Moving to an era of Decentralized DNS registry

An ambitious public blockchain project is trying to reinvent the process of assigning domain names on the Internet

We are at the cusp of a paradigm shift with Web 3.0 on the horizon — triggered under the influence of emerging technologies of which blockchain is one. The current structure of the internet as we use in the West is the freedom to information access without censorship, but this vast swath of data is mostly lying on servers in physical locations, which are owned and operated by centralized authorities.

Accessing the internet in the current form is pretty straight forward. You type in the name of the website like www.medium.com in your browser and a request is sent to a network of computers called the domain name system (DNS). Each website name on the internet is mapped onto a string of numbers called the IP address (e.g 192.68.210.52), which is basically the address of the server where the website is located. The browser locates the website via the DNS using this IP address.

Now a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol called the Handshake Network is trying to reinvent the DNS name system. Almost a year after the project was unveiled, the project has launched its main net. In its current form, DNS is a hierarchical global…