Overview
Kora Labs is a software company that builds ADA Handle1, a service that lets people use a short, readable name such as $alice in place of a long crypto wallet address2. Anyone sending a payment types the name, and the money goes to whichever wallet holds it2. Around that naming service, Kora Labs has built related apps for chat, sign-in, and profiles.
The company works on Cardano and was started by three cofounders who go by their own Handles: $goose, $papagoose, and $bigirishlion1. Kora Labs says its team brings more than 50 years of combined engineering experience, including running staking and mining operations on Cardano and Ergo1. Kora Labs, LLC applied to Project Catalyst, Cardano's community-voted grant program, to move the creation of Handles into a program that runs on Cardano itself3.
Key Features
- Readable names for wallet addresses. Each Handle is an NFT, a unique digital token, so the name can be held, sent, or traded like any other asset in a wallet2.
- Extra names under one brand. SubHandles let a person or company add names such as $john@acme under a main Handle, either as separate tokens or as virtual names the owner can create, edit, and revoke2.
- Private chat between Handle holders. HandleChat starts one-to-one conversations by typing the other person's $handle, and it encrypts each message with the Signal protocol so only the recipient can read it4.
- Easier lookup for voting representatives. DRep Handles give delegated representatives, the people who vote on Cardano governance decisions for other ADA holders, a readable name and a dashboard for updating their profile details5.
- Open tools for other builders. Kora Labs runs a public API, a service other apps can query to find the wallet behind any Handle, and developers can also run their own copy of it6. The company publishes this code, a software development kit that lets apps look up the wallet address behind a Handle7, and a library for connecting to browser wallets on GitHub8.
What to Expect
The Kora Labs website is a single page. It introduces the three founders, states the company's mission of building lasting protocols and DAOs, member-run groups that make decisions by vote, for Cardano, and links out to ADA Handle1.
On handle.me, Handle owners can personalize how their name looks. They can set an NFT they own as a profile picture, pick background colors or an NFT background, and add borders9. Each change is saved by signing a transaction in the wallet, and the result appears on the Handle's public page9.
Developers get the most from the Handles documentation. It covers minting, SubHandles, the public API, and HandleAuth10, a "log in with your Handle" system that other websites can register for11. Kora Labs also publishes a technical guide for teams that want to look up Handles directly on Cardano without going through its API12.
The code lives in the company's GitHub organization, which is written mostly in TypeScript and includes the programs behind Handle minting and the Handle marketplace8. On Project Catalyst, the proposer page for the ADA Handle projects lists work on SubHandles, personalization, the marketplace, decentralized minting, and HandleChat as complete13.
