🌹 What's In A Nameservice? — Issue No. 11
/🗞 News
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) announced a partnership with a traditional DNS registrar to create a top-level domain, ".luxe", that will resolve on both systems. This strikes me as a smart way to ease adoption of what could be a key piece of decentralized infrastructure. Link.If you're not familiar with ENS, here's the TL;DR: it's a decentralized, smart-contract based service to map human readable names to Ethereum addresses. Check out "ENS in Five Minutes" and the rest of the developer docs for a dive into the tech. Link.
You might be wondering, how will a decentralized namespace be synchronized with a de-facto centralized service like DNS? Makoto Inoue is writing a 3-part blog post breaking down how this integration works. Link.
In more ENS related news, the team also announced a partnership with GitCoin, offering bounties for DApps integrating with the service. If you're not familiar with GitCoin-- a smart contract based platform for funding open source contributions-- it's a project worth checking out as well. Link.
Both ENS and GitCoin impress me as decentralized projects that have a good chance of being viable today, despite the fact this technology is at such an early stage of adoption. ENS does so by building at the infrastructure layer, while GitCoin does so by targeting tech-savvy developers who are capable of dealing with the significant UX barriers which still exist. If you're thinking about launching a DApp, you'd be wise to consider one of these approaches. Decentralized services intended for mainstream adoption have a much tougher row to hoe in the current environment.
🔮 Blog
A Developer's Guide To Running A Bitcoin Full Node And Local Block Explorer. Link.The Two Views Of Crypto: Sound Money Vs. Global Computer. (Note: the link to this blog post in the last week's edition was incorrect). Link.