Dappy is an alternative web PKI and name system built for the next generation of secure and privacy-focused services on the public web. As many things happened in 2022 we want to sum up the year and give insights for 2023.

Launch of dappy

The number one goal entering 2022 was to launch dappy, the launch of the mainnet occured September 29th 2022, after few months of making sure the code is stable on the testnet with our partner Pathrock Network. It was quite a challenge since we decided not to use any major blockchain L1 technology but instead a custom-built simple leaderless no-token state-replication system that is able to massively parallelize processing. Parallelization is an important feature for a name system, since resources are generally independent one from another. This article argues about our technical choices.

The path to standardization

Dappy is a long term project, among other things, what is important is not reinventing the wheel where it is not needed. This will ease future standardization processes. We have made the choice to respect DNS-over-HTTPS standard for the browser-to-node communication, which is basically co-resolution. In addition dappy sticks to the DNS syntax for zone management, see this example file.

Real time presence at international events

Dappy was at Paris Blockchain Week Summit in March, FIC 2022 Lille in April, Vivatech Paris in April and Web Summit Lisbon in November. Dappy also participated to a hackaton in november, and was able to demo junctions domains which allow direct multi-party endorsement of websites.

Whitepaper v2

Whitepaper v2 is out.

Understanding of the market

During the events and our discussions with engineers and security researchers, we saw many trends. First many people, despite of 2022 being a bad year for crypto are very curious about web3, blockchain-related technologies and where it is all going, we also saw a great deal of scepticism regarding the use of blockchain for cybersecurity, which is in some way what dappy does.

The number one learning of this year is the very slow showing of interest and movement of the industry towards blockchain-powered name systems and alternative web PKI solutions, we are still at a point where the web PKI is considered secure enough, despite its flawed design that gives poor control to the user, and theoritically allows for some man-in-the-middle scenarios. Developers, security engineers are fine with it.

The browser issue

FABCO is not a browser company, dappy a naming, web PKI and resolution protocol for the public web. We do have built the desktop-only dappy browser, a chromium-powered browser that is independent of DNS and Certificate Authorities, implements co-resolution and allow us to demo dappy.

Some other companies maintain a browser full time, and already have user bases, for 2023 we think it makes more sense to build partnership with those companies and browser vendors, and see under what condition they whish or can emantipate from DNS with the .d extension. The cool thing is that domain purchases and renewals creates an economic incentive model, into which browser vendors can be integrated.

ICO and token

Dappy’s ICO occured in the beginning of 2022, during which 4.03% of the token supply was sold to 20-30 investors around the world. This page gives details about the token. Dappy has a shared economic model, rewards are split between the dappy network members and token holders, this is important to understand.

What makes dappy different

Dappy is an ever evolving project, nevertheless some things don’t change, many things make dappy different :

• The dappy web PKI and name system does not only provide infrastructure for storing domains and TLS certificates, it provides a trustless and very secure resolution mechanism that is called co-resolution.
• Dappy is a fully working alternative web PKI system, where certificate forgery is not possible because the user is in full control of its root certificates (eq the trust anchor for a given domain)
• Dappy has more focus on security and privacy than censorship-resistance, by that we mean that in order to get adoption, it will need and probably implement some level of brand protection programs. Remember that as the whitepaper states, every domain blocking or removal has to be the result of a collective decision.
• Dappy has a huge UX advantage since it does not use gas or token and has its own no-token L1, the yearly payment is what feeds the dappy network and allow it to maintain robust infrastructure. A user just has to purchase a domain, and is able to start working, uploading his TLS certificates and IP addresses directly, many times a day.

Year 2023

Dappy team will continue building and more impoortantly build partnerships with the right people and projects. We will attend many events in 2023, the first one being CES 2023 in January.

We want to whish everyone a merry christmas and happy new year and remain fully available on our chat platform.