There have been questions regarding our early launch of Hashgraph Name.
We felt the need to clear the air and give some more context to the situation.
Follow the 🧵 below:
It was determined that it would be in the best interest of the ecosystem to establish an .hbar standard which would allow any number of naming services to co-exist on the network and ensure that names are not duplicated.
In early-mid August, we came to an agreement with Web23 and other parties that:
a. We would create a Collaborative Topic on the Hedera Consensus Service – this included an SDK for wallet integration
b. Each naming service would check the registry before minting a name
c. Each provider would have the ability to add names to the registry upon mint
At that time in Early-August, we provided Web23 with a document consisting of our reserve list of names (consisting of core developers/contributors, and council members).
We asked them to please provide us with their list as well, so we could avoid any duplication issues, and to coordinate efforts on the unified registry.
Despite not providing their list, we continued to build the collaborative topic registry, and about two weeks ago began asking for their public key so they could be added.
While asking, and waiting, for both the reserve list and Web23’s public key, we became aware of their promises of early access to minting, something that we do not believe to be fair to the community
We made our announcement that we were going to move forward with our launch.
Web23 then announced an earlier launch, indicating that early-access individuals would have 12 hours of near unlimited access to minting – allowing them to front-run the rest of the community.
The threat of front-running, and their unwillingness to coordinate on the collaborative topic ID and reserve lists, became the final catalyst which compelled us to launch as soon as possible. We wanted to allow the entire ecosystem open access for EVERYONE to begin minting.
We know that many community members had been promised .hbar names from Web23 – please connect with us on Discord discord.gg/3JqjVT8r5m and let us know. We will provide a free available .hbar name to Web23 token holders.
TLDR; We agreed on a way to work together and collaborate, Web23 continued to delay or ignore our requests. We learned that they were going to provide unfair early minting access, so we accelerated launch in order to be open to EVERYONE.
We also note that Web23 did finally provide a public key yesterday and within hours we added them to the topic prior to our launch.