Burn Baby Burn Handshake Improvement Proposal (HIP)

Based on community feedback, an alternative proposal is to be presented: Burn Baby Burn.

Based on community feedback, an alternative proposal is to be presented: Burn Baby Burn. Here is the proposal on Github, where you can vote and leave a comment.

There are currently 628M HNS in circulation, and 890M HNS left unclaimed for open source developers. The primary component is officially ending the open source developer airdrop. The secondary component is making ICANN TLDs and Alexa Top 1K claimable, which requires a hardfork. Overall, this proposal is aligned with the Handshake ethos due to the absence of a centralized foundation or group receiving an airdrop reallocation.

Burning Open Source Developer Airdrop

Rather than reallocating the remaining 890M HNS airdrop, this will be officially removed from the total supply. The arguments for ending the open source developer airdrop include: 

1. This airdrop has been publicly available for more than four years;

2. Only 2.9% of the airdrop was claimed, most of which occurred during the first year of Handshake’s launch;

3. This provides certainty of coin issuance, which will increase confidence among miners and $HNS holders;

4. This is not an effective mechanism for developer adoption.

Having coin issuance solely derived from POW miners can strengthen $HNS price stability. Removing the possibility of $HNS being created at a zero-cost basis, whether from the open source developer airdrop or name claims, will effectively establish Handshake as an authentic POW chain once-and-for-all. $HNS trending to zero over the past few years is arguably based on the murmurings of this free coin issuance and shroud of the actual coin supply. Rather than allowing these original traits determine the collective price of circulating $HNS, burning will free $HNS from the shackles. The value of $HNS will more accurately be based on the utility of the coin (eg. bidding, renewals, updating records), TLDs in existence, and overall adoption of the protocol. By $HNS increasing in price, this should result in more developers and users overall. 

Remaining Name Claims

With the soft fork of February 2024, the unclaimed Alexa Top 10K and ICANN TLDs were locked. This hard fork proposal includes unlocking the Alexa Top 1K and ICANN TLDs for claiming. ICANN TLDs will be permanently reserved for the ICANN TLD owners, and the Alexa Top 1K will be reserved for the ICANN domain counterpart (eg. openai.com) for an additional four years from the hard fork date. While initial $HNS allocations were included for claiming reserved names, this early adoption mechanism will be removed for these remaining names. In order to update records, transfers, or renewals, $HNS will need to be acquired on exchanges at market prices. The previously allocated 188.3M $HNS, while technically never in existence, will effectively be deducted from the total supply. The Alexa 1,001-10,000 will become available for auction at the commencement of the hard fork.

Adjusted HNS Coin Total Supply

Based on August 25, 2024 (blockheight 239,664) [1]:

• Circulating supply: 628M HNS

  • issued: 690.9M HNS

  • previously burned: 62.9M HNS

• Burn Baby Burn Proposal 

  • Burned airdrop: 890.4M HNS

  • Removed unclaimed name claims: 188.3 M HNS

• Unmined block rewards: 270.3M HNS

• Previous Total Supply: 2,040M HNS

• New Total Supply: 898.3M HNS

Fee and Renewal Limit Adjustments

This proposal also includes lowering the renewal limit from 600 to 200 per block. Instead of renewals being .1 $HNS every two years, this will effectively create a competitive fee market for miners and TLD owners. This renewal limit adjustment will have a two-fold effect by increasing demand for $HNS and hashrate to secure the network.

ReRecord On-chain (HIP-018)

A and AAAA records can be added to the TLD on-chain.This “allows users to point to an IP address (host), on the HNS blockchain, without needing to also setup or use a name server service, at the bare TLD level” [2] [3]. Here are the benefits for allowing A AAAA records on-chain:

1. More choice to TLD owners 

2. Trustless in not having to rely on 3rd party nameservers or services

3. More utility to HNS blockchain

4. Increases blockchain usage, miner fees, and $HNS demand

Implementation

If there is community consensus, including support from Namebase, Nodar has agreed to write the code and be the lead developer. There should also be additional developers to review and assist where needed. This support may come from existing members or outside the community. Hey TX is willing to contribute towards implementation efforts. The community can raise the remaining funds necessary to cover costs as needed. Per Zipkin, funding for core devs should derive from outside the chain.

As a reference, below is a job description for a core developer: 
Cryptocurrency Protocol Engineer: Add features, test, and maintain a layer-1 blockchain daemon based on Bitcoin (UTXO/PoW) written in NodeJS.

Additional Notes

Importantly, the one component of this proposal that requires a hard fork is making the ICANN TLDs and Alexa Top 1K claimable again. I view this as necessary to do at some point, which is why it’s included. The community can decide through discussion on whether to do a soft or hard fork though.

Generating excitement through increased TLD utility, the Alexa 1-10K available for auction, and effectively reducing the total $HNS supply by 56% can result in growing our community and funding development.

In addition to being prepared to cover some developer costs in the implementation of this proposal, there should also be a community fund to pay news publications to cover the protocol changes in order to attract new users and builders. There can be HS3 miner giveaways to developers and the overall community.

[1]  https://hns.cymon.de/stats
[2]  https://rerecord.skyinclude.com
[3] https://github.com/skyinclude/HIPs/blob/HIP018-Adding-A-AAAA-Records/HIP-XXXX-adding-A-AAAA-records.md