Transcript
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[Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] all right so for a first amazing session he’s gonna share with us so what is uh
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LMS and so on I’m trying to do with us is the shake Zac Brown yes using ever right and he’s gonna moderate the session so guys enjoy listen up and be inspired see you later hi guys it’s a pleasure to be here actually actually Zach yesterday um last year I I watched the endicon from the sidelines and now I’m here so I think it’s a it’s a great progress uh I’m so excited yeah it’s it’s wonderful to have you and um welcome everybody to the start of day two of handycon 2023.
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um so so yeah we’re here with dom we’re talking about uh his project the nouns naming service and the nouns and naming service is a community namespace for the nouns project so I think before we dive in we should take a step back and for people who don’t know nouns do a quick overview of what that is so people have context and um so I’ll I’ll speak to it and um you can jump in if there’s anything else you’d like to add yeah sure so nouns is in ethereum nft project um they’re these cute pixelated
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characters with the glasses called noggles that Dom is wearing actually um and they’re the nft project uses a novel auction mechanism to sell one noun per day every day forever and that project has really taken off um every winning amount goes to a treasury that’s managed by the nouns and that treasury a check today has over 40 million dollars worth of eth so it’s very big and has the that treasury has the goal of proliferating the meme of nouns and making nouns as a as a meme with the noggles as kind of the the key
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component of the meme more popular and um and has kind of exploded into a variety of different projects and offshoots of that original nft project uh is that is that an accurate um your description was uh was perfect uh the only thing I want to add is that you don’t need a noun to build something um in the announce ecosystem uh in the case of myself for example I don’t hold a noun yet but at the same time I built the nns and uh I closed um a founding ground directly from nouns Dao of around 200 eat so you can build
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massive things for the nouns ecosystem also without having a noun a noun is important because it gives you more influence within the Dao but it’s not mandatory for a builder for example right that’s an excellent point so um right with that treasury that exists they uh they were able to fund your project and that’s how um the birth of of nns came to base so this is a nice segue into an nns itself why don’t you uh speak to the the birth of the project how it started and what it is yeah uh sure uh I mean it started uh
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randomly um one one year ago I was exploring web tree domains uh the centralized domains I was really uh into handshake I um I registered more than 1 000 names I completely fell in love for and Shake one year ago and uh during during that time I uh I saw a tweet on my timeline about this uh this project called the nouns and after I clicked and I discovered what what this project was about I was uh really fascinated from the very beginning but what really shocked me was to discover how many people were using uh denagle’s text icon next to their
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Twitter names on Twitter so uh it was it was crazy I never saw anything like that because there were thousands and thousands of people that were using this text icon and they and that gave to me uh the first um um that helped me to understand how um an icon or a symbol could be important especially in web3 uh there is a there is a a community a Community member in the nns that once said that emojis are the next Brands and I think I do believe that this uh applies uh 100 to the novels as well so I saw this situation uh and uh
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from on one side there was a huge community that were already using these uh powerful symbol and on the other side uh there was me that was exploring uh all the potential of web3 domains and decentralized domains so at that point I I I found out a good opportunity to transform the text icon uh that text icon into something more into uh a top level domain and much much more in the future and that was the first uh real idea about the project that will then become the the nns but and I think the rest of the story could could also
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give a little a little inspiration to other to other builders that are trying to build remarkable products but uh they are stupid because maybe they don’t have a strong Network they don’t know anyone in the community they want to uh they want to enter and so on because when I started the nns uh I didn’t know anyone literally not a single person in the nouns ecosystem uh I created I created a my personal profile that is not nouns uh with zero followers and zero tweets I started uh to tweet about my first idea
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about about DNS and I started to connect with other people of the community uh I start to follow them I started to ask for feedback I I started to understand uh what they really wanted they their desires and so on and I was I was lucky because I found out that it was a community Ultra support team um but the relationship I did during those first weeks were uh at the base of uh of our successful lunch so my my advice in this situation is don’t be afraid to uh to to ask for feedback to connect without with other
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people because usually if we want to build something we are afraid to uh DM someone asking for uh a feedback or um uh sharing our idea and that that is really really important at the beginning so after that our goal was to focus on a minimum viable product in MVP that could uh That Could That Could Have sense and we at the same time we didn’t have resources so we we applied to propose to around of propels that you uh Zach and all the listeners should really should really check it’s a it’s a platform that
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um give that gives small grants to finance now Niche ideas so we want so we wanted to apply to this and we won the second round of profiles uh they gave us to eat to test our ideas um our assumptions and after that it was uh four months of development and connections and extremely important of creating uh a core Network that could support and natively support the nns after the launch from day one that was that was the the secret uh of uh for our lunch and also the most the most challenging uh the most challenging task
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because I I I think that it’s really it’s really it’s really easy to build a top level domain to create a top-level domain um especially as a as we did because for our MVP we we we forked and ens to have uh something that could that could work well in a in a short amount of time but um we wanted to give a great utility to our you to our users because otherwise uh it was really hard to uh sell our top level domain to the price we actually sold our uh our domain because uh the price for nns is uh starts from 100 and
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reach one thousand dollars uh forever fee uh no renewals but still it was it was quite expensive so we wanted to offer a beautiful experience for uh for the community so um we we made it and uh we did we did our public launch in October and on day one the nns was already resolved on every platform in the nouns ecosystem so thanks to thanks to uh DNS users who are finally able to see their their noggles on their own chain identity and and what was especially important was that they were able to do that on on the
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platforms that used basically every day so now now it’s now all the other all the all the other um uh platforms and websites uh into the into the ecosystem so it was I think that was the um the secret uh for uh for us to sell more than 600 names and uh have um getting getting that kind of notoriety and Authority in in the ecosystem as well so uh after after the launch in November we were ready to scale the nns to transform an MVP in uh into something more and uh we applied uh to get a bigger found uh a bigger
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funding ground directly to down to directly from nouns Dao this time and uh again we made it it was art really hard maybe one of the most challenging things in my life but we we made it as well and uh announce thou founded the DNS with the um almost 200 200 each to build um division of the MNS and at the same time to scale the platform um outside the nouns ecosystem and now in March we are we are here and we are almost ready to release all the all the all the cool things we developed in uh in this month so that was a quiet uh exciting Journey
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um and it happened it happened uh so fast actually amazing yeah I’m I’m really grateful for uh for that but um I think I think everyone everyone can can do that I mean if you if you put if you put community at the center and try to give value as much as much value as you can to your community than uh I think I think that’s the key point there is community there’s a few different ways to think about top level domains and name spaces underneath them but one of them is a community name space and start with that community and
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build a namespace on top of that community and that’s what what you’re speaking to that’s what nns is you notice that this community was using these um nogles this this uh Unicode in their in their Twitter domains they were sort of identifying with it and built out from there and that this community that happened to be well funded enough was able to support this vision and to support this naming use case on top of it and so there’s a few different approaches um to tlds and how they think about
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their names but sort of flipping the script and starting with the community and then building a namespace um outwards has been successful for you and I think that that’s something that other people who are thinking about what to do with their tlds or how to think about how naming fits into the larger ecosystem might be able to take away from this yeah exactly I mean Zach there is I I believe I believe in that it’s just a personal opinion that there is not a single um identity in web3 okay exactly like
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you can you can use more nfts different nfts as profile picture I do believe that people the web 3 users will have different identities basic based on use cases and uh based on the communities they they blog so for example super link super link they are doing an amazing job an amazing job with with identity super link identity is uh related uh on first names and surnames so they give you to users a beautiful experience to create their digital identity that is connected to those two parameters on the other side for example there is
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the nns that allows other people in a completely different Community um to attach the the knuckles to their own chain identity they are both identities and they told they sold different different problems but they they could they could easily coexist right it’s contextual to where you are in the community that you’re in yeah exactly exactly I uh I see the future to go uh to follow that path and so I I do believe that we will see other um uh other naming services and uh that that can serve other communities I’m not
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saying that is uh is easy because I think the the most the most important challenge that every name service um has to um is the creation of the network so ens or Unstoppable domains other those two Titans they are what they are because they they were the they built a huge Network and that’s their competitive Advantage so you have to find a way to if you want to launch uh to successfully launch a top level domain into a niche you have to find a way to give to that top level domain uh all the reach and the support
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you can inside of that niche you you should not you should not create the top level domain just to sell a top level domain you you should really think about think about your your users and how you can provide a tangible value to them yeah that’s a great point so let’s talk about um use cases in in nns um I think a lot of people um like to talk about uh wallet support and wallet integration but with with bootstrapping new name Services that’s not going to be there out of the gate and something that you spoke to with
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being embraced by the nouns Community is that when it launched um you were able to get integrated as usernames in these applications and that that sort of um that use case was there early on um so can you speak to how people are using your uh the the dot nouns or dot noggles names today and how you think about using them um in other ways like as domain names in the future yeah sure so the first two use cases we uh we built around the nns especially in our MVP was to allow people to see their um their nuggles resolved in all the nouns ecosystem and
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that was a very important very important thing for for our user for our users and at the same time we also created uh um an initiative called nns rewards uh where every week we allowed we allowed people to um join um free nfts free free now initial rewards um so we can so so we we could find a way to reward their loyalty um to to the nns so uh thanks to nns rewards we we could give a great visibility to uh artists and to creators inside the nouns ecosystem and at the same time reward our users those were the uh very first two utilities that we
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um that we created in the future of course uh we it will be extremely important to uh extend the reach of um um of the nns give to the nns more and more and more support into um into new uh platforms and especially wallets and we will try to solve these uh this issue and speed up this uh uh this uh this problem uh from with the with the next releases uh that are uh supposed to come out in the coming weeks where we will find a new way to reward every single day all the projects and all the users that are uh supporting and
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showing online the dot noggles um I can’t I can’t I can’t share more right now but if you are if you are interested you you can follow the dnns profile on on Twitter and everything will be unveiled in the starting starting from the next next few days wonderful so I think we have just a few more minutes left and we’ll try to squeeze in as much as we can um connecting this to to handshake you have the handshake top level domain there’s the ability to plug in and some standards in place for name resolution
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um across handshake to ethereum naming services do you do you intend to follow the the hip five naming standard that impervious uses um have you gotten to that point about thinking about integration we we will surely integrate the uh and shake with the nns and there is one thing that a few people who know of that that is that the very first draft of the nns idea was this uh uh dot noggles that was built entirely on end shake so that was that was the very first idea but uh it was not really compatible with the needs of
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our users uh because they were more into ethereum and it was really important to give another kind of utilities but the the noggles the the nuggles Unicode was the very first thing that I uh that a claim on uh on name base and a few months ago I also uh I was also be sure to claim and to reserve the dot nns that’s that just to just to show you how much we are interested in integrating and shaking the future so that day will come absolutely exactly like I’m I’m a believer of and Shake I’m sure that in
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in one year we will finally see it result on browsers like Brave and other important other important platform uh the adoption is is coming and we will have everything we need once uh um once and Shake will be uh will be ready to take over the world yeah that’s that’s great to hear um okay I think that’s um we’ve got a minute or so left so is there anything else you’d like to share um about NS or um where can people follow along and reach out to you if they have questions um in the coming in the coming uh days
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we will release an important initiative called nanish Club so basically the nns will distribute all the uh all the numbers from zero to 99.99 uh for free only the first 1000 1000 names will be reserved for nouns for nouns holders but all the others will be distributed for free and the goal is to bring more people into our Discord into our community and this way we can uh spread of course the nanish culture and making all our future initiatives more viral and effective so if uh viewzak and all the listeners uh want to have uh one one
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number for free just again join the community uh follow follow our Twitter profile and uh in the next weeks uh we will be sure to give one thank you Dom okay I think that’s our time um thank you so much for coming speaking about the project superlink is next so once this closes you can go to view schedule and you can go and hop into the next section next next session um great appreciate your time and I’ll see everybody in the next one thank you thank you Zach bye everyone bye guys [Music]