ADA Handle 2022 Roadmap
The crypto industry is developing at lightning speeds with protocols stretching the bounds of what is even considered cutting edge technology. While that happens it is vitally important that a few teams keep a birds-eye view on the developments of the space and ensure that the human practicality is always factored in. This is an important cornerstone for our team at ADA Handle as we strive to make this industry as receptive as possible to even the most untrained eye.
Since July of 2021 we have been working towards building, offering and extending the Handle Standard across the Cardano ecosystem and at the time of publication have issued nearly 100,000 unique NFT-powered Handles to nearly 25,000 unique Cardano users, the largest NFT-denominated distribution in Cardano’s short history. We are not done yet, in fact, we have only just begun. So what is next?
Three Quarters
With the first quarter of 2022 in the rear view mirror, our team has set it’s crosshairs on the remaining quarters to execute instrumental deliverables that will provide considerable boons to the usefulness and effectiveness of the Handle Standard on the Cardano blockchain.
SPO Portal
While Q1 was a success in bootstrapping the Handle Standard across the Cardano ecosystem, we left out some key features that we need to polish up and ship to ensure we’ve catered to every corner of the ecosystem. With that being said, we are in the process of finishing up our SPO Portal for the stake-pool operators of Cardano. Once we finish integrating CIP-0022 to our mechanism we will ship the access portal allowing the SPO’s to pay for and mint their pool tickers.
Each reserved pool ticker will be a flat fee of 250 ADA. This is to account for the variations of ticker character length and our price model being extremely sensitive to shorter character Handles. It also accounts for the extra work put in by the engineering team to ensure that Cardano’s SPO’s are taken care of and can continue to market their businesses within the Handle Standard.
All un-minted SPO ticker Handles will be released to the public on June 18th.
Legendary Auctions
The next key feature in extending the Handle Standard is to issue our legendary Handles; Handles that are 1-character in length. These Handles will be extremely rare as only 39 will exist (excluding full-stops) of this rarity, among nearly 750 sextillion.
The auction date remains unannounced as we either need to build our own auction smart contract system or work with an existing platform whose auctioning system is operational.
Wallet Authentication
In Q1 we also celebrated the fact that we won our Catalyst Fund 7 proposal that aims to use staked wallet addresses as an authentication layer for not only our own project but for others as well in efforts to deter bots from future mints. This eliminates the need to capture email or other off-chain dependencies and allows projects to leverage the on-chain security of Cardano. For a more detailed look into our approved proposal, click here.
We will begin building out this piece of infrastructure during Q2.
Privacy and Verification
Two major deliverables we place very high priority on is the ability to provide verification and privacy at the discretion of each user and at the discretion of the community as a whole. There is a significant cohort of individuals in not only Cardano but the crypto industry as well that prefer and strive for privacy in the products that they use. We agree.
This is why we are going to either partner with an existing privacy infrastructure team or do what we have always done, build it ourselves. Handles provide an extremely useful way to transact on the Cardano blockchain in a way that modern humans are more used to, but it also means that a layer of privacy is significantly diminished for those who care about it. We aim to either eliminate that or allow the user to customize the level of privacy their Handle brings.
Another important aspect of identity, status, and social construct is verification. In almost every medium to large community, across any forum, ideas and values tend to coalesce around key figures. This happens as humans tend to contrive ideas together, naturally. As a naming solution we need to account for this phenomena in the digital age and implement a layer of verification for those that have naturally sourced ideas and opinions in order for everyday users to more easily wade through the complexity of the blockchain space’s instrumental persons.
Q3 and Q4
Q3 and 4 will focus on some major implementations for the Handle Standard in both identity and in interoperability. With the rollout of IOHK’s Atala Prism framework, we must be as composable as possible in order to take advantage of the robust decentralized identity model that Atala will bring to Cardano. In this regard, we have our executives and engineers enrolled in the Prism Pioneer’s course in order to stay on top of developments and aim to execute as soon as possible post-Atala launch.
The next major key implementation will be the rollout of Handle’s Crosschain Compatibility layer with the Ergo blockchain. This has always been the goal of the Handle Standard from Day 1 and something we are extremely excited to build into reality.
More information will become available to the community as our research teams carve out solutions.
Decentralization
In order to remain as transparent as possible we’d like to touch on this aspect of ADA Handle. It is our goal to decentralize the minting mechanics of our platform as it is the ethos of the industry to do so, and we believe and abide by that ethos. However, in terms of our minting mechanics, decentralization loses priority over the buildout of composable layers of the Handle Standard itself.
It is much more important for us to cater towards the users who have minted Handles, and thus subscribed to the Handle Standard, by providing them with robust options and useful choices on the blockchain. This will help not only with users of Handles continuing to support the new Standard but also to bring in entirely new cohorts of users that will drive the growth of the Handle Standard; benefitting all who hold a Handle.
Once we feel we have accomplished some of those key implementations we will work toward developing the smart contract infrastructure needed to decentralize the operation that mints Handles.
2023 & Beyond
It is our goal to be the first and last naming standard for Cardano and other UTxO blockchains for the rest of their respective history’s. With that being said, you can expect the buildout of a robust governance model, and therefore, an intuitive and powerful, financially-incentivized governance token in the future.
This will allow the Handle Standard to continue to grow, thrive and prosper for much longer than those who are building it now. The end goal has always been to provide a naming standard built for the people, by the people.
