Agreed it's a very hard problem. We're in the process of forming a syndicate of like-minded parties who are interested in seeing this come to life because the model itself has no exit plan and is basically anathema to traditional capital funding.
Also, to be clear, names are hashed/salted in the backend with Argon2ID and a rotating salt. So the name index itself isn't enumerable, but it doesn't necessarily guarantee names are private once they are shared publicly. Theoretically you could lookup someone based on their public key without knowing their name - so in that sense it's somewhat close to what you're describing.
Perhaps you could do a name presale, although I’m not sure that would be enough funding. I look forward to hearing more about it.
Anyone interested can reach me directly at hn@sepositus.com (this is a SimpleLogin alias to protect my email from spam).