they would only be able to affect things going from, you know, from then on. So this is a really important limitation on the day's power and sort

Bringing in Harbridge taxes, uh, you know, the new rules could limit how long you can register for, but all the existing names that were registered for, you know, however long you like, and any names registered during that that you know, period when it was being voted on and decided on would retain their existing rights indefinitely.

That makes sense. So it's almost like grand they're being grandfathered in, right? Sorry, go ahead. You have a follow up.

No, no, no. That was absolutely perfect. I mean that was one of the questions whether any future actions could have any retrospective impact on obviously what we already have registered.

Hmm.

Yeah, that was. Yeah, I feel like that that definitely gave some clarity because we were talking on Sunday, Nick, about the Harbinger taxes and one of our community members, Army dot death was ultimately like, we got to find the balance, right? It's like, how do we find the balance? You're never going to please everybody, right? So it's like what is the ideal scenario? And I guess let me just ask you this plainly, like, do you feel that like right now we're in that ideal scenario? If not, like w

To get to that ideal scenario.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. So. So no, I don't. You know, I think what we've got now is the best approximation we could come up with so far there are.

A couple of things that bugged me about the current situation. One is that the registration fees are set not exactly arbitrarily, but based on sort of best guesses. You know, they're, they're pegged in U.S. dollars, which requires an external Oracle. And they're set based on, you know, sort of our best estimation of of what's required to to keep, you know, squatting and speculative registrations to a same level so that people have a good chance of registering the name they want without having to

On the secondary market, but it feels like there ought to be some kind of feedback based mechanism for pricing names as a whole, not individual names, but the the whole market that reflects the relative scarcity of different types and lengths of names and that you know more fairly encapsulates that without being easily manipulable and without relying on an external U.S. dollar Oracle. And I guess the second thing is like maybe there is a better way to do name pricing in general that you know.

That isn't necessarily the the month that the, you know, regular renewal model, but is better than, you know, the other obvious model of register once and and keep forever. Because that leads inevitably to stagnation where every good name is locked up forever in lost wallets and and forgotten wallets and, you know, people who are sitting on it speculatively forever because they think someday it'll be worth something.

Sounds like me and you have a very similar problem my friend.

I think.

Hmm.

Yep.

I think, uh, you want some better, some feedback on maybe some better pricing mechanisms. I think that the Community can definitely help give you color on kind of what we're seeing, why we're seeing it, what people. I mean, I'm seeing some crazy stuff out here. It's like people that are registering to extend by a day or two just to be able to get there. So it doesn't go into the grace period like all the way up to. I'm registering this thing for 100 years like nobody's got touched this thing. Li

Like, but we have to start start that conversation. So let's, let's figure something out. But obviously like let's let's talk offline. Let's figure something out about how we can help each other. Like really get the feedback to one another right. Like. Like I think it's super important.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm like I ideas are very welcome. And I guess my only caution in general is that naturally there are a lot of participants who have different goals out of beginnings. You know, different people are going to want different things and that's going to affect what they see as a as a good proposal. And trying to thread that needle and find something that works the best to make sure ENS's long term sustainable and serves the purpose it was built for can be really tricky thing indeed.

Yeah, slippery slope. What's up, WAVY?

Hmm.

Uh, yeah, just kind of relating to that and new user registrations within ENS and Nick, is there anything that you guys are looking at in terms of maybe a suggestion engine, um, because obviously naturally trying to discover new names and what have you and just help users get what they want for that first time experience. And yeah, a suggestion engine in terms of what's available, I think would be really super.

Hmm.

Before and do you have any thoughts on that?

It's not something we're actively working on, although I've heard about one or two, you know, secondary marketplaces working on something similar. It's I I wouldn't have any objection to such a thing, but it's not on our road map at the moment.

Umm.

No.

So those secondary marketplaces, can we talk, let's talk about them for a second, right? First off, doing a little bit of research, talking to a bunch of people. Did DNS used to have a marketplace like way back in the beginning? No.

Uh.

You probably what you're hearing about is the original auction system, which was how names were originally registered, but that was a primary rather than secondary marketplace.

Gotcha. OK. OK, that makes sense. That makes sense.

For those who aren't familiar with the terminology, primary means effectively buying it off US. You know, names that weren't previously registered, and secretary means buying it off other participants.

Uh-huh.

Hmm.

So are are you guys are you looking to enhance? I I know obviously like the app has gotten like a really complete overhaul, but are you looking to to offer some of the features that some of these third party sites offer like a bulk registration, you have guys obviously already offer bulk renewals. Are you looking at maybe some of the features that they're building and maybe thinking about incorporating some of them as well on app dot ENS domains?

I think like our main focus is on what helps our our target users which is individual users looking to and and companies and so forth looking to acquire names that that represent them that you know that they have direct use for. So we tend to praise less priority on building features that just on things like bulk registration and so forth and more on usability improvements for people managing individual names. And I think that the the market as it is does a pretty good job of handling those othe

With things like Ennis, vision and so forth filling that gap rather than us trying to be a be all end all for for name registration and management.

I agree. We've actually had one more question in regards to ENS vision. Obviously now we have domain plug that's going to be launching also this coming week. If we think about this right, like do you see like any of these like secondary like marketplaces?

Causing an issue like are you working like directly with these like with these marketplaces like I guess what? What kind of relationship do you have with these marketplaces, if if any at all?

Not a not a close one. You know we've we've been in touch with the devs of most of them. If they've had questions we're very happy to answer them. We don't have like a close you know that Channel with them you know and and basically we're very happy for them to exist but it's not our own focus. So you know we're happy to to help on a technical basis but but haven't had an opportunity for sort of close integrations.

I mean, they can determine really how people ultimately end up looking at ENS, and they're not even names, right? So I feel like they play a pretty vital role.

Yeah, wait.

Hmm.

Yeah, it was just kind of relating to the, UM, additional functionality or managing off individual domains. And Nick, would you be looking at potentially having any beta testing programs that we can opt into and where we can help provide feedback, you know, if we're really individually championing and maximizing all of the features that EMS has to offer?

That's a good question. And so currently you know we have the new version of the app in alpha, but once that is out on main net, I can definitely see some value in allowing people to opt into things that might be a little less polished and ready for the mainstream so that they can offer feedback. And that's something I'll bring up with thieves.

Great point.

Thank you very much.

Any question we have. Great question. Alright, so in regards to wake poet person, no, not yet.

Not yet, not yet, not yet. OK, so.

Let's kind of I don't want to pivot too much. I don't know if I wanna go the unstoppable route or the dot ETH Ethiopia route. Let's go the Ethiopia route real quick because I think it's it took me a minute to really understand because I am the least techie. Go figure. I know everything there is or a lot of whether it's know about how block chains work but I can't figure out like resolving and and like the the dot names and I can. It's really all confusing to me and I heard you obviously address

You know we're typing in, you know they're ultimately showing results for for like 0X wallet addresses, right?

Are you working with like how does that actually work I I generally don't know like is that something that you have to work with Google for them to now start indexing some of these sites like like Ether scan, is it ether scan specific? How is it working and what are we going to see in the future and are you are you I don't say hopeful but do you see like the dot if names ultimately like showing up in search results on on a Google browser.

Hmm. So there's the sort of two routes to to widespread inclusion in existing systems like that. One is what would effectively be doing so far, which is getting individual integrations, browsers like brave, you know, individual support and apps like etherscan and so forth. And that means that they can fully and directly support, you know, the NSA's unique features. But it is also, you know, a bit of a grind to to get adoption everywhere. And naturally it runs into questions.

About, you know, legitimacy of ultimate naming routes and and who they want to support and what their stance is going to be on on this. And of course it gets all political and everything. You know, we've nevertheless made some pretty great strides in that direction, but it is very much a sort of a retail one at a time way of doing things. The other solution would be if we could get dot ether added to the global DNS route, then we could operate some sort of gateway that makes the DNS data availab

All the existing legacy systems would would integrate with it immediately. Uh, you know if you can serve up DNS records from from dot ETH. You can visit dot ETH sites via this gateway in any browser without any special plugins, without any, you know dot link or dot limo at the end, etc. You can send emails to it, you can you know, use it for your logins. You can. You can do everything with it that you can do with any other DNS name.

Getting there is very much an uphill battle. There's sort of. There's two main routes to that. One is I can who are effectively in charge of, you know, the global route for the most part, but the full answers, but complicated could decide to make that heath available to to ENS. The only realistic way they would do that is via a.

An option of sorry, sale of new top level domains which they last operated all the way back in 2012.

And they would basically have to, you know, choose to make it available and then choose to accept our bid on it. And then we would have to operate it in accordance with Icann's rules, which say things like you know, you must adhere to the uniform dispute resolution process and if somebody commits a trademark request, you must process it and if necessary take the main offline. And which has, you know all number of complicated issues with with how that would interact with the units as a whole.

There's also an open question as to whether I can would actually put it up in the 1st place because dot ETH, as many of you will know, is the three letter ISO country code of Ethiopia. And so far there has been a mostly informal agreement that no three letter country codes will be allocated as top level domains. You know, in order to preserve them potentially for those countries, no country actually operates through these country code as they're dying. They're all the two little ones, but they'v

So the other option would be to approach Ethiopia and say we would like you to delegate dot ETH to us you know right letter to I can or the ITF sorry the OR Ariana and say you know we would like these people to we we claim you know our right to dot Ethan we would like these people to operate on our behalf.

And the the that's not necessarily guaranteed to succeed because it's kind of unprecedented. You know the delegation isn't unprecedented but actually using the three data country coders. But if it was successful, it would mean we could basically operate it with Ethiopia's consent under our own rules, we wouldn't have to worry about the DRP. We could basically do whatever works best for for units.

And so both of these routes are pretty speculative and and you know worth investigating but but difficult to achieve.

They give you neither an Ethiopia delegate like I will gladly lead the delegation. Just send enough smart people, right?

Take it.

They could speak the language, but like, but in all seriousness, like is this actually being explored, right, because it's like, I mean dream big like, why, why, why shouldn't we go after this right like this would this would really transform. I mean I don't say everything but a lot, right like are we actively like pursuing these angles?

Yeah. So, so in terms of the I can route, there's not much we can do until I can decides to announce they're actually, you know, releasing new TLD's. In terms of the Ethiopia route, you know, I have been in discussions with people who who have connections, but it's still very early days.

Hmm.

So are is there a not a fear, but like a worry that maybe a large institution, a hedge fund, some Wall Street clown that heads up a hedge fund, literally takes a ton of money, goes to Ethiopia and says, hey, I'm going to give you all this money, give me that dot ether, a competitor, right. Like, I mean it's got to be something to think about.

So yes, I mean, it's it's, it's a possibility. But I kind of view it as a slim one. Like if Ethiopia asks to delegate dot ETH to us, it's far from guaranteed, but I feel like we have a much better chance than anyone else by virtue of having already demonstrated a sort of a credible claim to dotties.

The I can is not a big fan of alternate naming systems you know despite the fact that we've worked you know to to make sure ENS embraces the traditional DNS architecture and is non disruptive in that regard and they're still kind of skeptical of us and even more so of other ones. But they see I think they are higher goal is ensuring the stability of the Internet and it would not be hard to point out to them that allocating duties to anyone else.

Would definitely have a big impact on on that, you know, whereas giving it to us they might see as a risk because we're new and we're weird and so on. Giving it to anyone else would definitely be inviting disaster.

Like what? I'm so how, man, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but I'm so curious, like what is the fear? Like, what is the downside of giving it to us, right? Is it fear of retribution from some of the other like Fang companies? Like what? Like what is it?

The so I can is quite conservative and also committed to their approach of managing names with things like the DRP and and so on for settling disputes. ENS runs counter to a lot of that. You know they we we don't observe the DRP. We we have a different view on the trade-offs between the right to name ownership and and the right to brand protection and so forth.

End it I guess further also just the existence of the units kind of threatens I cans like sole responsibility for the DNS route. You know they they see us as in some ways a computer and we've been at pains to point out that that's not the case but we are seeking to extend not replace DNS but they're actually very conservative and some and to to some degree that serves them well. You know they they asked you adding one of the most important.

Foundational pillars of the Internet. But in some cases it means I think they they reject things reflexively.

Hmm, I just got an amazing question and I hope I'm reading this the right way and that the word handshake actually means handshake and it's not some software but somebody just wrote me. Is 1/3 option via using a handshake being realistically considered? That's such a great question.

I know it.

So handshake is in fact another naming system and it is yeah sorry and it is kind of an Annius computers up it definitely and I can compute it like if you wanted two opposite approaches to to the traditional Internet. I I would argue that handshake and DNA are at you know we seek to extend and improve it by by adding you know our smart contract functionality and and the new capabilities that NS handshake basically wants to.

Place I can. And so they're issuing new TLD's of their own on their own system based on, you know, their own internal auction thing. And they are pretty much directly at odds with Icans ownership of the Internet route.

Handshake did reserve.

Are they gaining traction or are they gaining market share?

I mean they, they have some traction you know, there's a, there's a thriving community of people trading them and so on. But in terms of actual adoption for real utility, I think it's pretty limited at the moment and.

I mean, my worry is that is the same thing happens to it that's happened to many other previous attempts at, you know, new domain systems, which is that they get overwhelmed by speculators who hold on to all the names and hope they'll be in the hopes they'll be valuable. Which makes it impossible for anyone who actually wants to use it to obtain their name that's meaningful to them and therefore is sort of a self defeating prophecy.

So one of our attorneys says that she believes that they actually have the dot ETH though.

So handshake our reserve dot ETH for ENS basically you know did didn't give it out as option.

So you know, in a world where handshake wins against ICAN, ENS would be in the top level directory I guess.

Ah, OK, all right everybody, we got to start preaching the handshake gospel you heard.

That's amazing. That's amazing. What was I going to say? OK, I'm going to check this pop stuff again. I hate this stuff, man. I messed up the date. But I want to talk about unstoppable domains. Like, I want to take a pivot wave unless you have anything else in regards to, I know that this was a very, like, lengthy conversation for us in multiple Twitter spaces to the wee hours of the morning. But if there's anything you want to tackle, I don't want to move on until like, you know, maybe we feel

Yeah, I'm, I'm thinking maybe for some of us builders out there are kind of level two of our ENS journey. So if I kind of describe level one as that the registration frenzy and kind kind of wanting to secure our domains and what have you. Some of us are at the the level 2 stage and as part of that discovery of wanting to build websites for the first time on our Earth handles, I'm wondering.

Umm.

Are you looking at potentially simplifying um some of that build process that maybe having a native will web builder within the ENS app tools and or kind of simplifying the the fleet and hosting requirements and because it is quite a it can be quite a daunting daunting experience even for a technically savvy web two guy.

Well, speaking specifically of being able to put up a site and host it on IP face with an ENS name.

Yeah.

Uh, yeah. So although it's possible today, just wondering if there's kind of there can be any native integration on the ENS side of things.

Yep. So it's kind of you know given the size of of AES labs and and our focus it's not something we can work on directly in the foreseeable future. But it is something I know at least a couple of other orgs are working on and is something I think we'd be keen to to integrate and to to support because I think yes being able to do that in a seamless way without you know any of the the technical hurdles isn't I mean that's the whole point of the NSA isn't it, to not have to deal with.

Long machine readable identifiers and manual configuration and all that stuff. So I think it's going to have to be a third party doing some of the lift. But if somebody comes along with a credible, you know system like basically WIX for the decentralized web, then we would be enthusiastic supporters.

Super. Great. Thank you.

Awesome.

All right. Let's talk about unstoppable. How do you view unstoppable domains? What are we thinking? Are they active competitor? And yeah, what's I guess, what's your overall view of of unstoppable and just maybe like the landscape overall?

I mean, I guess, yeah, I'd rather speak about the the overall ecosystem, which is that personally I view the reason the Internet succeeded in large part was because it was not operated by a single for profit company. You know, the the Internet was built out as an interconnection of networks because it served their users to do that. It's governed by a collection of, you know, of nonprofit or unincorporated organisations like I CARE and Ayana, the ITF. Funny how they all seem to start with.

You know and and basically because of that the Internet developed into into what it is today rather than some sort of like intrinsically paywalled closed off toll gated system that would have been effectively impossible to use in a practical way. And I think the fact that the you know the naming system on the Internet was also open was a really essential component of that. I don't think you can have a for profit company squatting at the center of all name.

Registration and extracting rent and expect to build a system that is open and fair to everyone. So you know those of our competitors that are doing that, I kind of view them as they've seen this successfully and they've seen the promise of decentralized names and their ultimate question was how can we make a buck off it. And they tend to lean into the heavily into the the whole speculator flow and trying to sell people on this as an investment whereas we're trying to build infrastructure.

I can't tell you how I resonate with that so much. It's like, enough with the speculation, stop like throwing Wall Street money at something and being like, OK, we can do something really similar. And all they do is find a very, like a widespread pain point, right from all of their potential customers. They exploit the hell out of it, and that's how they, quote, grow. It's just so annoying. Like we're actually building something here, like this is. So let me ask you this question. Where do you s

And so I've always had like a three stage vision free. And yes the the first is that ENS integration should be the assumption. So if you're using an app or a site or or whatnot and it asks you for an address, you should naturally just assume that you can enter an DNS name and it will work and be surprised if it doesn't, you know. And in the early days of course that was very much not the case. I think we've.

We're pretty close to to reaching that now. You know, most apps supporting any spy default and it's usually a fairly safe assumption. You know, there's there's still work to do. Obviously. The second goal has always has always been for me that end users shouldn't have to see a theory images or PDFs hashes or any other blockchain address in their everyday lives at all anymore than they see IP addresses or or, you know, Mac addresses or anything. Those are internal things that developers deal with

And we're still a long way from that. You know that we have the infrastructure, we have the technical capabilities for it, but you know the the the ecosystem isn't there yet. So that's something I really want to focus on in the next years is getting to that point where people are like Oh yeah, I hear there's this other way you can name a wallet and that's what they use internally, you know, rather than that being the default.

And then the real stretch goal is like and he says used to name everything you know ENS based naming is used for you know everything DNS is used for today, extending and enhancing and replacing it.

You know the the basically your fridge hasn't in his name is is as one of our developers puts that. And the route to getting to those last two goals is you know in in large part it deals with things like our work on CIP read, which makes it possible to host DNS names off the etherium chain without giving up the security guarantees that Etherium brings. So that's going to make it possible to issue names to everyone in their fridge rather than having to pay transaction fees for everything, and it'

Integration.

Got it. OK. So I know that we're at around 6:15, Mark. I'm going to get these popups. Just watch, you're going to see, I'm going to get us these popups. Just be patient waiting on one final e-mail. But please, everybody that has requested so far, I think we had about like 6 or 7 requests till now. Feel free to request and come back up. I know they might be 1 offs and it might not be what we were on now. I just kind of wanted to keep the conversation going. But Nick, if you're good, I have a coup

That I'm covering. Otherwise I'm not gonna be able to go back into Twitter spaces ever again.

So normalization, right when it comes to all these different things, right? Like I have to, I have to talk about it, I'll have my head when it comes to normalization, right. Like what is the process behind it? How do we determine what is, what is or isn't normalized? And I got a whole slew of questions on emojis, but I'll narrow down after you after you tackle the normalization question.

Mm-hmm. OK, so. So a bit of background probably helps. Like what the hell is normalization and why does it matter? The most basic version and and all the DNS originally needed is the that nick.com with capitals should be the same as nick.com with lower case. You know, it would be hideously confusing if you could register every variation of capitalisation of the name and so the most basic version of normalization is just a lower case. Everything but thanks to Unicode and the world.

Taking 200 odd languages, we have a lot more than that to deal with these days. And so normalization starts to have to deal with questions like, well, what does it mean to have lower case Chinese characters or lower case Arabic characters? Um, what other changes are necessary for each of those? You know each of those languages representations. And then further like what other things have to be done to to ensure that if two people into what they think is the same name, they get the same result. S

There are characters that look functionally the same but are encoded differently and so that ranges from the trivial like you know are in looks like in a lot of fonts. You know, lowercase L looks like uppercase I. And a lot of fonts that we simply sometimes just have to learn to deal with all the way to the esoteric, like the fact that, you know, Unicode has like 20 different symbols that look like a dot in the middle of the line because they mean different things. You know one is like a Braille

Like a, you know, printing character ones like a numeral and some number system and so forth. And so the goal of normalization is to to make decisions there that are sensible so that if you enter a name it it resolves to something. That is what you meant, which is a difficult task. And ENS initially used something called UTS46, which is the standard that internationalized domain names use on the Internet. And it's a pretty good starting point because it was intended for something very similar to

Yeah, but it's not necessarily complete because we want to be able to do things like emoji that a lot of traditional domain names don't permit and therefore hasn't seen a lot of attention. And in some areas it can be a bit inaccurate. You know, they, the designers of it, either haven't paid a lot of attention to it or the the Unicode standard has evolved since it was specified, and there are languages and scripts where it doesn't do as good a job as it should. It permits things that it shouldn't

It prohibits things that it should allow and so forth. So big area of work with. With Raffi, who's been spearheading this, he's a community contributor, is developing a new normalization function that has hopefully a minimal viable set of changes from UTS 46, but helps with all of this. And so it will. The new standard will prohibit more deceptive names that could currently be registered but really shouldn't be registerable, like names with invisible spaces and so forth.

It will allow names that were they busted but shouldn't have been, such as certain emoji names and you know, certain character seats that were marked as as unusable. And it will in some cases chain zation of names to to be better suited so that you know, names that should work out to the same address work out to the same name too. And that's a big task and we're not going to get it perfect first time. But the goal is to have a new standard that's better with well, well having a minimal impact on

Illustrations.

Ohh.

Makes sense. I mean I I know that I've paid enough tuition on invisible characters and some of these artifact projects like Linaje and Heather ID and you know I'm diving into these knowing full well what it is right. Like for me it's like they're mostly like art stuff and it's like not so much competition but man people are like and big shout out to my guy OVR who is who's in the listeners right now we got so when you know the term degen right like we got so degen one night that we were spotting

Don't think I'm not even kidding. Like, that was the level of, like, Oh my God, this is so ridiculous. But no, I think that's super, super important. I have some emoji questions, but I want to be respectful. Norman, thank you so much for being patient before. Yeah, you got a question?

No, I just have a comment.

Excuse me?

It's nice to hear Nick, after years of chatting with him since 2016, I think it was when.

He used to have that. I forget where, where it was on line names and something.

And uh.

I think we did the first transfer of 0.0123 E from one name to another and it didn't work and Nick got online and changed the code and then it worked. That was crazy days back then, but I think I have to congratulate NFL champion for bringing up the two issues right in front of neck that that I've always even back then talked about. Like the one mistake I thought he had made was was the 8th because it was already Ethiopia and.

Hmm.

If it could have been something else you know, we could all have our domains now and on the on the ICAN whatever. And then the other one was the unstoppable because that was the other issue I kind of complained about. And the pricing and the of the yearly pricing I see WVY he's paying 600 bucks a year and I'm paying $12.00 a year for my threeletter.com domain. So I didn't like that either. But Nick is a genius and what he's done is amazing and.

My hats off to him and always has been.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. That's all my comment.

Thank you Norman. That was really cool. I was like ohh because I guess a host. I'm just like alright, it's Norman natrol. Is he not? Is he going to blurt out something crazy right now? I gotta have my trigger finger ready yet. And I'm like, oh, OK, this was awesome. Thank you Norman for not being a troll. That was actually a really cool story.

Really really cool story. Thanks.

Can I just tell you another one, NFL champion?

Please please.

OK, I I'm 78 years old.

And my mother's in the hospital right now recovering from pneumonia. She's going to be 100 next month. In her wallet, she carries the tag that was put on me when I was a baby 7878 years ago. And the last three numbers on that are 337. When I saw that on your on your Twitter thing, I'm like, I got to talk to this guy.

Wow, that's crazy.

That's crazy. But you know what I I've yet to update my banner. I just sold it two days ago. I've yet to update my Twitter banner. So it may be somebody else that you would want to actually go after. But man.

Yeah.

No, I don't know. It's just a coincidence, you know, my my cell phone ends in 337 as well. Just a lot of things.

That's so crazy. This. I mean, those are daily occurrences. Like in my web three life. I got to be honest, like literally daily occurrences.

Yeah. Go ahead, nick.

I I didn't say anything.

Ohh, sorry, sorry, my fault. Uh my headphones died for a second. But yeah, normally feel free to chime in man. I love stories like that. Like those are the feel good stories. I love the feel good stories. I hope your mom gets better soon man.

Novax. What's up, man?

Yo, hey, thank you guys for doing this. Nick, thank you for making yourself available for this. Very, very cool. I'll just quickly show you I have crown emoji. Nick, Dottie, we should talk. You are the king. But hey, I wanted to let you know I have posted in the forum, you know, on ENS the discuss forum a few months ago and ASA had responded to it. It was kind of a a commentary on non Ethereum ENS address fields and the need to kind of start.

Filling those out and using those because it's kind of you know ENS and it's in it's you know the record itself is it's just a text record right. I mean so the idea is that in order for wallet services and providers to start using that they have to see the the user side demand. We need to be people who are saying I got my dose and Bitcoin and my other addresses here and I would love to be able to use XYZ wallet service to be able to.

Have those resolved correctly? So I feel like it's kind of like a catch 22 sort of a situation with that where we might want to have special events where we really promote people filling out their record with their other addresses and identifying those wallet providers and others that might start building the tools that we'd like to see. What do you think about that?

Ooh, Nick was rugged. Hold on. I was like, ohh no, don't tell me I was rugged.

He's still on. I can maybe mute it.

No, he's good. He just, he went down and came back up. Nick, you there?

Rick Astley is here. He he's probably been rickrolled.

Yeah. No, I think, uh, Nick, you're on mute now. Now if you unmute, I think you should be.

Nice.

Yep, cheers. Uh, Twitter spaces just crashed on me.

Sorry.

Did you hear Novak's question?

I heard the lead up. I didn't hear the question.

I had no back.

Hmm.

Uh, huh.

Yeah, sure. Uh, so the kind of the question is with regard to the non non etherium ENS record. You know for the addresses which are non Ethereum addresses that it's sort of a catch 22 in terms of the implementation of resolving those addresses with the wallet providers. And seems like what we need is kind of twofold. We require kind of a more ENS users filling out their non etherium address in the record there for and then we also need to identify those wallet.

Providers that can start you know, building those those functionalities. So that's kind of, I wanted to hear your thoughts a little bit about that if you wouldn't, if you wouldn't mind.

Hmm. Umm, I mean I guess the you're right, those are those are what we need. And the support of things like you know of of wallet platforms like Coinbase that support multiple chains is going to make that easier because it provides people with a direct way and incentive to to fill out those addresses or multiple chains. And so is off chain support for for names because when you don't have to pay a transaction fee for each one, it's easier to sign up and if you perhaps don't have etherium wallets

Is your wallet is multi chain and you use other ones not having that barrier of having to to acquire one and register before you can start setting your your records as is a big step forward. So I kind of think those are going to be our main routes forward to getting you know cross chain addresses more widely recognized.

Wow, thank you. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we'll probably see, um services like Coinbase that already have the user connected to multiple chains just populate automatically on their sub domain.

Yeah, definitely.

Thank you for that. Really appreciate that. And I'm gonna relieve the the audience. I've got much to to ask and say this opportunity. I'm sure many of us are hungry for more of this. So thank you guys for putting this together. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, man, for sure. Nick, I do have a couple more questions, but really quick, everybody.

It's 627, probably going on 628 if you have the PO app app. I don't know if it's gonna be open for another 2 minutes or another 17 minutes, but I'd go in there right now. The secret word is Kiwis. All lowercase Kiwis.

That's.

Go get your pull-ups. There's a limited number. They didn't even tell me what the final number was, but I think there should be enough to cover everybody in the room but Kiwis K IWIS. I think it's good till 6:30. I'm trying to get it extended. I did switch it to 6:45, but I'm not sure if they're going to honor that. But 6:30, you got 2 minutes go run to two-minute drill.

It's saying word not found for me.

What is it saying we're not found?

Yep, it says secret not found.

Ohh.

Same here, man. Yeah, unfortunately.

And now?

Come on, you just messaged me saying the curators have been made aware of the updates.

You failed on the QA process there, champ.

Yeah, that's my bad. It's my bad. It's my fault.

Yeah, that's my bad, but I I promise you like we will get a pull out for this because I did put the end date for like 48 hours out just in case. So they can always back issue, but that doesn't really make any sense does it?

Um, yeah.

Ahead.

OK. Last couple of questions for you, Nick. Are you OK? Just for a couple more. I know I don't, I don't wanna keep you, OK. Hopefully it hasn't been too bad so far, no.

It's been alright, OK.

Now I know it's been a it's been enjoyable.

Good. I'm. I'm really, really glad that that that means a lot. Like, definitely to me. WAVY, for sure. So emojis.

We have this conversation all the time about emojis. I think some of us recently learned that emojis are, I think it was punks. Was it copyright or trademark and it was our brands really going to use this for?

Something like like can they actually use it as like their domain name and I still think that the jury is kind of out how what is the role that you see emojis playing and like what is their current functionality at the moment?

Hmm.

I mean I I basically based mostly view them as as fun rather than practical you know like it's.

If you if your name is like smiley smiley smiley dot ETH, you're probably going to spend more time communicating to somebody like exactly which of the emoji smileys and which skin tone it was. You know the then you would have just by reading out your Ethereum address. But I think it is pretty neat to have that associated as like the primary name on your account and have it show up as your identity when you interact with things. So I think they serve a purpose. I think it's mostly sort of cachet

I think they worth supporting personally.

Hmm.

Is there so now if I were to register let's say like like if I register the like 3 different smile, like 3 different smiley faces right isn't it? Isn't it true like that a like how do you view like are they trademarked or copyright either or they're intellectual property of of either Apple or Google M and.

Oh.

You know.

So, so. Well, not exactly so. The emojis themselves are defined and described by the Unicode Consortium, just like any other character. The individual fonts are copyrighted by Apple and Google and, you know, all all the other platforms. But there's a distinction between the name itself and how it's represented. You know, if you view it on an iPhone, it's an apple or set of emojis. View it on the Android, it's an Android set of emojis. They only own the representations of them, not the names them

Ah.

Yeah, and that's actually technically true for anything. Like any, any font you use is copyrighted by somebody, and many of them have pretty broad licensing terms. But, you know, just because I use Helvetica to display my name doesn't mean that adobo when's my name.

You're definitely not legal advice.

OK alright so the legal advice but not legal advice that we get in here which is that it's never ohh no it's never legal advice from anybody. I totally get that for sure. Punks taught us that like we got a good teacher but yeah no that's exactly what what he informed us of so like that that's OK got it. So now in regards to two character 1 character are we is there discussion talks of maybe kind of going that route where will we ever see other than like the single emojis or so on.

Hmm.

Aside from emojis, would you would we ever move to single and double characters?

One or two here.

I mean it's always open as a as a possibility. I think doing it would have to have a pretty compelling case for like why it's a benefit to the ecosystem. We talked about harberger taxes earlier and one thing I raised my discussions with Patella because that you could use something harberger esque to allocate one and two characters because they haven't been allocated before. And you could set them up basically as registrars with the intention that if you own youknowits.edu, use it to sell subdoma

And those subdomains are set up with the name wrapper so they can't be revoked and so therefore if you lose the name at Dottie to someone who bids more, you don't. Your users don't suffer a loss because the names are already registered and they're set up so that the new owner can't take them back. And so that could be a really interesting way to operate. Basically sub registries where what you're effectively doing is paying for the right to own the registry and issue the names rather than, you k

That is my speculation on something I think would be neat, not like a fully formed plan that the Dow is going to execute.

You gotta be super careful what you say in these spaces.

Yeah, I've, I've learned the hard way that I have to disclaim this stuff. Like, you know, I can't just have a cool idea and say here's a cool idea. I have to be really careful to say it's just a cool idea.

We we have a thing like, I haven't brought it to yet to the NS community yet, but the V fan, we have something where before you even start it, you have to give a speculation nation, you have to give like the little speculation nation Jingle and then that's how we know it's like.

Hmm.

Alright, so last couple of questions and I know that that we've kind of had like us as a community have kind of talked about this a little bit last. I'll give you last two questions.

Hmm.

Hmm.

The one that the NS logo, right? Actually maybe I have three now. Oh my God, I have so many. The NS logo, right. Can we use the ENS logo? Like do we need to get approval like is it how does that work? Like did we copyright trademark it? Can we? You can remember the community the Dow like how does it work?

Yeah. So you know, the, the, the logo is the copyright is owned by Yannis Labs, the trademark, I believe we're in the process for applying for a trademark we don't have. Like, you know, we're not super pissy about it. And, you know, in, in the medium term, these should probably be transferred to the foundation, which is the legal entity of the Dow owns. Umm, we don't have a firm policy on this, you know, like I'm not going to go endorse your use of the logo, but if you're using the logo to repre

This you know in a way that's non deceptive then that I don't know. That seems like a pretty good use of it to me. This is not legal advice.

I yeah so so we're not we're not with it enough to have like a firm legal like licensing stance on it but it's definitely something we're going to have to do now that we see more people integrating the logo into things and so forth. We certainly have no intention of going after anyone who's using it in a non deceptive non like you know stigmatizing way like if you wanted to launch the like.

ENS logo penis collection then I might like want to have a word with you about that, but.

Yeah.

But yeah, you know, so far like it, we've been continued to sort of let it ride, but, but in the long term, we will have to figure out what an official position should be.

All right, looks like the, uh, the NS Dicks fucking PFP project is off the table, guys. Like, scratch it, scratch it, we're done.

Alright, the this is one question where I'm surprised they'll be actually messaged me, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Are you or any members of the Dow behind the ENS Maxis NFT?

Not as far as I know. I mean, I don't know all the members of the Dow and what they might be into, but nobody I know is involved. At least if they are, they haven't told me.

Very sneaky, very sneaky.

All right. OK.

He's cool under pressure. Next cool under pressure.

Given the follow up question, why would you lie? Why would you lie to us? We know it's you.

Where were you on the night of the Freeman? Ohh no. What? This is going to be just rapid fire. So one thing I actually missed earlier was when we were talking about the ENS token, one of our Members shout out Hedgehog. Like he gave us a great suggestion in terms of would we think of something like, you know Coinbase does kind of it's almost like a learn to earn right, where it's like you learn about specific protocols, you go through these like little modules and you can earn some of that protoc

Broken, would we ever consider doing something like that to maybe kind of like entice new people, maybe incentivize like current like current holders to like educate themselves more?

I think we've actually done something like that a little while ago with um.

I can't remember the name of the platform, but I'm I'm almost positive we we did something like that in the past. And yeah, I mean it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to me. It has been an absolute delight speaking with you guys. But I do have to run to to an appointment very soon. So one more question.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no problem. Wait, do you get?

Yeah, I've got one more question, maybe to close Nick and what plans might you have for your sub domain? And I'd be really curious to know how you might utilize the sub domain wrapper for Nick dot E.

I I don't really have any plans to give out subdomains of that dotties to anyone other than myself.

Uh.

And and for yourself, how would you best utilize Nicki like just in terms of maybe hot Wally or cold Wally or very warm?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like I've set up like, you know, wallet like mobile.net dot ETH and stuff like that. Or or at least I've done that with previous names and it's a pretty convenient way to to give, you know, names to wallets I use regularly and that I don't mind doxing.

Thank you so much man.

So you're saying you need a manager? OK, no, Nick, thank you so much for coming. Yeah, you're right, waves.

Hmm.

OK. Thank you so much for joining us. I like this really was like awesome. I think it went for me personally. Like I I thought this went so much better than I expected it to go. But you were so forthcoming. Like so candid. I really would hope that we could maybe do this on a more regular basis if if you'd be open to it. I'd really love to have you like a maybe once a month thing just to kind of like come check in and have you kind of like jump like jump into these spaces with us. Like I'd love t

That was my pleasure and I'd be happy to come back, although I can't promise monthly.

Yep.

Yep, Yep.

Thank you.

Fair enough. You're good. They versed you well in the PR department, my friend. Never ever make commitments. In time they will hold you to it. Thank. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. And if you want the recording to this also, just let me know. I'm happy to send it over your way, but it will be like up on my page. But you are awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much, Nick. I know that on behalf of me and the whole Community, I appreciate you.

Thank you. See ya.

Take care. All right, kids.

What do we think? I feel like that went great.

Yeah. Thank you, champ for really championing the communications getting disorganised. Really. It's been like for me the most memorable session of my whole ENS journey. And even just with the limited questions, I still felt as a participant absorbing that that personal touch that Nick gave. And I think that that experience like to be where we're part of history right now.

And it's, it's really a little bit surreal.

Touchdown NFL champ.

We're going to let shills close us out the way he knows how, but the ethical way, just the ethical way.

Chills what's good, baby.

Shields was good, baby.

Hey, what's the NFL champ? I, man, I just wanted to say congratulations on such an amazing milestone. You keep doing you, man. You know, you've been doing amazing and things will happen. It's on its way. So I know it's only a matter of time, but you know, stay consistent, stay doing what you're doing because this was a very big milestone and you've allowed, because of you, everybody to participate with you. So I just want to say, you know, just say, just want to say thank you so much and I just

Say you're Norman. Uh, just wanted to say happy birthday to your mom in advance. I kind of sent you a little greeting card, and I took it out and I tagged you and I tagged NFL champion V so, you know, just wanted to say happy birthday to mom. And at the same time, we also want to send a speedy recovery. Prayers from the entire US community. Thank you so much for allowing me to speak. Much love, guys.

Yeah, man.

Thank you very much for that.

Awesome. I love this stuff man. Then thanks shills. I really appreciate this. This is not me. Like don't come up here give me flowers. This is like I like, I'm happy to be a voice to be able to facilitate these conversations for us. Like we all got, whether it's money invested, time invested, right. Like we're doing this for a reason because of like when you hear people say the cliche, ohh the balance of transfer of wealth and like we see opportunity here. Like. Like we're doing this. We're in t

Time 90 like 100 minutes almost. Yeah. OK, whatever. Fuck.

And it's almost like almost like a teacher and session.

I swear bro, it was like but I and I tried to do it. It might have seemed like rapid fire, but I felt like the conversation, the topics flowed 1 into the other. No like for the most part. Or am I crazy?

You asked very good questions. I thought that was great.

Thanks Norman. I appreciate that. But yeah like this is like this is what we're doing alright. So give me some slack. I freaking. Yo meta. My fault bro. I promise you, I swear to God I'm gonna get the freaking poll app. I will get everybody the power apps. We're going to do it this way. It's a fair drop. I'm not going to let it get like you know we. I didn't do it too. They they they flagged me for engagement farming because I gave you a shout out on the friggin on the on the invite. These freak

Yeah, you want me to like, screenshot everyone in the room right now?

Ohh, yes. That would be hella dope bro. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. And I do also want to give a shout out. Yo cola labs. JC. Like you've been awesome to work with. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for everything.

Thank you, thank you and info champ.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Um, when's the live? When's the mint end of this week?

Yes, within this week, so within one week. So stay tuned.

Beautiful. Good.

And the whitelist. The whitelist is open, so go check it out.

Nice is NFL champ like one of those promo codes?

Yes.

Gang. Gang. NFL champion. Go get it. Yeah, novaks. Let me know when you're done there. But WAVY. Anything, any, any closing. Anything in closing my brother.

No, no, no. Again, just really to be able to participate in the conversation and and like even for me I was really late on the emojis, but I know how much everyone has kind of taken their their different strides and different routes and I wanted to make sure that you know, important questions are addressed regardless of what our individual interests may be. And so I thought it was really well represented of a lot of the.

The Community questions that have come up in recent days and weeks and what have you, but really, really great session. Thank you dude.

Ohh novax anything closing?

Oh, you're you're screenshotting in as well? What's up, my brother?

Alright, I got you snapped up and I just wanted to say that I did appreciate it, man. It was it was cool to be able to have a word. And I did you like how I shield him? Crown emoji Nick, I mean.

I love it. I was debating me with you had a bit of over under I I said three names, but you went with one. So kudos to you bro. WAVY. You win.

I respect.

I mean, that's well, what's up? Thank you again, novaks. And that's why it was good, bro.

Oh man, congratulations on putting together an awesome space, man. It was epic, and I'm glad I had a chance to be a part of it, man.

Yeah, bro, this is this is definitely definitely good stuff. Norman. Thank you for joining. Also everybody else too. Whoever submitted questions part of the office hours, like, you know you know you know, there's way too many else to fucking think. But this was dope. Let's I'm really looking forward to doing this again. I thoroughly enjoyed this, like, a lot. A lot. It gave me some great insight. I took Hella notes. I can't promise you that I'm going to clip this one up because there's a lot to