Sci-Hub Leaves Handshake Blockchain After Just 2 Days

The recent alliance of pirate academic library Sci-Hub and a blockchain-based domain name system (DNS) was celebrated by the blockchain community. Now, it’s already over. 

Less than two days after registering its domain on Handshake, the distributed network for storing domain names, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan told CoinDesk she discontinued it because of the lack of decentralization.  

Sci-Hub gets academic papers out from behind the paywalls of scientific magazines and provides them for free. The project has been exiled from various web domains, as well as the payment service PayPal.  

The debacle is a fresh example of how decentralized web projects struggle to live up to the hype around them. 

Namebase is the VC-funded company that is facilitating access to Handshake’s infrastructure. An initial tweet by Namebase about Sci-Hub’s joining was met with much fanfare from crypto celebrities including Balaji Srinivasan and Dovey Wan, causing the price of the project’s native HNS token to surge. In contrast, the breakup has been largely unnoticed. 

Elbakyan told CoinDesk that after talking to the team behind Namebase, she decided that it was impossible for her to control her domain.

Handshake was supported by some of crypto’s most prominent VCs and was part of a slew of projects aiming to decentralize the internet’s underlying infrastructure. Handshake’s predecessor Namecoin, the Ethereum Name Service, a platform for decentralized personal servers called Urbit and the network for distributed file storage Filecoin are other efforts to create what’s referred to as Web 3.0. 

“I first just thought that another domain for Sci-Hub won’t hurt. But later I realized it’s them who really controls the domain, not me,” Elbakyan told CoinDesk via Telegram. 

The Namebase team reached out to Elbakyan after Sci-Hub was banned by Twitter, reportedly due to a new copyright infringement case in India, she said.   

“They wrote to me when I was having that stressful situation with Twitter,” Elbakyan said. “I just gave them an IP address and they connected it to the domain. That’s all I did. Now, where is the decentralization?”

This process looks a bit different from the original idea of Namebase, according to the project’s website. The concept is that people willing to register decentralized domains would buy the native NHS tokens, bid for available names and manage their domains using private keys.   

According to Elbakyan’s exchange with Namebase founder Tieshun Roquerre and the project’s investor Eric Meltzer, one can own a top-level domain (TLD) on Handshake, like .hns, but not a particular subdomain registered there. (CoinDesk reviewed the messages provided by Elbakyan.)

Read more: Handshake Exchange Sees $10M in Token Trades as Race for Censorship-Resistant Websites Heats Up

The team offered to hand Elbakyan control over the entire .hns domain, along with some HNS tokens, so she could custody them and keep the records of all future subdomain registrations in .hns. 

But Elbakyan wasn’t interested in managing records for the project, only in controlling her own subdomain. That, according to Meltzer, “will eventually be possible, but it requires a lot more engineering work.” 

However, he told Elbakyan, the current owner of the .hns top-level domain “is completely anonymous,” so she shouldn’t be concerned it would be pressured to censor Sci-Hub, as multiple hosting services already did after Sci-Hub was sued by academic publishing houses for copyright infringement. 

But relying on some centralized custodians to manage your domain feels like deja vu for Elbakyan. 

“In fact, I’m not in control and they can throw me out at any moment, just like Twitter did. And yes, all domain services are like that, including .se and .do, but they aren’t promoting themselves as decentralized. Plus, those are reputable ones, and this is God knows who. They are just using Sci-Hub to promote this weird project,” Elbakyan said. 

Steven McKie, technical manager of Hanshake’s native HandyBrowser and CEO of Amentum, believes there has been a misunderstanding from the start.

“There seems to be miscommunication,” he told CoinDesk in an email. “Namebase is akin to Coinbase as they hold your keys. They’re a centralized service. They set up a domain that reroutes for [Alexandra Elbakyan]. She can buy her own name and do the exact same or they can gift her a TLD.”  

Namebase founder Tieshun Roquerre further confirmed that there is currently an owner of the entire .hns domain, which “would like to stay anonymous.” 

Read more: Handshake Goes Live With an Uncensorable Internet Browser

“They were in the process of transferring the TLD to Alexandra but once Alexandra learned that she could only own the entire TLD instead of just a single subdomain she decided not to manage it. On Handshake, you can own the TLD directly and control all subdomains,” he added. 

At the moment, Sci-Hub’s .hns domain is disconnected, but the project is still available on .se, .do and .st domains.