Skiff x Interchain Name Service launch

Skiff has integrated the Interchain Name Service for more decentralized, private communication options.

Skiff is a privacy-first workspace for collaborating and communicating with confidence. With secure Mail, Calendar, Drive, and Pages products, Skiff allows you to easily work together with end-to-end encryption of all of your sensitive information. Skiff’s products require no personally identifying information, and you can sign up or subscribe to paid plans using a crypto wallet, increasing user privacy. Today, we’re announcing an integration with the Interchain Name Service (ICNS) to support human-readable, memorable names across the multichain Cosmos ecosystem.

What is ICNS?

ICNS is built to be a name service suited to the unique needs and constraints of the Cosmos ecosystem with the basic goal to create a unifying, single name that can be used across Cosmos chains. As a result, ICNS builds upon multichain support; forwards compatibility for future wallets, addresses, and chains; and bootstrapping with Twitter account handles, an existing and highly used identity and communication product.

How does ICNS work?

In a multichain ecosystem, having different naming services for each chain would yield fragmentation, confusion, and complexity for users. Instead, ICNS’s initial on-chain logic consists of three contracts (Name, Registrar, and Resolver) to manage name ownership, resolution, and bootstrapping with Twitter suernames.ICNS is governed by contributors to the Cosmos ecosystem, including Chainapsis (the creators of Keplr Wallet and Osmosis), as well as Skiff, which has been deeply committed to supporting Cosmos users with secure communication and collaboration products.

Skiff x ICNS

Now, ICNS addresses will be usable for sending and receiving email. Since we announced our partnership with Keplr Wallet to enable privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted email via Cosmos Hub and Juno addresses, ICNS addresses can also be used on Skiff for addressable, private communications.ICNS allows human-readable names like dogemos.cosmos or sunnya97.osmo to be used instead of raw bech32 addresses. Overall, this greatly improved the sending experience for interchain email — rather than sending to cosmos1gha…[email protected], I can send to [email protected] .

FAQ

Why use ICNS on Skiff?Connecting your ICNS address on Skiff gives you a privacy-first identity that you own on the web. You’ll receive emails encrypted with your public key, using an address resolved in real-time from ICNS contracts.How can you use an ICNS address for email?First, make sure you’ve connected your Cosmos Hub or Juno account to Skiff. If not, you can go ahead and add this in our Alias Settings page if you have the Keplr extension installed.Next, open up the compose window (C hotkey for short) and select an alias in the from dropdown. There, you’ll be able to see all the email aliases you can send as. If you have an ICNS name for any of your connected Cosmos Hub or Juno addresses, you’ll be able to see a [name].cosmos or [name].juno alias accordingly.

How can you contact another ICNS user on Skiff?Simply send a message on Skiff to <ICNS>@skiff.com to send a message. If you are contacting a Skiff user, message subject and contents are end-to-end encrypted.