Jun 2026
Nothing to squat
DNS is a land-grab. So we didn't build one. Names on Verse work like the contacts in your phone.
There's an old result called Zooko's Triangle, named for Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, who laid it out in 2001. A name can be at most two of three things: memorable, secure (one name, one owner, no forging), and decentralized (no central boss). Pick two. You don't get three.
Every name system you use cheats the same way. DNS and ENS buy memorable plus secure by
building one global namespace with an authority on top: ICANN, a registry, a chain. Tor goes
the other way. vww6ybal4bd7szmgncyruucpgfkqahzddi37ktceo3ah7ngmcopnpyyd.onion is
secure and decentralized, and good luck remembering it.
The land-grab is the namespace
Here's the thing nobody says out loud. The global namespace is the problem. The second there's
one shared list of names everybody draws from, you've built a thing that can be captured and a
thing that can be squatted. Captured: in October 2016 a botnet pointed at Dyn, one DNS
provider, knocked Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, and GitHub offline for hours. Nothing was wrong
with those sites. The list that told you where to find them went dark. Squatted: someone grabs
google before Google does, someone parks ten thousand domains and rents them back.
Namecoin tried to fix squatting by minting names on a blockchain and walked straight into it,
who gets google.bit? Whoever paid first. All that machinery, auctions, disputes,
lawyers, a registry that can revoke you, exists to referee a fight that only happens because
there's one list.
So we didn't build the list.
Names like contacts
On Verse the secure, global id for a thing is its key. A hash. Ugly, unmemorable, owned by nobody. That part already works. What we add on top isn't a global directory. It's a petname book, a term Marc Stiegler coined for exactly this: your own private list mapping short names you pick to those keys.
It's your phone's contacts. You don't ask a registry for permission to call someone "Mom." You
just do, on your phone, and it means nothing to anyone else. My alice and your
alice can be different people, and that's fine. Your contacts don't collide with
mine either. This isn't a new idea waiting to be invented. Ron Rivest and Butler Lampson
sketched it in 1996 as SDSI, local names that compose through introductions, and it has been
the right answer sitting on the shelf ever since.
Sharing a name works the way it always has. By introduction. Alice hands you her key, you save
it as alice, and now you can follow her links: alice/blog,
alice/friends/bob. One hop of trust at a time. Nobody agreed on a global meaning of
"alice." Nobody could squat it. There's nothing to squat because there's no shared list to grab
from.
The catch
This isn't free and we won't pretend it is. The cost is that alice isn't a
universal id you can put on a billboard. For the few names that genuinely need to be globally
unique, like a brand, you rent one from a small bonded registry that pins down only those
names, the same way our money island pins down only the coins. You pay to hold it, it lapses if
you stop, and there's exactly one of it instead of a whole namespace of land to grab. Most
things never need that. Your blog doesn't.
And you can just browse it
Last piece. None of this is locked behind a special app. A gateway turns @key/name
into a normal URL, resolves it, pulls the content (verified by its hash, so the gateway can
withhold but never lie), and hands it to your browser. Host a page, name it, open it in Chrome.
The mesh is just on the web, and it never touched DNS.
Zooko was right. You can't fit all three in one string. So we stopped trying. Secure and decentralized live in the key. Memorable lives with you. And the fight over the global list never happens, because we never made the list.