[00:05:31] Handshake registry essentially has four basic components now a lot of techies in the community may not agree with the way. I think because unless, since I'm not a techie, I do not have the tools that techies think so I had to take a different approach so that led me to these things. [00:5:44] A Handshake TLD naturally everybody needs to have one an NS infrastructure that consists of a TLD name server and an authoritative name server a registry solution and a registrar solution. [00:05:56] So if i were to look at it a little visually, there's a user whose browser sends a query to the root zone to the Handshake blockchain which then forwards that query to a TLD name server in our case it's dot bar or could be any other TLD which then forwards that query to an authoritative name server, so [00:06:16] In which case you have the domain name there which then gets back to the user with the IP address at the back end there is this registry and there is a registrar solution that helps the registry talk to these servers as and when required this is the larger overall high level picture of most registries. [00:06:36] Okay so if you can kind of get this picture in your mind you kind of have solved the problem going forward now this is the minimum viable product which we launched in Jan as i said we've moved beyond that point right now. [00:06:55] But again it had four components a Handshake TLD, NS infrastructure, a registry solution, and a registrar solution a Handshake TLD and then its infrastructure a TLD name server authoritative name server and a registry solution Handshake TLD. [00:07:14] Well I don't think I need to tell the community how to get your hands on one you can, we'll just move straight to the NS infrastructure. Now an NS infrastructure should ideally have two servers: a TLD server and an authoritative server. [00:07:29] There are many big company systems who are and it is possible to use one server to kind of do both the jobs but it's kind of bad practice especially going forward where people have individual identities and they're going to put important information on your authoritative server such as tax records for wallets, your email logins and so on so forth. [00:07:52] So to prevent a single point of failure you want to ideally break these up so that you have your risk is kind of distributed so my experience is if you have multiple TLDs you should have multiple servers for each of these TLDs and they all should have their own authoritative servers and you should have backups. [00:08:08] Technically speaking there is no difference between these two servers; they're exactly the same. It's just for the purposes of labeling we're labeling them as separates you can look up various solutions. [00:08:19] PowerDNS, Atomia DNS bind and there are quite a few others. In the end we decided to go with PowerDNS because I love the UI as a non-tech person.
[00:08:31] I thought that it was something that I could kind of use on a day-to-day basis. This is what the larger dashboard looks like: three users, we have about seven domains 863 events and it's been up for about four months, three weeks, and 18 hours. so as you can see very user friendly. As you can see very user friendly, very clean right, a nice UI, so that's the NS infrastructure. [00:08:57] Let's now go to the registry solution. Now what is a registry? It sounds very complicated but if you break it up, a registry is basically just a register, a database of names tethered to a bigger name. As you can see here Google is tether2.com so what is that tool out there? [00:09:17] I don't need to probably create it what is that tool out there that helps me to manage a database with a primary name and secondary names tethered to it? That's it if I can get that done voila you have your registry! [00:09:30] So we did look at some other solutions like nomins and fred but they were just way too complicated and i didn't want to go through that so I wanted to look at something that would help me manage a database, manage the users who interact with that database are easy to use, [00:09:47] UI both for me as well as the users payment gateway and billing. Now why do I mention billing? Now there are a lot of solutions out there that offer billing but if you are selling domains because there are renewals, there are various other factors you need to be able to customize that billing solution. [00:10:06] Now while it may seem far away from what we are trying to do billing solution is going to be important so if you are picking up a ready-made tool make sure it has a robust billing solution that you can customize. [00:10:15] So where could i find something that had a billing solution and an ability to manage? I decided to look at industries close to the domain space and I managed to again go on youtube, do a lot of Googling and hosting solutions. [00:10:30] Now hosting solutions are typically Saas products used by local resellers or affiliates who manage their customers so you'll find a lot of them who are basically downstream sellers of Godaddy or Hostgator and so on so forth. [00:10:45] And they had local level sell hosting solutions to small companies and so on so forth so they have a robust billing solution and it's very close to the industry and you can again look them up. Quite a few of them available in the market some of them are open source. [00:11:03] We decided to go with WHMCS at that point of time because we liked the overall UI. It offered a lot of features and the one interesting thing I found about all of these hosting solutions is they have a small domain registration module. This is usually there for clients who use hosting from them and sometimes they may need a child domain. [00:11:22] Sometimes they may need a backup domain, sometimes they may need additional domains so all of these solutions have this little domain registration thing built in. So now I had what i wanted, a domain registration system and a billing system that can manage the users who are using that. [00:11:36] So we basically stripped everything away from that, we just kept the domain registration and the billing and got rid of everything else and that formed the heart at that point of our registry. [00:11:51] So boom WHMCS add they should pay me anyway that's what the dashboard looks like very neat very clean, nice interface easy to manage. This is an admin panel, which is the backend panel so you don't really need to get into a whole lot of this codes and stuff. [00:12:09] It's pretty much an easy to go no code solution so something I'm very fond of because the community may have a lot of entrepreneurs, not everybody may be a techie so here you go and on top of this whole WHMCS powered register, [00:12:24] We built a registrar module which helps us connect and talk to these name servers. For instance, when somebody sends a query like sergeant, is this domain name available or not? [00:12:37] The registrar module checks with the name servers and gets back with the query saying if it's available or not so and so forth. So if you update your DNS records and all, the registrar module helps it find, reflect it on the servers. [00:12:53] So that's what the registrar is. So this is essentially what our deck is now. If you guys want to reach out and have a you know better chat. We can do that later if you want to know how to make a registrar, I can't really put it here. [00:13:05] But again Google and Youtube are the way to go. That did it for us. I'm sure it will do it for you. Just a snapshot of what we have so we are Handshake mega registrar. [00:13:16] That's what we call ourselves. We started out as a micro registry. We are now a mega registrar. Why we have our own registry? We have our own TLDs. In fact that's what we are going with. [00:13:27] So the TLDs are owned by us. We will eventually move to staking as well so we'll take TLDs from outside. We are registrars, we offer name servers so our users have DNS management systems, so they can add records and stuff like that. [00:13:43] We plan an app IOS and Android soon, SLD marketplace so we have a TLD marketplace but I think we also need an SLD marketplace so that all the people who are currently buying SLDs they can put it to some use. [00:13:58] Typically in my experience, domainers are the ones who show the initial interest in these market segments and they like to flip so it's important to give them a platform to flip while we also work on other use cases, which the average user is not looking to flip but for looking to use it for personal purposes [00:14:16] Can use it just some initial screens of our app, it's still working progress but it looks neat good UI and so anyway I'm glad we got kind of that part and coming to the interesting bit. [00:14:33] Why are we here? So why did a filmmaker have to kind of go through all of this and get into tech apart from the obvious financial considerations, which can happen in any field why this? [00:14:47] Because for the first time when I came across Handshake, I felt here was a piece of technology that was truly inclusive. It took care of everything.