The holders.vote Origin Story

holders.vote was inspired by the ENS procurement process, by the team at Agora Governance. We wanted to find consensus from the DAO, in order to shape our submission. We found the process very speculative and blunt. We had too many questions, and forum posts felt WAY too slow to us to get signal from the community.

We felt that if we had something similar to reddit to discuss ideas with the DAO members, we would be able to tune our submission. Which, would increase the odds that both ENS and Agora could find alignment sooner.

Hence, holders.vote was born. But, holders.vote needs to be sustainable. How? It starts with the holders name service.

What is HNS, technically?

It's a fork of WNS, deploying only the name system parts (not the DAO). The contract is deployed on Ethereum mainnet, and semi-permissionless to register a new name. Registering a name has no offchain impact on the holders.vote site. You have to take action with your HNS name, the same way you would have to take action with an ENS, WEI or GNS name.

Now how do you fund holders.vote?

In order to be sustainable, holders.vote needs to at least break even. This is crypto, and we've been around along enough time to know that we'll die if we don't find product market fit ourselves.

Ads? Gross. Surveillance Capitalism? Also gross. ICO? Blah.

We landed on a pay-for-premium model. But, not in a two-tier differentiator model like X or linkedIN, we think that a subset of users might choose to voluntarily show support for accelerating product-market fit of blockchain-backed applications. We'll see. Somewhat like signal. For the greater good of the industry. And, we also think people might pay for productivity enhancing features, integrated with the site. Those are quickly coming, stay tuned for more on that.

We're effectively using HNS names as the mechanism to track both support for the project and an upgraded experience on the app.

We have NO intention of competing with ENS, WEI or GWEI. You can see that in our actions already. For instance, we didn't send a PR to the 1001 project to add our TLD, instead, we sent a PR to enable devs to manage their own resolving logic. Because that was the bear-minimum we needed for our goals.

How we differ from ENS/WNS/GNS...

• We will change the price of HNS names in line with the cost of operating holders.vote, at our discretion.
• We will not be investing in integrations for other use cases.
• We are not even pretending to be a DAO at all.
• We intend to mint and give away HNS names inline with ways to advance holders.vote (ie, there is perpetual 'founders mint' option).
• We intend to let users bind .eth/.wei/.gwei names to accounts that hold HNS names, and both get the features from owning it, without marketing that they possess a HNS name at all.
• In our DNA, we love the bake off between WNS and GNS, and want to support that experiment, not harm it. Where as, those founders, we should assume they are pushing their name systems rationally.

In short, it's a membership token with your name on it and perks on the app. Not something we expect other applications to ever want to use.

What can you do today, with an HNS?

• On holders.vote, you can do everything an ENS, WNS and GNS name can do. We commit to parity on that. You can create a community, you can use it as one of many aliases. That's it. :)
• Vote on features and discussions in the /h/holders.hns community.

What can you do soon, with an HNS?

• Optionally, you can display a badge to show your support for HNS on either your community or your profile. We literally, didn't even prioritize this feature for launch. Hopefully that signals we're trying to add value first.
• Get better API rate limits
• Manage multiple accounts
• Bring your own sorting algorithm (inspired by the latest changes to the X-algo).
• See what is "new" since your last login
• Access anonymized analytics for your communities.

...and more stuff like that.