HandyHost: A New Way to Manage Dweb Assets and Protocols

By: Steven McKie

Oct 07, 2021

Launch Season

It’s that time again, another opportunity to help push the industry forward with another lens to see the story of how, collectively, we as a community can move the world—with haste— towards censorship-resistant technologies. One’s that best serve a wide array of users, and don’t leave others behind based on their socioeconomic upbringing, or lack of technical mentorship.

Without going too much into the weeds for this announcement, in short we’ve been working on a project the last few months that we felt needed to exist. As we saw all of these Web3/DWeb protocols emerge, but each had a walled garden between them that was combination of technical UI/UX barriers that made them too cumbersome to use in tandem — especially for your average new entrant to crypto.

Reading and interpreting more API docs, launching another cloud instance to sync, dealing with installing VMs, etc— these are generally known IT/developer related skillsets many in the greater crypto community don’t possess (yet).

What I’ve learned, personally, is anytime I am scared to try something new, it’s because it seems too large of a task to undertake when you’ve a busy career to manage. We (HandyOSS and Amentum) sought to help change that; and in return, we could push the community towards being more self-empowered while holding more firms accountable for prioritizing UI/UX that aids a larger swathe of the general retail population.

Plus, with bridging HNS at the root of HandyHost, we can make new friends to help us empower the world to join our efforts, together.

Introducing “HandyHost” (The Gist)

What we’ve managed to construct is a simple browser-based application that merges Handshake/Akash/Sia and Sentinel DVPN into one cohesive platform. We’ve taken each of their unique attributes as functional public chain protocols with real utility, and assembled the lego pieces with UI/UX glue.

Each of these protocols serves a unique purpose in the greater crypto tech stack to provide the emerging new decentralized internet further redundancy and resilience. In this beta launch version, decentralized compute, storage, and privacy-centric VPN services are immediately at your fingertips without having to deal with dependencies and configure your nodes. Included is support for the Handshake chain whenever you run a DVPN Sentinel node, as it also launches a Handshake light client node beside it so you can resolve HNS names in your browser. It’s hidden and you never even know it’s there — you’re just on the DWeb/Web3 and ready to explore when your DVPN is running. You can toggle it on/off quickly on MacOS too from your menubar.

Bandwidth usage historical data, updated to keep you informed of your node’s status all in one beautiful package.

Effectively, this is a re-imagining of the incumbent tech stack of Web2, by slowing weaving complementary protocols together under on functional GUI interface.

And, with some of these protocols belonging to the Cosmos ecosystem (DVPN/AKASH) earnings can be easily sent to AMMs such as Sifchain/Emeris/Gravity Dex and Osmosis, and be liquidity pooled for other further passive earnings. We see a lot of cohesive interoperability being possible here with applications like HandyHost, and others that mimic it in the future to combine certain protocols together for brand new types of user experiences we haven’t thought of. We look forward to future updates and showing you what we mean.

Kavaskous @Kavaskous

@Stanzo_89 @CardanoAdonis @Sentinel_co Even better. It means my GPU can keep mining on Nicehash, I can disable RandomX and enable this. DVPN AND AKT? I can reach my staking goals and have a way to become an LP whale on Osmosis. This needs to happen yesterday lol

The Details

Here’s is what our team sought to accomplish as worked on this project collaboratively, and we believe we were successful (you’ll be the judge):

Make passive-income generation simple through an easy to use GUI application.
Enable income generation via public blockchains over a low-energy footprint that possess real utility.
A single project that combines multiple projects with similar goals into one single hosting interface.
Enable more users to experience the decentralized web without the headaches of running nodes and using a command line, but without giving up the power of running software locally (and important part of this whole decentralization thing).
Dramatically increases the resources available on Akash, DVPN and Sia. It creates a healthy ecosystem for renters to scale into and builders to host their applications on.

That’s it. It’s time to go try it out and let us know what you think. Have any issues or find any bugs, leave an issue on the Github repo, and we’ll get back to you. Also send HandyOSS a ping on Twitter if you need some assistance or want to contact us about it directly.

Special thanks to the Sentinel Foundation, Greg Osuri and the Akash team for subsidizing the cost of development through their awarded grants. As well as Thomas Costanzo and others that contributed and assisted us with building, testing, and squashing bugs as we worked to integrate each separate protocol.

Enter the DWeb