Hello! Our team took an interview from the founders of Augual.TEAM, which developed the first DeNS system based on Free TON. Let’s get to the interview so you can learn about it and what purpose it has.
Tell us about Augual.TEAM. How long have you been in the community? Is DeNS your first solution in terms of Free TON?
Dmitry: Augual.TEAM is a small international team, which has a good experience in developing IT solutions in financial technologies, cloud services, gamedev and Metatrader platform. Co-founders of the team are me, personally, Dmitry Yankin (@laugan), and Anton
We’ve been following the TON project by Telegram from the beginning, but news about the ending of the project surprised us, and for a while we were taking a closer look at Free TON. Only since November 2020 it became clear that Free TON is moving forward and our team can participate in the development of the network. Since we didn’t have an understanding of how successively we are going to be able to join the process of Free TON development, for some time we didn’t propose our solutions as Augual.TEAM. But we basically took almost every top place in each contest we participated in. There are highly regarded architectural solutions for stablecoin, latinoamerican voting autide and much more behind our backs.
First program solution which Augual provided was Free TON app for hardware wallet Ledger Nano S and X. You can find it in our repository - https://github.com/laugual/ledger-app-freeton. At this moment we are working at the app update and adding it to the Ledger marketplace. We also participated in the first step of DEX development - a solution for decentralized token exchange, and we continue leading it to the future release. What’s why DeNS can’t be named our first product for the community. However, now it is the most important and meaningful project.
DeNS. How can you describe your product to a regular people?
Dmitry: DeNS at its core is a website domain name analogue, which we and you use every day while surfing the Internet in our Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Now we so got used to domains, it seems impossible to use the Internet and memorise and insert real IP addresses of the websites each time.
However while using Free TON blockchain you still need to carefully copy and paste long strings of letters and numbers to get your transaction to its destination or to open the right DeBot. This would not happen every time, of course. With the help of Augual.DeNS you can refuse manual interaction with real smart contract addresses and start using understandable names, such as nft/baseball-cards, debot/multisig, token/usdt, or tonlabs/surf. This also opens a door to the world of blockchain for new people, who view a work with crypto-addresses as very technical and complicated.
Augual.DeNS provides a fast and safe solution, which allows you to quickly release and start using a similar domain name in the Free TON blockchain. We provided a huge amount of functional for all kinds of usage and development: in smart contracts, using DeBots, using REST API and also Whois website.
Anton: Common architecture of our solution is based on NFT principles. Each domain is, by far, a unique token, a product. However all domains in general create decentralized network of independent contracts.
Is there any browser, which supports your solution? How to use DeNS right now?
Dmitry: Yes, a first product came up recently with the support of Augual.DeNS, TONWallet (https://tonwallet.io/) from the SVOI.dev team (https://github.com/SVOIcom/browser-extension). This is a browser extension wallet using DeNS-domains while making transactions, moreover transactions are available not only for TON, but also for TIP-3 tokens. Recommend! More DeNS-enabled products are coming soon.
In general, we considered it important at this stage to launch the platform itself, to begin the process of adapting and applying DeNS in all services that work with the Free TON network. Here the situation is similar with DEX projects, which are launched earlier than the real turnover and the need to exchange TIP-3 tokens begins in Free TON. This is the specificity of the network, we all create new opportunities and products, even knowing that they cannot be 100% used right away.
Anton: DeNS as a system requires integration in order for ordinary users to start working with it on a daily basis, but for developers it is a universal ready-made platform that can be embedded into any services, smart contracts and wallets. We are currently negotiating with several teams to integrate DeNS into desktop and mobile apps. Right now you can get Whois domains on our website (https://freeton.domains), as well as use DeNS through the system debot (https://uri.ton.surf/debot/0:e49d816061c8d83f3f31d44a6bfa938855ad8848a5ab9b7206d2d09808636dac , management is avaliable, as well as resolving names.
Perhaps the most popular browser in the community is Surf. May it support your DeNS? How soon?
Dmitry: It seems to me that this question is better be addressed to TON Labs, the developer of Surf, after all, this is a proprietary, not open-source product, and it has completely different tasks. We are fully engaged in the implementation and expansion of the Augual.DeNS user base for the open-source part of the community, but once our solution is used by a large part of the community, when we will surely see it in Surf. At the moment, we have several thousand installed certificates and several integrations in the pipeline. The first wallet with DeNS transfers was also released. More wallets and DeNS website support coming soon. Follow the news in our Telegram channel (https://t.me/augual).
How much do you earn from your solution? What exactly are the tokens sent for during registration?
Anton: Our solution is completely decentralized and open source, when registering first-level domains, the payment goes for Gas (payment for the execution of a smart contract), and a part (currently 0.5 TON) remains on the domain contract as a non-withdrawable balance. The remaining amount, regardless of the amount, is returned to the wallet of the person who performs the registration. We do not receive income from these registrations and believe that the freedom, openness and basic freeness of this particular solution are extremely important for the rapid development of Free TON.
After placing the first-level domain, the domain owner can set individual registration rules for its subdomains, one of the options for the rules is registration for a commission (which is also set manually by the owner). Thus, by setting a fair price, the domain owner can receive a small profit for owning the domain. If you set an unfair price, the owner will lose the competition with other domain zones. Free competition.
Dmitry: Although at the moment you can buy / register a domain only through debot or by directly placing a contract on the network, soon there will be more friendly options for selling and buying, for example, the NFT marketplace. This is one of the features of our architecture. Since domains can be freely transferred and traded, they are also an NFT token and can be traded through marketplaces and auctions.
How long is the domain registered? How to renew it?
Anton: DeNS-domain is registered for 90 days. Up to 10 days before its expiration, it can be extended without being charged, but the execution overhead (Gas) will be charged. This ensures that active domains remain with their owners for as long as they need, and inactive domains will expire and can be acquired by other people.
Dmitry: At the moment, the extension is possible through debot, through a call from a smart contract and a set of scripts. A separate service is currently in development, which will make it more convenient to track the renewal.
Do you plan to implement an analogue of the DNS cache to increase the performance of name resolving?
Anton: Much attention was paid to the complexity of resolving a domain name in our system during design. As a result, we came to the complexity of performing O (1) regardless of the domain level, be it the first or the fourth level. The information is received directly from the blockchain and is very fast. I am afraid that a service that stores name caches (being centralized) will lose both in speed and in the relevance of the information received.
Dmitry: That's right, the benefit of the TIP-2 approach (and of the features of Free TON addresses in general) is that in fact the address of the domain certificate is calculated directly on your device. You don't need to access any cache on the blockchain or wait for a response from Augual's servers, you already know the address using cryptography. The cache can be made only in the application for the device itself, which wants to work with DeNS. There is no point in a centralized cache. We're pretty damn fast anyway.
Do you think similar solutions will appear on the blockchain? Are they needed? What should browser developers do in this case?
Anton: The beauty of decentralized blockchains is that any team can present their own solution to any problem at any time. The emergence of such systems is a matter of time and the desire of people to have new competing systems. If the community has requirements that cannot be met by our system, we can confidently wait for a new system that gives users what they want.
Right now, I don't see any really needed additions to the DeNS core. In general, Augual.TEAM promotes the "Unix way" in the design and creation of software in its developments, when a utility / program should do one thing, but do it well. And this applies especially well to the blockchain, where the resources to perform operations are limited. We were somewhat disappointed by the tough business model and the amount of superfluous and very exotic solutions that were submitted to the DeNS competition. Therefore, we are sure that Augual.DeNS will be much more popular and interesting for users and developers, even if some of the contestants still launch a working product.
Dmitry: Our task is to develop our own solution. And multi-browser support isn't new. There are many examples on the Internet today where browsers or websites need to support several competing technologies. What can I say, in the same Ethereum there are many different wallets for browsers, and not all sites support all wallets. It is up to browser developers what solutions they want to integrate into their applications.
Many thanks to Anton and Dmitry for this interview and special thanks to you, dear readers! Subscribe to our Telegram channel.