Decentralized Minting

ADA Handle is the largest naming convention on Cardano with ~235,000 Handles spread across nearly every application. Handles themselves exist as a token within the user’s wallet, and as such, benefits from the full decentralization any asset on Cardano benefits from. Each Handle is thus fully owned and operated by each user with zero monthly payments.

With that being said there is still a main point of centralization we wish to correct, our minting engine. As it stands our minting engine is a centralized AWS serverless NodeJS stack with a multitude of double-mint checks. This is a process that is hard to abstract into a smart contract structure, but we have a way forward.

Merkle Tree Minting

The process of making our minting engine permissionless is not a simple but we believe that the path forward is to implement a Merkle Tree primitive that can substitute the current check and balances necessary to maintaining the uniqueness of the Handle Standard.

A Merkle Tree is a specific type of hash tree developed by Ralph Merkle, a cryptographer, in 1979. A hash tree utilizes a topography of peer-to-peer hashes called branches and leaves, wherein each leaf (node) is labeled with a hash of data, and each branch (inner node) is labeled with a hash of the labels of its child nodes. These hashes will serve as proof that each minted Handle is unique and meets all other checks and balances by the commitment scheme of labels attached within each leaf that are connected to the root of the Merkle Tree.

Project Catalyst

The process of tearing down the existing minting engine and rebuilding it to not only mint Handles in a permissionless way but also to be compatible with Personalization and subHandles is a daunting engineering task. To accomplish this we’ll need to begin hiring for developers with experience in platform systems, devops, and/or smart contract design (specifically on Cardano).

The link to our Catalyst proposal is here; Decentralized Minting.