Hi @dfisher,
We have started to develop the name registry canister based in the proposed specification, this will serve as a common layer for the remaining CNS canisters such as the CNS Root and TLD canisters.
The initial plan is to develop that canister with DNSSEC support that will leverage tECDSA to sign the records so that later on we are able to implement the ic-cns-resolver library that will be used by the clients to resolve the records and verify the signatures using the public key of the canister (similar to how traditional DNS works).
Once those are in place we plan to start working on the CNS Root that will be used as the root of the CNS tree and will be used to resolve the available TLDs to their corresponding canisters. This will in turn allow us to release the resolver library that can be used by the clients, we plan to integrate that with the Local IC HTTP Proxy.
We are also looking into the possibility of integrating ENS as a TLD canister to allow the resolution of .eth domains for CNS clients.
Another topic of interest is the Governance side of CNS, we have an initial Governance Draft of how it would work but the initial version won’t have it implemented yet.
Regarding timeline we are currently pointing at H1 2024, but is subject to change as we progress with the development and due to other competing priorities.
We will be sharing more details as we progress with the development.